NEW research and a documentary into the prehistoric micro-gold artefacts at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes has concluded that it is likely that they were made by children.

An analysis of objects, found near Stonehenge, shows that the ultra-fine craftwork involved such tiny components that only children and short-sighted adults could have made them.

The object found close to Stonehenge with the largest number of ultra-small gold components is a dagger, made in around 1900 BC, and is currently on display in the museum.

It was made more than 1,000 years before the invention of the first magnifying glass and the dagger’s 12-centimetre long handle is decorated with up to 140,000 tiny gold studs.

The gold-studded dagger was found in 1808 inside Bush Barrow, a large Bronze Age burial mound located just 900 metres from Stonehenge but it is only now that the craft, human and medical implications of its manufacture have been looked at in detail.

David Dawson, director of the Wiltshire Museum in Long Street, where the world’s finest prehistoric micro-gold working achievements are on display, said: “The very finest gold work involved the making and positioning of literally tens of thousands of tiny individually-made components, each around a millimetre long and around a fifth of a millimetre wide.

“Children have much more acute vision. There is no way an adult would have been able to see the tiny pieces of gold unless they were severely short sighted.”

The implications of Bronze Age micro-gold-working on the human eye have been examined in a BBC Two documentary Operation Stonehenge, featuring Wiltshire Museum.

The programme was shown last week and is available on BBC iPlayer.