#Archaeology31 #Treasure

Apologies in advance for the rant, but here we go...

Treasure!

And if gold torcs don't count as treasure, then I don't know what does. Bling, shinies, sparkles and so much gold - riches beyond the imagination of any archaeologist!

Thread.

Except. Torcs aren't just treasure and that apparent lack of looking beyond the bling, and at the artefacts themselves has, we believe, led to a huge failure in their historic understanding as archaeological artefacts.

As artefacts, they should have been measured, weighed, photographed, drawn, examined and then thought about with reference to the way they were made and used...

...except they weren't.

When we started looking at torcs we discovered most had not been closely examined.

Yes, various scientific techniques had been applied to them, but if you wanted to know their measurements + even in some cases, their weight, this had yet to be recorded.

Many photos had been taken without scales, interiors never photographed + academic writing described everything but the detail. Alloy % were either highly inaccurate pXRF results, or were readings taken from one point on a torc with 70+ component parts.

And it drove us nuts!

(In addition, the value of these treasure torcs means they can't be transported, moved or gathered - so there will never be a day when all those held in different museums will sit together on a table to be compared + contrasted... torc research will always be the poorer for that)

So - despite my first encounters with torcs often producing a spluttered 'it's worth *how* much???' - I genuinely no longer think about them as being treasure.

They will always be treasure torcs to many, but they also deserve the detailed recording and research approach we would apply to any other artefact.

...So, that's what we're trying to do.