Valuable Old Gold Cross Found in Hole (Archaeological Parable)

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From the Gravelston Times:

Amateur archaeologist Trevor Thugwit was headed back to his car idly swinging his metal detector as he went. He had been searching for parts of a crashed World War Two aeroplane that was in this Cambridgeshire field and he was eager to add to his artefact collection. He'd had a hard day, the ground was as dry as a bone and hard, and he has a Minelab GPX 4500 'Site Wrecker' metal detector, "You can find plenty of deep targets'" he said, "but yer don't 'arf 'av t' do a lotta digging!" But he was happy because he had plenty of bits of the plane in his pocket. Just as he was half way to where he'd parked the car, he got a signal, then another a little distance away, but they were just iron signals. Nothing worth digging. He sighed and was just about to pack it in for the day when he got another signal. Faint at first, but as he swung to coil back and forth, 'low and slow', it got clearer. "That's odd", he thought, "sounds like gold, cant be, perhaps its just a bit of the aeroplane's electronics?" He says he hesitated whether to dig or not, he was dying to get home as the match would be beginning soon. Nevertheless he got out his digging tool. Trevor prides himself on digging neat round holes and putting the sod back neatly so he dug a narrow hole. He got out his pinpoint probe. Deeper. He had to widen and deepen the hole three times before he found the source of the signal. By this time it was beginning to get dark, but as his digging tool scraped over it, some 60 cm down, Trevor saw the unmistakeable glint of gold. He pulled it out of the hole. "[I] Couldn't believe it", he said, "blinking big piece of gold wannit?" After rubbing the dirt off with his sleeve, Trevor saw it was a fairly well preserved Anglo-Saxon garnet and gold cross with a loop. He swept the area around the hole again, but nothing, apart from the many iron signals, which of course he ignored.

Last week, the cross, which - in the view of experts - could be worth a staggering 600 000 pounds was declared Treasure at a coroner's inquest, the reward money will be shared with the landowner. Although Mr Thugwit paced the distance of the findspot to the place he parked the car, when the local archaeological unit did a one-metre by one meter excavation at the spot he indicated, they did not find Mr Thugwit's hole. Nevertheless, the Portable Antiquities Scheme Finds Liason officer Fionella Sloane-Squarr says that the fact that the excavation produced only prehistoric pottery and the object "came from the ploughsoil", suggesting this was a chance loss. Ms Sloane-Squarr says this find is important new evidence of the Dark Ages, "it shows not only that the Dark Ages happened here in Cambridgeshire, but also that by this time the British were Christians, or at least knew what a cross looked like". She said only five other crosses like this were known, and said this was yet another vindication of the value of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

The Staffordshire Hoard, a glittering treasure from the world of Beowulf – more than 1,600 pieces – was found by amateur metal detectorist Terry Herbert in Staffordshire farmer Fred Johnston's field in early July 2010, changing both men's lives forever. The hoard has been valued at £3.3m by the independent experts of the Treasure Valuation Committee. It seems the key to helping the experts throw new light on the now-less-Dark Ages and getting rich quick is to go out and buy a metal detector.

Maeve Kennedy, 'Cross and bed found in Anglo-Saxon grave shed new light on 'dark ages'...', Guardian Friday 16 March 2012 (source of photo and link to video)

[PS... For those who do not "get it", the shiny ooo-ahhh gold thingy is in the parable hoiked out by "metal detecting" from its context in undisturbed archaeological layers but in a way which makes retrieval of the context (a grave with a bed) impossible to determine. The fictional detectorist - like many of his real-life fellows - does not dig the 'iron' signals, thus missing the bed. This sort of thing is happening ALL THE TIME when detectorists are highly rewarded and praised for pulling such "Treasures" out of their findspot. There is no archaeological logic in that. What a mess the Brits are in. Still at least the journalist did not this time discuss the reward the finders would get - because they do not, these people ARE indeed the ones "doing it for the history", to get the history that artefact hunters too frequently destroy and discard]