SCIENCE & TECH: Pieces of Ultra-Rare Iron Age Helmet Found in Metal Hoards from Britain

A recreation by artist Craig Williams showing the nose and eyebrow pieces that first alerted an expert that the fragments might be a helmet.

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Through advanced scientific testing, fragments of copper alloy unearthed from one of Britain’s most significant archaeological sites have been identified as parts of a highly uncommon Iron Age helmet. This groundbreaking discovery was made by the British Museum, which had been working on a 15-year project to analyze 14 hoards of gold, silver, and bronze torcs (stiff, twisted metal rings worn as jewelry) found at Snettisham, Norfolk, between 1948 and the 1990s.

According to Dr. Julia Farley, the Iron Age curator at the Museum and co-editor of The Snettisham Hoards, this object is particularly unusual, as there are fewer than 10 known Iron Age helmets in Britain, each of them distinct from the others.

“There is a reason why everyone was so surprised in that room… helmets from Iron Age pre-Roman Britain, are just vanishingly rare,” she told the BBC. “ And this one is a one-off, it’s got a kind of nasal bridge which is really unusual and these little brow pieces and it’s all hammered out from incredibly thin sheet bronze, and that’s a tremendously skilled thing to be able to do.”

One of the most eye-opening aspects of the study was the confirmation that Iron Age metalworkers had mastered the technique of mercury gilding, a method that involved applying gold to bronze using a toxic mercury-gold amalgam. This was used to make both the helmet and the vast collection of torcs from the Snettisham hoards.



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