Hoard From Frome: Not The Only One?

I see from the news that the Frome Hoard mentioned here a number of times has been declared Treasure, not really all that surprising. What does surprise me however is another piece of news reported by the BBC.

Mr Crisp found a hoard that was buried in undisturbed archaeological deposits in a pit and was well below the base of the ploughsoil. Despite the fact that an excavation was carried out here, we still know very little about the actual archaeological and landscape context of its deposition, it is still a load of coins in a pot in a hole.

Just after the official announcement was made, in connection with ongoing discussions here about to what degree artefact hunters make finds at random and to what degree they concentrate their searching on sites known from the archaelogical literature to be likely to be "productive", I wrote to the Somerset archaeologists specifically to ask whether this hoard had been found by searching a known Roman site (at the back of my mind is a fuzzy and possibly false recollection that Frome has a villa or temple site).

I received three very nice polite and helpful replies first from Steve Minnitt Somerset County Council and then from the FLO Anna Booth assuring me that this was not the case. That Mr Crisp was just searching a random field. Both assured me that Mr Crisp was searching a field where "nothing" had previously been discovered, that it was a site which produced very few finds, a small amount of pottery, "a few coins" and "very little metalwork", but (Ms Booth pers. comm. 14.07.10) that a siliqua hoard had been found somewhere in the general area in the nineteenth century.

The BBC however reports "Mr Crisp had earlier found a hoard of 60 silver coins in the same field before he discovered the larger pot of coins. That find was also declared treasure earlier", but this is in conflict with what two archaeologists from Somerset County Council, one of whom works for the PAS too assure me, that nothing had been previously discovered here. Indeed Mr Crisp on TV himself protests he'd "found nothing like" a hoard before.

The question is whether Mr Crisp was targetting a site known to have produced important artefacts in the past. The BBC account suggests that not only was he searching an area suspected of producing a coin hoard known from old records, but a site from which he himself had already recovered Treasure. So what is the truth?