Iron Age torcs and the Snettisham hoards

The British Museum's double volume The Snettisham hoards, edited by Julia Farley and Jody Joy, offers the long-awaited complete publication of the largest concentration of Iron Age torcs in Britain and beyond.It covers a wide range of aspects related to finds made on the so-called Snettisham gold field in Norfolk, where over the past 60 years more than 1200 items were unearthed.The artefacts are now kept in the British Museum and Norwich Castle Museum collections.The publication has 710 pages in two volumes, is organised in three parts, which are subdivided into 24 chapters and five appendices, and presents the results of a long-term and in-depth investigation.The integrated interdisciplinary research team comprises around 30 renowned experts, with a wider network of collaborations visible in the extensive acknowledgements.Developing the publishing framework for such wide-ranging contributions is no easy task.The authors address challenging issues about Celtic society, culture, economy, arts and crafts, including function, social meaning and depositional practices of Iron Age metalwork, with special attention paid to torcs and coins.The double volume is available as a print version, and free PDF version online in the British Museum online research repository.Since the first finds in the second half of the previous century, the Snettisham hoards have been only partly published and the most spectacular torcs are highlighted in publications on Celtic art and culture.Some selected and more specific typological, technological and analytical aspects of the Snettisham finds have also been considered in previous research, and these findings are incorporated into the new full presentation of the site.The two volumes deliver access to a comprehensive scientific study with a huge and well-structured data collection on the exceptional metal assemblages.The level of detail is remarkable and the high-quality documentation supporting images is excellent.The same applies to the clear terminology in the various scientific fields.The subject areas include, among others, field archaeology, history of discovery, conservation, typology, Celtic art, numismatics, technology and archaeometry.