The Snettisham Treasure

In November 1948 a plough cutting deeper than usual on Ken Hill, a low rise above the Wash in north-west Norfolk, dragged up what the tractor driver took for a piece of an old brass bedstead. The next day more 'twisted wire' came up. It was gold, and the curator of archaeology at Norwich Castle Museum soon identified it as a group of Iron Age neck rings more than two thousand years old.

That was the first of at least fourteen separate hoards found in one field, lettered in the order they were discovered. Two years later, in 1950, ploughing turned up the most famous object of all, the Great Torc, with a broken torc threaded through its terminals and a bracelet beside it. Single torcs surfaced through the 1960s and 1970s, and it was widely assumed the field was exhausted.

It was not. In August 1990 a metal detectorist recovered more than 500 fragments of gold, silver and bronze alloys that had been packed into an upturned bronze helmet. He reported the find, and from December 1990 a British Museum team under Ian Stead excavated the hilltop over three seasons to 1992. They found several more pits. In one, as reported at the time, two bronze bracelets lay at the top, then two silver torcs, then ten gold ones, an ordered packing that a hurried thief would hardly have bothered with.

Snettisham has produced more than sixty complete or near-complete torcs and hundreds more in fragments. For comparison, only about 85 have been found in the rest of Britain. Alongside the neck rings are bracelets, finger rings, ring-shaped ingots and scrap, and a few gold coins. The metal ranges from almost pure gold through electrum to silver and bronze; recent scientific work found that some bronze torcs were gilded with mercury, the earliest known use of the technique in Britain, and that repeated hammering, heating and pickling had enriched the surfaces of the gold wires.

Who owned it all is a matter of inference. North-west Norfolk lay in the territory later ruled by the Iceni, and the quantity and quality of the metal point to a powerful community or ruling group. Many of the torcs had been deliberately cut up. One reading is that this was bullion held in a treasury; another, now more widely favoured, is that the hilltop was a sacred place where valuables were offered and kept out of circulation. Excavation found ditches and enclosures and signs of feasting, and in the Roman period a square stone building, possibly a temple, stood in the field.

The quantity is what sets Snettisham apart. A single torc can be admired as a work of art; dozens of them, sorted by metal and buried in pits on one hill, show that gold-working, wealth and ritual in late Iron Age Britain were organised on a scale that the sparse written record never hints at. After more than a decade of study, curators at the British Museum and Cambridge published the full account of the finds and excavations as a free open-access book.