| Treasure in the Field by Mary Chester-Kadwell |
Metal-detecting started to become a popular hobby in the 1970s when lighter and less expensive machines became available. Since then it has become a pastime that enthrals all ages, including children who go out detecting with their families at the weekend, and retired people enjoying the exercise and excitement through the week. At the moment there are probably about 30,000 active detector users in England. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of finds – probably about 400,000 a year!
Finds can be from almost any period in history when they had metal. This means you could find a lead shot ball (from a gun) from 300 years ago, a Roman coin from 2000 years ago, or even a rare Bronze Age axe head from 3000 years ago! The main problem is telling this exciting treasure from all the rubbish, because the soil is stuffed full of bits of agricultural machinery and rusty iron nails. Luckily, that’s quite easy to do because most metal-detectors have what’s called a ‘discriminator’ which can tell whether the metal is iron, bronze, or even gold. But despite that, metal-detecting isn’t really about treasure in the usual sense. It isn’t all gold jewellery and pieces of eight.
Most of the things that detectorists find are broken, rusty or corroded, and quite small, but that doesn’t mean they have little value. All finds have the potential to tell us about where people lived or were buried in the past, what they were doing and why. Artefacts may also be beautiful because of the quality of the craftsmanship or fascinating because they are very different from the modern objects we are used to seeing today. As with many things, the value is in the eye of the beholder.
| Metal-detecting is quite easy to do. It’s possible to buy a metal-detector for as little as £100, though the most expensive ones can be anything up to £800. You just have to have a lot of patience and a strong arm because you might be waving the detector over the land for hours! The hard part is getting permission to use someone’s land, because without that permission you’re breaking the law. In fact, during the 1980s, there was a massive campaign to make metal-detecting completely illegal, as it is in many other countries. This is because some archaeologists considered metal-detecting to be ‘stealing heritage’, and they even suggested detectorists were ‘pillagers’. |  |
It is still true that some people raid fields and even archaeological sites with metal-detectors in the middle of the night, leaving giant holes, and stealing objects. It is very difficult to know how many of these people there are, but they probably number in the thousands. Only a few are ever caught and brought to justice. However there are also many law-abiding detector users who enjoy the discovery of ancient artefacts, learning about history, and having fun together.
All this fuss in the 1980s eventually lead to the Treasure Act in 1996 which, among other things, set up the Portable Antiquities Scheme to make it easier for the law-abiding detectorists to report their objects. There is a Portable Antiquities Scheme Officer for each county, and they borrow objects for recording, making a description and a photograph or drawing available on their online database: www.finds.org.uk. This site can be searched by anyone – try it! This means that everyone can have a chance to enjoy the objects, rather just the person who found it. What happens to the artefacts is then up to the owner, but at least some of the information about the objects will be saved for future generations, because once these finds are gone, they will never be replaced.
It’s thought that in about 30 years time, those archaeological sites that are currently in ploughed fields will be gone, churned up in the soil, scattered and broken down into tiny pieces. No more treasure. The past will be lost. So in a way, the law-abiding metal-detectorists are doing everyone a favour by recovering the artefacts that would otherwise be ploughed away. Some of the most dedicated detector users even work closely with archaeologists to uncover sites such as Anglo-Saxon cemeteries from 1500 years ago in order that they can be properly looked at and recorded. It’s such a shame that, as with all things that promise gold, there will always be those who are only interested in how much they can sell the objects for and will willingly destroy sites to get at them. By stealing these objects they prevent other people from enjoying them. The thieves are so preoccupied with treasure and financial value they forget that other people treasure and value these objects too.
First published in the Streetwise magazine with the theme of ‘treasure’, December 2004
Mary Chester Kadwell website and information