Prehistoric children as young as ten were put to work making gold treasures so fine that the smiths would have gone blind by the time they were 20.
A dagger found less than a kilometre from Stonehenge had 1,000 gold pins per centimetre, each as thin as a human hair, embedded in its wooden hilt.
The work is so intricate that it is hard to make out details with the naked eye. The studs were arranged in a herringbone pattern and were fixed in their holes using a resin or animal glue.
Although the dagger, the finest yet found, was discovered 200 years ago in the Bush Barrow burial mound near Stonehenge, it is thought that it was imported from Brittany, France, where many more examples have been dug up.
Only a fragment remains of the hilt, which disintegrated when a trowel hit it during excavation in "a scatter of shining points of gold". Scientists estimate that it originally had 140,000 gold studs.
The human cost of the manufacturing technique have only just been considered for the first time.
"Only children and teenagers, and those adults who had become myopic naturally or due to the nature of their work as children, would have been able to create and manufacture such tiny objects," Ronald Rabbetts, a life fellow of the College of Optometrists, told The Guardian.
"There would almost certainly have been a section of the bronze-age artisan class who, often as a result of their childhood work, were myopic for their adult life."
The BBC2 documentary Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath, aired on 18 September, asked micro-artist Willard Wigan to recreate some of the work using a microscope.
"I cannot see an adult doing that because your eyesight starts to deteriorate even at 21," he said. "The quality of the work is phenomenal."
The bronze-age burial mound, the richest in Britain, was dug 1,000 years after the stone circle to honour "a stout and tall man", said William Cunnington, the wool merchant and amateur archaeologist who excavated it with the land owner, Sir Richard Colt Hoare.
The mound contained grave goods including a gold belt, a lonzenge-shaped gold plate on the dead man's chest, bronze and copper daggers and other weapons.
The encrusted dagger hilt is now housed at the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes.
