Accurate and efficient identification of bronze inscriptions is of great significance in archaeology, history, philology and other fields. We construct the publicly available bronze inscription data set to provide data reference for subsequent research. At the same time, on the basis of the convolution kernel pruning based on L1 norm, an automatic model pruning strategy is proposed. The experimental results show that if taking the LeNet network as the basic model, the number of parameters and the FLOPS after pruning are only 30% and 69% of those for the original model, and the accuracy is up to 97.62%. The proposed method can be well adapted to the bronze inscription data set.