You have to wonder how the butt plate got ripped off the gun.
Any way to discern time period? Or is there a good reference for flintlock hardware it might be found in?
OK, I'll lite up your imagination. The flintlock pistol was a single shot muzzle loader, once fired, slow to load. Compared to modern pistols, the flintlock, shooting a heavy round ball out of a short barrel with a less than rifle or musket charge of black powder meant it was also very underpowered by today's standards. So shooting someone with one of those pistols was many times not instant death, but left a fellow that was still able to fight back, at least until he bled out. So shooting an enemy with that type of pistol was not a done deal, and they were also smooth bore, so hitting your target at more than just a few feet was also a problem. So it behooved them to have a back up for the pistol, which in some cases might have been another pistol. However, that heavy brass or silver, and even on some military pistols iron butt was for use when the gun was reversed and used as a club. Using the pistol as a club would put a might handy dent in the adversaries skull, and would probably put his lights out much quicker that the random pistol shot, unless the ball hit an absolutely fatal spot, like between the eyes, which was unlikely. Now, if one will think just a bit further, seeing as how the shape of the pistol, the grain of the wood makes the weakest part of the stock the grip area behind the trigger guard. So you get in a clubbing match with a drunk, and hit him just as hard as you can right on his noggin, and the stock is busted, and the butt goes flying. Better yet, say your horseback, and adversary takes his shot and misses, you shoot back and miss, he starts running away, you ride him down, and as you pass by, the pistol is used as a club to the back of his head, the guy dives nose first into the dirt and stays there, the butt of the gun goes flying and is lost for more than 200 years when a fellow comes a "tectin'," and finds it and wonders, where's the rest of the gun. Unless the gun was converted to cap lock, the pistols with those type of butt decorations seem to have all been flintlocks, the cap locks seemed to become much less decorated and more utilitarian, with more and more even being rifled, so my swag as to age would be before 1840, most likely mid to late 1700's. There are a number of books on flintlock pistols/firearms, and my suggestion would be to do a search on Amazon.
I wonder whats under the applied "cap",on this one?
