Irreplaceable East Anglian gold torc stolen from museum 'may have been melted down already'
Experts fear the torc may have been lost forever, as Matthew Hudson reports for ITV News Anglia
An irreplaceable golden Bronze Age torc stolen from a museum may already have been melted down for its precious metal, experts fear.
Thieves stole the 3,000-year-old jewellery, along with a bracelet, in an early-hours raid at Ely Museum in Cambridgeshire on Tuesday.
Prof Francis Pryor, a retired archaeologist, dismissed the idea that it was stolen to order and said the torc would be too distinctive for thieves to move on easily.
"If you steal it to give to a very, very rich man to display, he's not going to be able to display it. You will never sell it.
"As far as we know the bracelet and torc have been stolen for their gold."
Prof Pryor, best known for his discovery and excavation of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age site near Peterborough, said he was "disgusted" at the theft, which has shocked the archaeological world.
"I don't think it was the kind of thing that would have happened in the Bronze Age, because I think people in those days had real respect.
"They had a different sort of value, in the modern world it's money, money, money. It seems most likely they [the items] are going to be melted down.
"The amount of information and the beauty of them, the artwork... it's just stunning and that's all going to be lost."
The museum paid £220,000 for the torc in 2017 - a fee that was shared between the metal detectorist who unearthed it and the Cambridgeshire landowner whose field it was found in.
Prof Pryor was saddened that the theft had robbed historians in the future the opportunity to discover more about our ancestors.
He said: "The torc and the bracelet are important not so much because they are made out of gold but it's how beautifully they are made and what they would have symbolised.
"People in the Bronze Age, they didn't swagger around in bling. These beautiful things would have symbolised a person's power and prestige within society - they would also have had religious significance.
He added: "Around 2,000 BC there was a shift in the way our ancestors treated symbolic objects like the torc, preferring to lay them in the water as an offering to the dead rather than burying them with the deceased."
Often these objects were "killed" and sword marks were visible on them, explained Prof Pryor.
"There is a lot of very complicated religious symbolism going on here and we're going to lose all chances of discovering that because you're not going to be able to look at the surface of these things in detail," he said.
"In 50 years' time, I imagine scanning electron microscopes will be infinitely more sophisticated but you won't be able to look at these things because these half-wits have melted them down."
The price of gold is at an all-time high - currently trading at nearly £60 a gram. At 732 grams and made with around 80% gold, the torc's metal value is estimated at around £40,000.
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