Fake or fortunate? The insecure provenance of the 'Pulborough Area' torc.

In September 2024 a paper, ‘The Pulborough gold torc: a 4^th to 3^rd century BCE artefact of European significance’ was published by a British Museum team in the online journal Internet Archaeology (Adams et al 2024). This paper was a response to our earlier paper ‘‘All the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order’: The riddle of the ‘Pulborough Area’ torc from Sussex.’ (Machling et al 2023).

The Adams et al paper claims to have ‘refuted’ (Adams et al 2024, 2. Discovery) our claim that the torc was of early 20^th century manufacture, and further suggests that ‘Pulborough can be added to a small but growing group of mid- to late first millennium BCE gold items of personal adornment found in England’ (Adams et al 2024, 7. Conclusion).

However, we believe that the confidence of the British Museum team in ascribing a definite Iron Age date to the torc is undermined by significant flaws and/or omissions in their research. In addition, even if one accepts an Iron Age date for this artefact, the absence of acknowledgement by Adams et al that a suspected forger and planter of archaeological artefacts (Machling & Frieman 2024) was depositing material within yards of the Pulborough torc findspot (Machling et al 2023, 29) raises further questions which need to be addressed before a secure in situ Iron Age provenance can be ascribed to the torc.

This paper will highlight areas where we feel further research still needs to be undertaken and will correct the record regarding various issues raised by Adams et al. However, as we said in our 2023 paper, ‘unless further work identifies a ‘smoking gun’ of evidence, it is likely we will never know for sure’ (Machling et al 2023, 30) whether the torc is an in situ Iron Age find, a planted Iron Age find or a forgery.