File:Bronze Age flat axehead (section) (FindID 158111).jpg

English: Cast copper alloy flat axehead with flattened and flanged butt end, and expanded blade. The size of the axe and the slight angle and thinness of the blade suggest that the axe is quite early in the Bronze Age, probably from the Brithdir phase, c.2150-2000 BC. The axe in section is subrectangular, but still thin so there is no evidence of any side flanges. Since it was cast, the axe has lost part of its butt or hafted end, and has then, it seems, been used with a hammer as a chisel or cleaving tool. The axe varies in width from the blade at 45 mm to the butt end at 29.7 mm, and in thickness from the butt end at 15 mm to the end of the blade at 4mm. "The flat axe is a small axe of Migdale form, possibly fairly early in the series as some of the preceding copper axes are rather small. It has had some use as an axe as the cutting-edge is asymmetrically worn. It has then been used as a chisel or wedge, with the butt having been struck repeatedly with some force. The butt of the axe would deform relatively easily. It is typical for a Migdale axe to be worked and annealed throughout the whole blade, but only the cutting-edge would receive a final cold hardening. The metallographic examination of the sample shows a medium tin bronze, say 9-12% tin and unleaded, that has been worked and annealed so that the blade is fully homogenised. This could imply an arsenic content of up to 1%; this is quite common at the time and the arsenic raises the recrystallisation temperature to a level where the bronze becomes homogenised. The sample was removed from the deformed butt to see whether the satte of corrosion was consistent with it having been used as a wedge in the Early Bronze Age or more recently. The appearance of the sample is consistent with Bronze Age use." (report by Dr. Peter Northover of Oxford Materials) Needham & Rohl (1998) illustrate a similarly small example with slightly flanged blade on page 123, Fig.24, No.34, which is a Class 3 axe from the Brithdir metalwork series.