The British Museum

I went to the British Museum to try and see how they presented casting, since they have massive sections of metalwork from throughout the ages. However they barely talked about how things were made at all so far as I could tell, in spite of the fact that technology enabled the creation of the obects, unless there was more information in the audio guides. The closest thing I found to a representation of it was seals which had a wax pressing next to them.

There was quite a lot of information about coins; about forging coins, hoarding coins, minting coins. There was a whole section on money sponsored by citibank which was slightly ironic since all major banks deal with digital money and quantitative easing nowadays and have little to do with physical amounts of metals.

Apart from searching for casting-related or process-related displays, the most interesting thing was the displays about people hoards.

This was a Late Bronze/ Early Stone Age axe-head that someone had stuffed some gold rings into and buried. Apparently they were probably made just to be put in the hoard because the metal is too brittle to be used as an axe. I find the mystery of why someone would do this intriguing. When I was a child I found one of the Dartmoor post-boxes which had stamps of Blackpool in it, hidden under a slab of rock step, and this reminds me of that feeling of discovering something secret.