In her useful paper on Late Bronze Age razors Mrs Piggott has designated as Class II the bifid razors. For these she suggests dates ranging from about 750 B.C. to about 400 B.C. Without wishing to dispute these dates for the British examples—indeed the date of about 400 B.C. for the one from All Cannings Cross cannot be altered by much—I would suggest that such razors may have been in use some time previously if not in Britain then on the western Continent.

It has been a commonly accepted view that these razors are of Sicilian origin. Sicilian tombs of the centuries before the foundation of the Greek colonies have produced a variety of razors (fig. i) and probably there is some ultimate connexion between these and bronze razors elsewhere. But the one from Cassibile that is considered to be the link between the western bifid razors and Sicily seems to be a unique feature in the island. At least I have not encountered another in the archaeological literature of Sicily, and on a recent visit to Syracuse, Dr Bernabò Brea assured me that he did not know of another Sicilian example. Hence one is inclined to suppose that the bifid razor from Cassibile is not really a Sicilian type at all but a western import. Consequently such clues as can be discovered to its date in Sicily—and these point to the vicinity of the 10th and 9th centuries B.C.—indicate at least a time when such razors were in existence somewhere in western Europe.