My name's Neil Wilkin
and I'm a curator at the British Museum
and welcome to my corner.
In my job I study the Bronze Age in Britain and in Europe
and it's a period I'm really passionate about.
It lasts about 1,000 years, which is a really long time,
but in that time lots of changes happen.
Revolutions if you like
and those changes are still with us today.
We still feel their implications.
With the Bronze Age, we see the first introduction of metal
of this new material.
And we have to try to image a world in which
people hadn't seen metal objects.
We're surrounded by it.
Our buildings are made of it, our planes, our cars.
Image how magical it would have seemed to see someone
melting this raw material into a liquid gold
and then making something completely new.
It's difficult to try and find a paralel in our lifetimes
for a completely new material
but maybe if we think about all the fuss and interest
that surrounds something like 3D printing, or wifi
or the internet
we're getting almost close
but I think it would have been even more impressive
to Bronze Age people
to see the first production of metal.
It would have been like seeing something from out of space!
We tend to think that from the very beginning of the Bronze Age
people were making weapons and swords
but that's not true.
It takes people centuries before they start to make objects that look like swords.
And we have an object here that relates to that change
to that revolution
that was almost its symbol if you like
and I'm going to show it to you now.
This is a Beaker pot and you might be disappointed
because I promised I was going to talk about the Bronze Age
and here I am with a clay pot
But the point is that these vessels
these drinking vessels
were associated with a new group of people.
A group of people who are known as the Beaker people
or the Beaker folk
and they brought the new technology of metal work with them
from the continent, from Europe.
Pots like these were as powerful and important as the metal work.
Although there are other materials during the Bronze Age
metal is still a big deal
and I've got an object here that shows how big a deal it was
during that period, and I'm going to show it to you now.
This is something that looks like it should be in the Game of Thrones
but actually it's a middle Bronze Age dirk.
A dirk is a kind of technical term, a jargon term
not a very helpful term for a sword.
It's a big sword.
But this particular one, this particular dirk
was never made to be used
and we know that because it's completely blunt.
It's never had a handle attached to it
and there are five other examples of these from across Europe.
None of them have any evidence of having been sharpened
or used.
So it kind of begs the question: What were these?
What were they used for?
And the only answer I can come up with
is that they were symbols.
They were symbols of something.
They were symbols of warfare, of fighting, of battle.
And I think that helps to explain
a number of interesting things about how they've been discovered.
This particular dirk was found pushed down into a bog
by a man out walking his dog
and amazingly he stubbed his toe on it
and pulled it up through this peaty, boggy soil.
Can you image stubbing your toe on something like this
and wondering what it was
and pulling it up through that soil
and exposing this beautifully preserved metal?
And it had been intentionally thrust down into a bog
when it had been deposited,
when it had been sacrificed.
All this makes me wonder:
why were people pushing such beautiful objects into bogs
and losing them forever?
Why were they also bending them?
We have another example that was found nearby
that had been bent and hammered so that it could no longer be used
so that it had lost its beauty.
Why were they doing this?
What I keep coming back to is the idea that these are symbols
symbols of warfare, symbols of battle.
And it seems to me quite a beautiful jesture
to sacrifice something that represents conflict.
To me, to my mind, that speaks of a protest, a kind of Bronze Age protest
against war and conflict.
When I started at the Museum
I'd only seen the dirk through the glass as an excited teenager
and when I got to come here and take it out of the case
I wondered: what could we do with it?
How could we explore its significance for Bronze Age people in new ways?
The one thing that really caught my attention was that
the six we know from Europe are all likely to have come from
the same workshop.
Possibly from the same master craftsperson.
We've been working on a really exciting project with UCL
called Micropasts.
Micropasts is trying to bring together traditional approaches to
museum archives and objects with new digital ones.
What we really want to do, and what Micropasts has been helping us do
is to provide digital models on Sketchfab of the dirks that we hold in our collection
and to try to unite all six dirks for the first time digitally.
Why that's really important to me is that
often we can only show some of our objects in the galleries
but we have lots of other exciting objects behind-the-scenes.
If we can show them 3D models and allow people to download them
and print them
we're able to get those objects out to a much wider audience.
Using the model that the public's helped us to make
we've been able to print one of the dirks in our collection
and I have the 3D print here.
It's in two parts, which is really interesting because
although our technology has come on so far
we're still only able to print something as big as this
in two parts, that we have to fit together.
And I think in some ways that's testament to how difficult it is
to make an object as big as a ceremonial dirk.
We struggle now, so how difficult was it during the Bronze Age?
And what's nice is that being able to make something like this
has lead to lots of other possibilities.
Because we can do what we want with a 3D print
we've been able to ask Neil Burridge, a metal worker,
to start to make a replica using the 3D print as a mould for the new dirk.
And we have a prototype of Neil's dirk here.
You can see it's got a solder line where he's had to join the two parts
but when he's finished we're going to have a seamless new dirk.
This is an experiment.
We're hoping to refine it and improve it
and we're hoping that when we get the finished dirk
that my team and I will be able to bend it and record that process
and we're really hoping that we can share both the process of
making it and bending it with you in the future.
The reason we want to bend the dirk is
we're not really sure how or why they did it.
It must have required a huge amount of force
and really quite a violent act.
And what we want to understand
and what you might have ideas about as well is
how they did it.
Did they heat up the metal or did they do it when the metal was still cold?
And all those things are things we can test by making a dirk
and then destroying it.
That was my corner.
If I nominate any other curator to swap with it would be Ben Alsop
because he curates the Citi Money Gallery
and during the Bronze Age there's no coins and no medals
so I'd really like to know more about that side of the Museum.