Slide 1

Recent research and finds

from the Portable Antiquities

Scheme

Roger Bland

British Museum

Current Archaeology Live! February 2015

Slide 2

When the news of the discovery of this hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold – the Staffordshire hoardi n a field north of Birmingham was announced in September 2009 it caused a public sensation.

Slide 3

Here is some of the publicity which accompanied the announcement: as archaeologists we wince at its concentration on gold and commercial value.

Slide 4

However, there’s no denying the public interest in it. People queued for 3 hours to see it when it went on show for three weeks in Birmingham Museum. The towns in the region saw it as the key to regenerating their town. This is an image from Tamworth council this week proudly advertising their contribution to the effort to save the hoard. The website that we built for the hoard was at one stage getting 2000 hits per second.

Slide 5

Of course the artefacts were of the highest archaeological and historical interest. The hoard consists of over 1800 objects, including over 5 kilos of gold. It contains unique objects, such as this folded gold cross – here is a reconstruction drawing of it – and another gold strip, also probably from a cross, with an inscription from Psalm 68 – `Rise up o lord and may thy enemies be scattered and those that hate thee be driven from thy face’. Nothing like these have been found before.

Slide 6

The find was made by a metal detector user, Terry Herbert, while detecting on a local farmer’s land with permission. Over four days between 5 and 10 July he found some 300 objects and he took these photos of them all and recorded them carefully. He reported them to our Finds Liaison Officer who immediately came to us for help and we were able to arrange that one of our Finds specialists, Dr kevin leahy, should carry out an initial assessment of the finds.

Slide 7

The other priority was to organise the controlled removal by archaeologists of the rest of the hoard and the county archaeologists attended the site the next day and started investigating. Terry was involved throughout.

Slide 8

The objects were lying very near the surface and the local archaeology unit from Birmingham University was commissioned to do carry out the excavation – which had to be done in great secrecy, as it was a very exposed location, next to three major roads.

Slide 9

No stone was left unturned in ensuring that all the objects were recovered – a crack team of police experts who normally search for enemy devices in Afghanistan was called in to search – click and the archaeologists did not refrain from putting local journalists off the scent when they started making enquiries before we ready to announce the find.

Slide 10

This had to be raised by Birmingham and Stoke museums and many predicted that they would struggle to do it. In fact such was the enormous public interest in the hoard that they were able to raise the money very quickly. In fact the Art Fund, a charity that helps museums acquire objects, which led the fundraising effort, said they had never before had so many contributions from individual members of the public in one of their campaigns. Here is David Starkey lending a hand to the appeal. The project to conserve and study the hoard is now in progress – it is a long job - and the hoard has featured frequently on TV – National Geographic are making three programmes about it, of which the first has been screened and they also hosted an exhibition of it in Washington DC which has just closed. Click Book – published Nov. 2009 – over 50,000 copies sold and a new edition was published last year.

Slide 11 Treasure Act 1996

• Only applies to objects found since Sept. 1997

• Definition of Treasure:– All objects, other than coins, at least 300 years old with at least

10% of gold or silver

– All coins from the same find, provided they are at least 300 years old (if they have less than 10% of gold or silver there must be at least 10)

– All objects found in association

– Extended in 2003 to include prehistoric base-metal deposits.

• Finds to be reported to coroner within 14 days of finder realising find may be Treasure

• Maximum penalty for not reporting Treasure: 3 months imprisonment or £5,000 fine (or both).

The Staffordshire hoard is probably the most famous individual discovery since the law on Treasure changed 19 years ago. After a long campaign – initiated by a local archaeological society, the Surrey Archaeological Society, and with the support of the BM, the Parliament passed the Treasure Act in 1996. These are the main points: Only applies to objects found since Sept. 1997 Definition of Treasure:

All objects, other than coins, at least 300 years old with at least 10% of gold or silver All coins from the same find, provided they are at least 300 years old (if they have less than 10% of gold or silver there must be at least 10) All objects found in association Extended in 2003 to include prehistoric base-metal deposits.

Finds to be reported to coroner within 14 days of finder realising find may be Treasure Maximum penalty for not reporting Treasure: 3 months imprisonment or £5,000 fine (or both).

Slide 12 Rewards and valuation

• Reward set at full market value, divided between finder and landowner

• Determined by independent Treasure Valuation Committee– Panel of valuers

– Interested parties can commission own valuations

– Abatement if evidence of wrongdoing

– Archaeologists not eligible for rewards

• Once valuation agreed museums have 4 months to raise money

I should stress here the importance of the system of valuing finds that museums wish to acquire. Treasure finds are valued by a committee of respected independent experts. Giving finders the confidence that if they do the right thing and report their finds they will be fairly reward is a key to the success of the Treasure Act. The reward is set at the full market value, which is divided between finder and landowner. The level of reward is determined by the independent Treasure Valuation Committee. The Committee is advised by a panel of valuers. Interested parties can commission their own valuations and the Committee can reduce the reward if there is evidence of wrongdoing. Archaeologists not eligible for rewards. Once valuation agreed museums have 4 months to raise money.

Slide 13

This is the impact of the new law. Here we see the number of finds reported first under the old law of Treasure Trove – about 25 a year - and since 1997 under the new Treasure Act. In the first four years of the Act about 200-250 finds a year were reported as Treasure, but since the PAS was extended nationally in 2003 the number of cases reported has increased greatly and is still increasing: last year it stood at 994 and that number has been about the same for the last three years, suggesting that we have now reached a peak. The staff of PAS offer an essential role in the operation of the Act and 97% of all Treasure cases are reported through them.

Slide 14 Portable Antiquities Scheme

• Started as 6 schemes in 1997; since 2003 a national network

• 38 Finds Liaison Officers, 5 Finds Advisers, 4 other posts

• Administered by British Museum

In order to work, Treasure Act depends on the supporting framework of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which is a network of locally-based archaeologists, `Finds Liaison Officers’, who encourage members of the public, especially metal detector users, to report all finds of archaeological importance – which we define as all objects more than 300 years old. This started with six pilot schemes in 1997 and in 2003 it was extended across the whole of England and Wales and this map shows where the posts are based. There are 38 Finds Liaison Officers, 5 finds advisers, who provide specialist advice on finds and four other staff. It is now administered by the British Museum, with funding from the Government.

Slide 15

Metal detecting club

meeting

Finds event

Our staff record these finds not by sitting in museums waiting for people to come to them but by proactively going out and encouraging finders to report their finds.

Slide 16 Educating finders on use of GPS

Another key role for FLOs is to educate detector users on good practice and here our FLO on the Isle of Wight is showing detector users how to use a GPS machine to enable them to log their findspots accurately. Click Since 2006 we have had a Code of Practice on Responsible Metal Detecting was published. The thinking behind the Code is that education and self-regulation offer the best prospect of progress. The two main provisions in the Code are to avoid damaging archaeological sites and to report finds and it stands as a statement of good practice that can be used by archaeological and government bodies in developing policies that affect metal detecting

Slide 17

This shows the number of objects recorded on the PAS database since 1998 and it is now at about 80,000 pa. We believe that this at the limit of what our current staff can record and they are having to find ways of limiting the finds they are offered for recording.

Slide 18

Aims

Provide training for volunteers

Increase the capacity of the PAS to record finds

Engage a wider audience of volunteers

Engage a wider local audience through our volunteers

Enable the local community to learn more about their area

Foster an interest in the local community to care for their archaeological heritage.

PASt Explorers: Finds Recording in the Community

A five-year project that will create a national network of volunteers who will operate as

Community Finds Recording Teams (CFRTs) based around their local Finds Liaison

Officer (FLO).

Because funding is not available to enable us to expand our network, we need to look at other ways of being able to increase capacity, particularly by encouraging volunteers – finders and others – to record, and we have over 100 volunteers who are recording on our database. Last year we obtained a lottery grant which has enabled us take this forward to a new level to introduce four new posts to help train volunteers.

Slide 19

Crowd-sourcing

http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org

Another way in which we are harnessing volunteer labour is through a crowdsourcing project, Micropasts, masterminded by my colleague Dan Pett. We have had in the BM an important research tool, the National Bronze Age Implement Index, which started in 1913 with the aim of creating a record of all Bronze Age implements found in the UK. It was maintained for the next 80 years or so by some of the great names in Bronze Age studies: Christopher Hawkes and latterly Stuart Needham and consists of some 30,000 cards with drawings of the objects recorded.

Slide 20

Seen here. By the 1980s it was increasingly clear that the cards needed to be transferred to a database but we struggled to find ways of funding the enormous job of transcribing all the cards and scanning the drawings. Last year, Andy Bevan of the Institute of Archaeology successfully obtained a grant from the AHRC which has enabled us to solve the problem. We had funding for a researcher, Jennifer Wexler, for 7 months, a scanner and the skills of my colleague Dan Pett to build a crowdsourcing site. The hand-written cards are all being scanned on a high capacity scanner, put up on the web as images and an army of volunteers are transcribing the data into a database. That work is well under way and within a year we will have it all in an online resource.

Slide 21 http://finds.org.uk

To return to the main database of the PAS, this is the home page which now has records of over one million finds from across England and Wales.

Slide 22

This is a record.

Slide 23 Findspots recorded by PAS

This map shows all objects recorded by PAS and, as you can see, they come from all across the country (except for the mountainous and thinly populated areas in the west and north of the country).

Slide 24 Research using PAS data

• Listed on http://finds.org.uk/research

• 416 Research projects

• 183 dissertations (61 undergraduate, 121

master’s)

• 93 PhDs

• 17 research-council funded projects

(AHRC, Leverhulme, ERC etc.)

• 88 personal research projects

I would now like to talk about some of the research that is coming out of the Scheme.

Slide 25

The PAS as a tool for

archaeological research• Leverhulme Trust funding (£149K)

• 1 RA (Dr Katherine Robbins) for 3

years, 2012-15

• A study of the factors underlying PAS

dataset

• Tool for researchers to use to help

them interpret data

Leverhulme Trust funding (£149K) 1 RA (Dr Katherine Robbins) for 3 years A study of the factors underlying PAS dataset Tool for researchers to use to help them interpret data

Slide 26 Mapping Constraints

Availability of land affects archaeological investigations – same for metal detecting Many recent studies recognise the spatial limits place on metal detector users 2009 – the VASLE report created a ‘constraints’ map to show landscape features that were most likely to limit the search areas available to metal detector users Results showed that the perceived constraints did correspond with areas of relatively few finds Eg, Isle of Wight 26% of land constrained 97% of the 9700 finds outside constrained area Hugging of boundaries

Slide 28

Guide for

researchers on

using PAS data,

available at:

http://finds.org.uk/

research/advice

Slide 29 Hoarding project

The second project I would like to talk about seeks to understand why we have so many hoards from Iron Age and Roman Britain. It is a 3-year project being funded by AHRC (£645,000) and is based at the BM and the University of Leicester, where we are working with Professors Colin Haselgrove and David Mattingly. We have three research assistants who are compiling a database of hoards, studying their findspots, using geophysical survey and site visits and studying theories of deposition of metalwork. Although the focus of the research bid was primarily coin hoards, we also now have two PhD students who are studying respectively Iron Age and Roman metalwork hoards.

Slide 31

This chart summarises the number of hoards from the Bronze Age to 1937. The Bronze Age and Iron Age data has not been analysed in more detail and so just show as a single figure, but all the later data is dated more closely. This is the Roman period (point) and this is the Civil War.

Slide 33 Dave Crisp; near Frome,

Somerset

In April 2010, metal detector user Dave Crisp, discovered a pot containing 52,500 Roman coins while detecting on farmland near Frome in Somerset and it was this hoard that prompted this research project. The archaeological record contained no information about Roman activity on this field, although Dave had found a stray coin of Hadrian and some sherds of Roman pottery.

Slide 34 Siliqua hoard (c. 394)

Silver siliqua of Gratian,

367-83, Mint of Trier

Very rare anonymous half

siliqua of Trier, dated by

Roger Bland to c. 392-4.

Silver siliqua of Magnus Maximus,

383-88, Mint of Trier

Dave Crisp found 73 coins

111 similar coins found in 1867 on

same farm. From the same hoard?

Dave Crisp’s first discovery was a scattered group of 73 late 4th century siliquae: a type of hoard quite common in Britain, but much rarer elsewhere. Subsequent research revealed that a hoard of 111 coins of the same type had been discovered on the same farm in 1867, so perhaps this was another portion of that hoard.

Slide 35 Excavation of the hoard

A little later while searching in the same field he received another response about 100 metres from the findspot of the siliquae. Digging down he uncovered the top of a large pot that turned out to be full of coins. At that point, crucially, he stopped and contacted his local FLO under the PAS. She was able to arrange the archaeological excavation of the hoard, which we see here. Dave Crisp and the farmer were also involved in the excavation - click. Because of the size of the pot and the weight of the coins, it was dismantled in situ – click - and the coins were removed carefully layer by layer in over 80 context bags.

Slide 36

There were 52,503 coins, making it the second largest hoard ever to be discovered in Britain. The coins were almost all radiates of very base silver, dating from 253 to about 290 and there were just five of these very fine silver denarii of Carausius (click).

Slide 37

Number of coins of Carausius in each layer

Plan of excavation (Alan Graham)

The excavation gave us vital evidence about how it was buried. The first point that became obvious is that the pot, which is quite thin, could never have borne the 160 kg of coins – it would immediately have collapsed under the weight of them. So the pot must have been placed in the ground empty and then the coins added to it. Because the coins were carefully recovered in a series of 10 layers or spits – point to diagram – we know that most of the coins of Carausius (the latest coins in the hoard) were more than halfway down the pot – click this diagram shows the numbers of coins in each layer. This means that the coins must all have been placed in the pot on a single occasion. All this has called into question the traditional interpretation of hoarding. If the original owners of this hoard had intended to come back and recover it later then surely they would have buried their coins in smaller containers which would have been easier to recover. The only way anyone could have recovered this hoard would have been by breaking the pot and scooping the coins out of it, which would have been awkward. In addition there is the fact that another hoard of silver siliquae, just 100 years later in date, was buried in the same field. Could this have been a sacred field?

Slide 39

Hoards of 274-96 (Hobbs 2006)

This map, also Hobbs’s Corpus of Late Roman Precious Metal Hoards, shows hoards with a terminal date of 274-96. It is interesting is that now there is a very strong concentration in Britain and much lower numbers elsewhere. Does this mean that Britain was facing unprecedented pressures at this time?

Slide 40 AD 270s onwards:

agricultural output increases

and villas grow

Rockbourne villa, Hampshire

If Britain has a greater concentration of coin hoards of this period than Gaul does, can we assume that the barbarian raids caused even greater destruction on this side of the Channel than on the Continent? The interesting thing is that the archaeological evidence does not seem to support that. The final quarter of the century saw the establishment of many villas which reached their apogee in the first half of the 4th century, and by this period Britain appears to have been one of the wealthiest areas north of the Alps – along with Aquitania in south-west France and the area around the imperial capital of Trier.

Slide 41 South Yorkshire – the Cadeby Hoard

The Cadeby hoard (left) found by

detectorist in 1981, within natural fissure

in limestone bedrock capped with stone

slab. 112 denarii & ant. of AD 194-251,

within small ceramic ‘poppy’ beaker. At

least 10 other coin hoards & other

metalwork such as brooches found at

Cadeby & Sprotbrough, & also at New

Edlington to S (below). Some focused on

natural limestone outcrops.

Also 4 silver

bracelets – two

‘snake’ bracelets,

and two with hinged

fastenings, set with

rough-cut

carnelians.

(Images A.M. Chadwick, courtesy Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery).

So our focus in the hoards project is not only to establish a definitive online inventory of the hoards – we have details of some 3400 and the online database is now being tested and will be released in the summer – but also to understand better the contexts of these hoards and this is the focus of Dr Adrian Chadwick. He has investigated an interesting cluster of 3rd hoards from near Doncaster, which includes the Cadeby hoard, found by detectorist in 1981, within natural fissure in limestone bedrock capped with stone slab. It contained 112 coins going down to AD 251, within small ceramic ‘poppy’ beaker. At least 10 other coin hoards & other metalwork such as brooches found at Cadeby & Sprotbrough, & also at New Edlington to S (below). Some focused on natural limestone outcrops.

Slide 42 The River Don gorge is a dramatic

landscape feature, with Cadeby

visible to the north (top left).

Looking south across the

Conisbrough Viaduct (below), its

scale is apparent. Although both

sides are cut into Magnesian

Limestone, just east of the gorge the

lower, undulating landscape of the

Sherwoood Sandstone begins, and

this was perhaps an older social

boundary too, possibly between the

Brigantes and Corieltauvi.

Cadeby

(https://www.flickr.com/photos/earthwatcher)

(© Roberts, Deegan

& Berg 2010)

(https://www.flickr.com/photos/earthwatcher)

The River Don gorge is a dramatic landscape feature, with Cadeby visible to the north (top left). Looking south across the Conisbrough Viaduct (below), its scale is apparent. Although both sides are cut into Magnesian Limestone, just east of the gorge the lower, undulating landscape of the Sherwoood Sandstone begins, and this was perhaps an older social boundary too, possibly between the Brigantes and Corieltauvi. I hope this gives you a flavour of some of the insights that we expect will come from this project, which runs until next year.

Slide 43 Hackney hoard

I would like to finish by talking about two more recent finds, one of which has an extraordinary story behind it.. In 2007 residents of a block of flats in Hackney were digging out a pond in the garden of their house, when they came on a glass kilner jar containing 80 US $20 gold coins or double eagles. The latest coin dated to 1913.

Slide 44 Bethune Road,

Hackney, as it is

today

The house after

bombing

This was an unprecedented discovery and we started a programme of research into the building where the find was made. This is the building that currently stands there: it was built in the early 1950s, replacing an earlier house destroyed in the Blitz in 1940. We undertook extensive research to see if might be possible to trace past residents to identify who might have buried the coins, but the flats had been used as nurse’s accommodation and married quarters for the police and there were too many possibilities.

Slide 45 Announcement: 14 Oct. 2010

So eventually the coroner opened an inquest on the hoard in order to publicise it to see if any claimants might come forward. No claimants did reveal themselves, but a local historian did contact us with a vital piece of evidence.

Slide 46 Hackney Gazette 14 March 1952

Another hoard, also consisting of US gold coins, had been found in the garden of the same house in 1952 and this is the story in the local paper from the time. The news report said that the earlier hoard was claimed by its owner, Mr Martin Sulzbacher and through some detective work by my colleague Ian Richardson we were then able to make contact with his son, Max Sulzbacher, now living in Jerusalem and through him the whole extraordinary story came out.

Slide 47

Martin Sulzbacher

Max Sulzbacher

Martin Sulzbacher, a German Jewish banker, had smuggled the coins out of Germany when he came to England as a refugee in 1938; he was subsequently joined by his parents, brother and other members of his family. Martin bought the house in Hackney and lived there with his family and he put his coins in a safe deposit box in a bank in the City. In 1940 he had the misfortune to be interned as an enemy alien and was sent to Canada on the ill-fated “Arandora Star” but the ship was torpedoed on the way. Rescued after many hours in the water, he was then sent to Australia on the “Dunera”, an equally gruelling passage. At the end of 1941 he returned to England – having travelled round the world – and, after a spell in internment in the Isle of Man was eventually released. His wife and four children were sent to the Women’s Internment Camp in the Isle of Man. The remaining members of the Sulzbacher family continued to live in the Hackney house. In the summer of 1940 Mr Sulzbacher’s brother transferred the coins from the city safe and buried them in the back garden. At the time the threat of invasion was at its height and the family

feared the Germans would break open safe deposits as they had done in Amsterdam should the invasion be successful. His brother told a family friend what he had done and the friend had asked him to let him know the exact spot in the garden where the coins had been buried. He replied that since there were five family members who knew the spot there was no necessity to reveal the location of the coins. Tragically, on the 24th September 1940, the house received a direct hit in the Blitz and all the five members of the family still in the house were killed. On his release Mr Sulzbacher went to the safe in the city and found that it was empty. The family friend then told him what had happened and so he arranged for the garden – by that stage a bomb site - to be searched but without success. However, in 1952 as work commenced on a new building on the site of Mr Sulzbacher’s house, a hoard of 82 $20 American gold coins dating to 1890 was discovered in a glass jar on the same site. The hoard was awarded to Mr Sulzbacher by the coroner at the time. The coroner resumed his inquest on the second jar of coins on 18 April this year and heard this new evidence and determined that the coins were the property of Martin Sulzbacher’s son Max and his three brothers and sisters. They gave the finders a reward and donated one coin (and the jar) to the Hackney museum; the rest were sold and they used some of the money to restore the family’s graves.

Slide 48 21 December 2014:

The Lenborough hoard

Of course not many finds have such fascinating personal stories attached to them and I end with showing the latest major find to come through the Treasure Act. Four days before Christmas the Finds Liaison Officer (FLO) for the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Bucks was invited to record the finds made by detectorists at a metal detecting rally at Lenborough, just south of Buckingham. Within half an hour of arriving and setting up her recording table, news came that something interesting had been found! As the light went at the end of the day a hoard of more than 5,000 silver coins, wrapped in a damaged lead parcel, had been excavated. The coins had been piled onto a thin rectangle of lead sheet with cut edges. The longer edges had then been lifted and folded over on themselves and the ends pinched together to make an elliptical parcel. Through the damage on the upper surface a tightly packed, jumble of coins could be

seen. They did not appear to have been laid in any order and there was no trace of, or room for them to have been in leather pouches. This was a rescue job and Ros, as our sole FLO at event with about a hundred metal detector users, did a heroic job in the circumstances and ensured that all the coins were recovered. Click The coins are in excellent condition and have been cleaned by in the British Museum and a report prepared for the Coroner by Gareth Williams, Curator of Early Medieval Coins at the British Museum. They are all silver pennies of Ethelred the Unready and Cnut, and it is the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon coins to have been discovered since the Cuerdale hoard of 1839 – most of which was dispersed before it could be recorded.

Slide 49

PAS has had a roller coaster ride since it was founded in 1997. In 2002 the 11 pilot schemes were was within three weeks of being wound down before news of the lottery grant came through which enabled a national scheme to be established. In 2008 our then parent body, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council responded to a cut in its funding by seeking close it down, with the result that we had to launch a public campaign to support it – here is some of the reporting …

Slide 50 PAS saved! (2008)

And that achieved a successful result. In 2011 the Scheme was transferred to the BM which I hoped would provide stability, although we had to transfer responsibility for funding the Scheme in Wales to the Welsh Assembly Government and I am delighted that they have picked it up. Unfortunately, we have not been immune from the cuts that the Museum has had in its Government grant and have just suffered a 6% cut. It was only possible to confirm all the contracts for the 42 posts with the partner organisations which employ them last week and we expect the BM’s Government grant to continue to decline. This will create real challenge to ensure the continuation of the Scheme as a national programme in the future – although the demand for it continues to grow. Thank you very much.