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We've just made what might not seem a very exciting discovery
but it has quite excited me.
Behind all the cut garnets in the Hoard there are small pieces of gold foil
which have been stamped with a pattern, and they act very much like a bicycle reflector
so the light would go through the garnet, hit the gold foil, and then reflect back through the garnets
so that your garnet, if you had it in sunlight and moved, would flash
and make the whole object sparkle and look really exciting.
Up until now we've noticed two different types of stamped pattern on the foils, and that's all of them,
hundreds of pieces, but today we've just found a third pattern.
And really excitingly it is a pattern of little five square by five square blocks
rather than three square by three square blocks, but it is terribly interesting - really!
All right Dave I've moved the camera around here to try and capture a picture of this foil
but I have to say I still can't see it. Could you point at it for us?
Right, well the thing we're interested in is that.
I can see the end of your cocktail stick and I can see the raffle ticket accession number
we still can't see the foil - that must mean it is tiny?
I'm guessing 1mm by 2mm.
Okay, that's too small for our viewers to be able to see it through this,
but I think what we'll do is that we'll take a picture of it under our microscope and put a still on the website
so that they can see how tiny but beautiful these foils are.
Well they're very important these things because the fact that there is a different pattern on it means
that this has been made from a different dye.
Now that starts getting you thinking - is it produced in a different workshop?
And if we can start putting together evidence like this it may help us say something about the manufacture of these pieces.
So although it sounds crazy to be getting this excited by something that is 2 square mm
and has got a five by five pattern rather than a three by three pattern there is a reason for the excitement.
This is our set up for taking handheld XRF analysis. XRF being X-ray fluorescence.
What it does is help us give us identification of metals and the elements within that metal.
So today I've just been 'XRF'ing these three pieces
which had initially been dismissed as a modern agricultural piece of metal work.
But actually, just got a hit for silver on all of them
which matches similar pieces on other objects, so I think we may actually have a historic object here.
And it can be put back into the mix to be discussed.