Hello, I'm Julia Farley
I'm the curator of the European Iron Age collections at the British Museum.
And welcome to my corner.
One of my favourite things about the job that I do
as the curator of the Iron Age collections is that I get to share with all of you guys
the things that I know and that I've gradually been learning
about all of the incredible objects that are in the collections of the British Museum.
Particularly Iron Age and Roman gold and silver working
and some of the objects that I was interested in learning about how they were made
are torcs or big metal neck rings like this one.
I'm able to pick this one up in my hands and be quite relaxed with it
because this isn't part of our collection,
this is actually an object which I made.
And I wanted to learn about what was needed if you're starting from first principles
to make a neck ring like this.
And this one is just about the simplest kind of torc that you can get.
I wanted to be able to demonstrate for you how I made it,
it took quite a long time and I started with casting a bar of bronze.
The Iron Age ones tend to be made of gold and silver,
but it turns out that those are quite expensive metals to work with,
particularly if you're just beginning.
So I went with bronze, cheaper alternative,
though actually slighter harder to work with,
it's a much stiffer metal and harder to forge.
So you cast out an ingot
and once that's cooled down
then you hammer it into a long thick piece of wire or rod.
And then forged out we think
with a square section so you can hammer down one side,
rotate, hammer down the other side,
until you're gradually forging out this square piece of wire.
One of the things that this made me realise,
is how incredibly difficult it is to make wire by hand in this way
and I may have given up in the end
and done some of this iron making on a rolling mill,
which they wouldn't of had in the Iron Age
because its a very very labour intensive task
and I think it really made me realise, all of these things are not one person jobs,
so everything from smelting that copper,
where you've got to be keeping your bellows going for a very very long time
to maintaining the furnace,
keeping all of the charcoal ready and to hand
and keeping your temperatures ready for working objects like this.
And doing all of that hammering to make very very large quantities of very very standard
wire,
some of these are quite easy jobs, some are very skilled jobs
but all of them are jobs that would require quite a large number of people
to actually be able to produce several different objects.
The next step once you have a piece like this,
you need to have two pieces
and so the first thing to do then, is to bend the ends of each one round in to a loop,
by taking your thicker rod and hammering it over something called a mandrel,
which is a kind of conical piece that you can hammer on to.
So I'm just bending that round into two little loops at the end
and these are going to make the kind of loops that we see on the finished torc terminal
there.
Ok, so we've more or less got one
and another one that I made earlier,
so you then take these, these are not particularly well matched
but hopefully you'll get the idea.
And the next step in making this is to clamp together
two of those opposing loops,
so you can start to see how those are going to become those there
on a much larger scale.
And the next thing to do would be to twist this,
and by twisting and twisting and twisting,
those pair terminals there together,
you gradually build up a twist which runs all the way down the wires.
So once you've put the twist in,
the next thing to do is just very simply to bend the torc round
and you can see then that you end up with something like this.
We don't know a huge amount about how they were worn or who wore them
because in Britain in particular we don't have very many graves from the Iron Age
and so we don't have burials with people wearing torcs.
When we do find torcs like this, they tend to be found in hoards
and this means that we just get a big group of objects like this,
perhaps pieces of ancient jewelry, pieces of metal working waste
and pieces of chopped up items like this deposited together in a pit.
And that's where a lot of the material from Snettisham in Norfolk
where the torc that I based this one on comes from.
So that kind of information by itself
and we can look at the objects and say that they were worn,
but we can't say who wore them or whether they were worn only for special occasions
or whether even they were worn everyday.
Some of the torcs that we have I think probably were not for everyday wear.
I've explained that I've based my replica on the simplest torc that you can get,
but I have another replica which I would like to show you,
which is a little bit more complex and not one that I made.
This is an electrotype of the Snettisham great torc,
so it's from the same site.
Rather than being made up as mine was
of just two twisted together large thick wires,
this is made up of sixty four strands of gold alloy wire
and that created this incredible neck ring.
And at the ends here, what we call the terminals
you can see these are incredibly complex,
and they've been directly casted on to the ends of the wire
and in this particular one, as I've said it's an electrotype
so here this ends have actually been soldered on,
but on the original, our scientists here at the museum have studied it
and they've realised that actually this part of the terminal was cast directly on to the
ends
and this here being added as a little collar to cover up that join.
And the way that you would have to go about casting something like that on,
so if i wanted to cast on a more decorative terminal to the one that I made,
I would put something like a material like wax
which could be melted a way on to the terminals
and I would mould it up and carve it into the shape that I wanted the final terminal
to take.
And then around that wax I would pack clay with little funnels
into which I can pour metal as that's going to happen in a moment
and a little hole for the wax to escape from,
you then heat up that whole mould and the wax drains out, it melts with the heat
leaving a void where you want to have that metal go in.
You then have your molten metal in a crucible
and you can pour that into the mould that you have created,
when you then break away the clay mould
you will have on there the terminal that you wanted to cast on.
This is an incredibly complicated process and it can go wrong quite easily,
not necessarily because you done something very wrong
but just because its quite a tricky process to get right.
If you imagine trying to cast on something as complicated
as that terminal on to all of this incredibly precious wire
that would have been really daunting and quite a daring thing to do.
I used to be, when I first looked at this object, I've always thought it was a brilliant
object,
it's one of the real star pieces in our Iron Age gallery,
I always just used to look at the terminals and I used to look at this decoration,
this fabulous engraving that you can see on here,
and this is an example of what today we quite often call Celtic art or La Tène art.
But now that I've done some actual metal working,
the thing that I really look at most now when I see this object is all of this wire
because for me it was so difficult, physically taxing
and very very difficult to get the very simple, very thick wire that I made to be even
and to look nice.
The idea of creating this much wire, hammering it all out by hand
and making it so accurately refined and so standerised across the entire length,
to me that's absolutely incredible
and I think that its quite easy to look at something like that now and it looks quite
simple and quite rope like
and we can forget all of the hours and hours of work that must of gone into making it,
so for me that was something really important that I got from actually making things
was realising what goes into this from first principles
and not just taking the finished object for granted,
but thinking about the people who made these objects and what it must of meant for them
to make them,
and also to wear and to use them as well.