- The Technology of Metalwork -
and an eye for accuracy and regularity in their shape and dimensions. They were
probably made and used from the thirteenth to the eleventh centuries Be, a time
when the British Isles and other parts of western Europe experienced a rapid devel-
opment of wrought-metal techniques with the introduction of sheet-metal armour
and vessels and, possibly, the development of wire drawing. Some of the small hoards
of gold torques and bracelets that survive suggest that the users of the gold had some
notion of its having an intrinsic value: often the weights of the objects in a hoard
show a simple relationship with each other. For example, in hoards with a pair of
torques one is generally twice the weight of the other; on occasion these weight
relationships can be very exact. For some examples there is also a strong ritual
element in their deposition.
Because of the great importance of gold in Ireland through much of the Bronze
Age it was thought that these torques, too, were typical of Ireland. In fact they are
distributed fairly widely across England, Wales and north-western France but are
almost absent from Scotland. In the succeeding century, the beginning of the Late
Bronze Age in Britain, there is something of a hiatus and the amount of gold work
surviving is very small (Needham 1990). At the same time there is a marked change
in the character of the finest quality bronzeworking, from wrought products to
elaborate castings, and the skills which formed the torques might well have been
in abeyance. After that, through the main span of the Late Bronze Age in Britain, the
quantity of gold, both by weight and number of objects, is very small in relation to
the amount of copper and copper alloys in circulation. In contrast, in Ireland there was
a great increase in the number of gold objects produced in the Late Bronze Age
although we have no absolute dating for the start of this process. Some of the gold
hoards were very large, such as that from Mooghaun, Co. Clare, with 146 gold objects
(Eogan 1983a: esp. 69-72). Reflecting the relative simplicity of contemporary bronze
types, many of the gold ornaments are very simple combinations of casting and
forging. A small proportion, such as 'lock-rings', gorgets and boxes, are fabricated
from sheet with stamped, engraved or chased decoration; however, the technology is
still simple with all joints being mechanical. A greater degree of metallurgical
complexity is seen in the 'ring-money', some of which has striped decoration formed
from precious alloys of contrasting colours formed round a base-metal core; the
methods by which the patterns were created have still to be determined (Green 1988).
Developments in the British Isles have been described in some detail to give an idea
of the major changes which could have taken place in both the use of gold and the
craft techniques involved in shaping it during the half-millennium of the later Bronze
Age. The other regional industries had their own distinct identities. For example, the
Danish tradition is very much associated with gold wire and gold vessels, while in
Iberia the goldsmiths were by this time coming under the influence of the
Mediterranean civilizations, initially that of the Phoenicians (Almagro Gorbea 1989).
RESOURCESThe Celtic goldsmith had access to three basic sources of gold: vein or reef gold, i.e.
gold mined from the ground, alluvial or placer gold panned or washed from streams,