My name is Julia Farley
and I'm the curator of the British and European Iron Age collections
here at the British Museum.
The Witham shield is probably my favourite object
in the British Museum's Iron Age collections.
The shield was probably made around about 300-200 BC
so it's over 2,000-years-old.
Now this is actually the metal facing from what would originally have been a wooden shield.
It's quite tall
it's over a metre high
and this particular object was dredged up from the river Witham near Lincoln in 1827
and it's the long time that it spent in the river that accounts for a lot of the damage
the kind of crinkling that you can see on the surface of the shield there.
The metal that you can see is very, very thin
and so what looks like one continuous sheet of metal
is actually two joining sheets bridged by that spine that runs down the middle.
So the spine running down the middle is decorative
but you'll see that in the center is sticking out what we call a boss of the shield
and that's where the hand of the person wielding the shield
would have held the handle.
One of the fabulous things about Celtic art
is that Celtic art objects have hidden in them
lots of interesting creatures and faces and beasts
and the longer you spend looking at an object like the Witham shield
the more of these creatures you will see.
So if we look first of all at the boss which is at the top of the shield
we can see around the central dome there are incised lines
which mark out these swirling forms
and at first glance this just looks very abstract
sinuou
but if you look more closely
you can start to pick out what look like motifs that might suggest wings or webbed feet
or even little birds heads.
Based on comparison with other objects
we think that these designs are intended to suggest birds
perhaps water birds like swans
with their wings thrown back over their shoulders
and webbed feet curling around.
If you look down below that top boss
we see a much easier to see face staring out at us.
Now this is the face of a cow probably or a horse
and you'll see two big bulbous staring eyes
and then fanning out on either side little fluffing ears
and narrow snout coming down to two flaring nostrils.
It's clearly suggesting the face of an animal
but it's not a naturalistic depiction
they're choosing to use a few very clean, simple lines
to suggest the idea of a cow or a bull.
The last animal that we can see on the shield is the boar
and this is the hardest one to see.
When the shield was first made the designer chose to put the outline of a fabulous boar
with elongated legs arching over and around that central boss
where the handle would go.
They depicted that boar in a different kind of materia
we don't know precisely what it was
perhaps a thinner piece of metal
or something organic like leather
and that outline was riveted onto the shield
probably using metal pins like the ones which hold the central spine on still.
All of that is now lost but what we can still see are just the faintest outline
and the little rivets which once affixed that boar plaque onto this shield.
So I normally start down at the bottom righthand end
because that is where we see the clearest little holes
and that's where we can see the tips of the toes of the boar
and if you follow then up the righthand side of the shield
you can see those turning into long, straight legs
and then the point where they turn off a little bit to the left
and we come up into the haunches of the boar
its tail curling down
and then it's back arching all the way over the top of the boss
passing under the spine
and on the other side
on the left-hand side of the spine the boar continues
we see those little rivet holes and that edging
picking out a little face and snout and ears
and then coming down again into two really long, elongated legs
that carry on down the front and end into little swirling toes again at the bottom.
And for me, there's something that's actually very modern about using this kind of elongated form
to just suggest the idea of a boar to the viewer.
We don't know exactly what these different animals meant to the people who used the shield
it's possible they were particular kind of family or clan emblems
that might have had a particular significance for the people who owned and wielded this shield in battle
or it's possible they were chosen for a magical significance
that wasn't restricted to a particular family
but was about the symbolism of those animals in daily life in the Iron Age.
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