Fragments of copper alloy unearthed at Snettisham, Norfolk, have been revealed to be parts of an rare Iron Age helmet, previously thought to be part of a vessel, according to BBC News. The British Museum made the discovery during a 15-year project analyzing 14 hoards of gold, silver, and bronze torcs excavated at Snettisham between 1948 and the 1990s.
Conservator Fleur Shearman was examining the fragments as part of this project when she realized that one of the pieces resembled a nose piece and identified possible brow pieces among the fragments, as reported by BBC News. “There are less than 10 Iron Age helmets in Britain and every single one is unique,” said Dr. Julia Farley, Iron Age curator at the British Museum, explaining the discovery’s significance, according to Archaeology Worldwide.
“This one is a one-off, it’s got a kind of nasal bridge which is really unusual and these little brow pieces and it’s all hammered out from incredibly thin sheet bronze, and that’s a tremendously skilled thing to be able to do,” she added. Researchers believed the helmet was probably not complete when it was put into the ground because so much was missing, BBC News reported.
Dr. Jody Joy, who was the British Museum’s European Iron Age curator when the project began in 2009, thinks the helmet was saved for personal or sentimental reasons and might have even been used to carry other objects, like the torcs, according to Archaeology Worldwide.
The Snettisham hoards are one of the biggest concentrations of precious metal from prehistoric Europe and include one of the greatest concentrations of Celtic art and one of the largest collections of prehistoric precious metal objects ever found, Archaeology Worldwide reported. Most of the Snettisham hoards were buried in about 60 BCE, with some finds dated to the early Roman period, and the items were discovered in at least 14 different hoards that were interred between 150 BCE and 100 CE.
At least 400 torcs were discovered at Snettisham, more than 60 of which were intact or nearly intact. The sizes of the torcs indicate that they can be worn as neck, arm, or bracelet rings. “When people imagine someone wearing the Great Torc, they’re imagining a man with a twirly moustache, but actually when you know the sheer breadth of sizes [found at Snettisham] we should assume they’re being worn by everybody,” Dr. Farley said.
Researchers uncovered minute details about the torcs, including wear patterns and polishing on areas that would have come into contact with the body or clothing, using scientific analysis, including electron microscopes. “You can see wear patterns at the back of the object and you can see polishing on the underside of the terminals where they would have been rubbing against either the body or clothing. So these things would have been worn for a long time or worn very intensively, and that was a really big insight,” Farley told BBC News.
The study confirmed that Iron Age metalworkers had perfected the art of mercury gilding, applying gold to bronze using a poisonous mercury-gold amalgam. “We didn’t know they could do this in Britain 2,000 years ago,” Farley noted.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.
This article was originally published at www.jpost.com
