Profile: Julia Farley - Museums Association

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Profile: Julia Farley

Carrying a torc for the iron age
Museums Association
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Julia Farley is the curator of European Iron Age collections at the British Museum, London, and was the museum’s lead curator on the Celts exhibition, which is now at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 26 September.

What’s on your desk at the moment?

I’m working with Jody Joy from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge on publishing a research project about the Snettisham Hoard. Analysis has shown that the makers used a complicated gilding process that entailed mixing
mercury with powdered gold to form a sort of butter that was spread across the objects and heated to a high temperature.

I’ve shown pictures of  the torcs to modern silversmiths who have said that they would not know how to do that type of work.

Have you made a torc yourself?

I thought that if I was going to talk about how people made these things, I ought to have a go. I have one that I made on my desk at the moment; it’s rather plain and made from twisted wire. We do get a lot of torcs brought to us that turn out to be modern replicas. You take one look at them and think: “I know which website sold that.”

You did a lot of television, radio and webcasts for the Celts exhibition. Does a career as a history broadcaster interest you?

We have a great team at the British Museum who guided me through that process and I enjoyed the digital content side of things.
 
I did a Periscope livestream with co-curator Fraser Hunter on the morning of the press launch, which was a chance to go behind the scenes and present ideas.

I’m not sure I’d want to do TV though, even though I have the necessary sensible cagoule. After we did a curatorial introduction on YouTube, someone actually commented: “I’m not going to visit this exhibition because it has been curated by women.” I saw then how uncomfortable things can become if you are in the public eye.

Does social media mean we won’t need archaeologists in the future?

Who’s to say people will be able to read a blog written today in hundreds of years’ time? I’m not 100% convinced of that. Most of what we write and put in the public sphere is performative – people choose their best pictures to post online, for example, and archaeology will always be the real stuff that doesn’t get written down.

As an example, I ask my students how best they might go about finding out how much their next door neighbours drink. Would they look at the form filled in when registering with a doctor during Freshers’ Week that recorded how many units they claimed to consume? Or would they look through the recycling bin each week to count the empty wine bottles?


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