I love to share torc research, and any of you who follow me on social media will know that my feeds are full of snippets, thoughts and ponderings – some turn out to be dead ends, some get noted for later use and some lead to fully-fledged theories and papers (see HERE for our work so far).
The usual process of my research is that I work away behind the scenes and the first anyone really knows about what I’ve been doing – what I’ve discovered – is that I will add a new blog/paper to the Big Book of Torcs and you will – hopefully – go off, print it out and read it. But what you don’t see is the journey of how that paper came into being: the museum visits, the ideas, the dead ends, the conversations with others, in short, the whole wonderful and up-and-down process of research that can take months, if not years.
With this current piece of work, I thought it might be fun to take you all along with me for the ride: from my first thoughts and hypotheses, through the research and museum visits, and finally – if it works out – to the final paper. Or will there be a paper? Maybe we can come up with a better way of getting the word out? Let’s see. This really is a totally unknown quantity right now!
The idea of this project, looking at five torcs from a very small area in Staffordshire, is to make it fully transparent and interactive so that you can see what artefact research (well, I guess, my way of doing artefact research) is really like, and for those of you who aren’t archaeologists, it will perhaps give you an insight into what we do and how we do it. Along the way, I would really welcome – sensible, please! – thoughts and ideas from you all. Although I’ve obviously got a lot of experience and knowledge regarding gold and torcs, there’s always a place for a fresh pairs of eyes!
To start us off gently: these are the five torcs. Alrewas, Middleton Hall, Shenstone, Glascote and Needwood Forest. The next blogs will cover what they are and how they were found, with subsequent blogs looking at the current theories about them… and then why these five torcs in particular have piqued my interest! Then we can get to arranging museum visits, seeing what I find when I see the torcs, the ongoing literature research… and the ideas that emerge, as they happen.
So, let’s torc soon…please feel free to add comments to the blogs and, if you want to make sure not to miss anything, click ‘Subscribe’ at the bottom of this page and you will be emailed each time there’s a new post!
I’m really excited about this. After all, it’s good to torc! Thank you! 🙂
The Big Book of Torcs 
One Reply to “”