#Archaeology31 #Communication

When you first look at a torc often all you see is the gold, the bling, the value, the treasure.

But then you look closely + the torc starts to talk (torc?) to you.

This is a teeny part of the conversation we've had with Newark.

Thread.

Look closely at the roundels and you can see each tiny little ripple where the Iron Age goldsmith slightly shifted their punch between strokes.

You can see where, in punching the <1mm diameter round dots, they slightly distorted the line they had added previously.

You can even see smaller punched dots - were they laying out for the design? or another line of punched dots which were burnished out as the design changed?

You might even see the hand of the expert in one roundel...

... or the hand of one still learning in another.

But even experts make mistakes, their punches slip and the mark left must be burnished out.

The marks of the goldsmith talk to me in a way that a book, an article or a paper never could.

Now we've started working with gold, I can even put sounds to the marks - the soft 'tink tink' of a hammer on a punch or direct on metal.

So if anyone ever tells you that torcs can't talk, don't believe a word of it - they don't know what they're torcing about!