The finds liaison officers
John Holt unearths what goes into keeping track of archaeological objects found by members of the public
It was not so long ago that archaeologists and what were known as “treasure hunters” took potshots at each other across the open fields of England and Wales. But deep-rooted disagreements over the often haphazard unearthing of artefacts have largely been replaced by a spirit of collaboration between metal detectorists and historians.
This was fostered 20 years ago by the Treasure Act and the introduction of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) with its army of museum-based finds liaison officers (FLOs) recording interesting discoveries.
Michael Lewis
Head of portable antiquities and treasure, British Museum, London; former finds liaison officer, Kent
“The positions became a little entrenched,” says Michael Lewis of the archaeological community’s attempts to restrict the activities of detectorists in the 1970s and 1980s. “Now, of course, the information they can provide complements other approaches to understanding the past. If they didn’t explore field plough zones and report back to us, a great many important objects would be lost forever.”
The PAS established a code of practice between detectorists, landowners and archaeologists aiming to set some ground rules, Lewis says. “Their activities aren’t regulated, so we’re really appealing to detectorists’ better natures. While there are individuals who pay no attention, vast numbers do and we record around 80,000 findings each year.”
Back in 2000, while looking for his first museum job, Lewis applied for an FLO post in Kent, despite having no experience in that area of work. “These days, interview panels represent the PAS, county archaeologists and local museums, but there was a detectorist on mine,” he says. “I was presented with an array of objects and asked what I made of them. I didn’t have a clue and there’s no hiding place in circumstances like that. Surprisingly, the post was offered to me and I was thrown in at the deep end, as so many of us were at that time.”
Just a year into the job, however, Lewis had a day to remember when a detectorist prised the lid off an old ice-cream container to reveal what he had found in a potato field – the Ringlemere Cup, a bronze-age gold vessel of international importance.
“It had a massive dent in the side where it had been hit by the plough,” says Lewis. “There had been no other evidence that the site was notable, but the discovery went on to reveal a lot of ancient activity, including an unknown Anglo-Saxon cemetery.”
Lewis later found another use for his detecting skills: a five-year stint as a special constable in the Metropolitan Police’s art and antiques unit.
“Although I concentrated on fine art forgeries, I did the police training at Hendon and was involved in all the usual street stuff too. You could, for example, be sent from Scotland Yard to take a statement from an antiques dealer in Mayfair, but if someone had their bike nicked or threw a punch, you were expected to deal with that on the way.
“You couldn’t say, ‘Sorry, I only investigate fake paintings’.”
Anna Tyacke
Finds liaison officer, Cornwall
While many FLOs have a background in field archaeology, Anna Tyacke brought considerable curatorial experience to her role at the Royal Cornwall Museum (RCM), having looked after the collections in Truro for 13 years. “Like a lot of museums, we have lost a lot of specialist posts and I’m not costing too much,” she says. “But as an independent institution, our council funding has been reduced. Trying to defend the archaeological side of things has been difficult.”
Tyacke is assisted by volunteers, some of whom receive specialist training through the lottery-funded Past Explorer programme. Her assistants include a former director of the RCM and an ex-policeman.
Recent important discoveries include the first iron-age coin hoard in the county found since 1749. “We’ve had to go about this one carefully because the finder is a nervous man with a heart condition and the rarity of the find means we’ve had to ensure no details leak out,” says Tyacke.
The museum is trying to raise funds to purchase the hoard, which also features Roman republican denarii coins dating back to the 1st century BC and Armorican (an ancient region in northern France) coinage. This highlights the international trade routes of the time, Tyacke adds.
Another recently discovered hoard comprised 179 Roman copper alloy sestertii coins featuring every emperor from AD69 to AD269. “It looks like it was a curated collection of two centuries of the same coin,” says Tyacke, who also sees many maritime objects.
“There’s a theory that the Romans sent boats full of old coinage they didn’t want to use any more to Britain for use there. But some were wrecked on the west coast of France. A fisherman brought me an amazing Spanish costrel, which is a portable drinking vessel, that he had dredged up off the coast of Brest. Normally, they are made of leather but this one is ceramic and a similar shape to ones found on Armada wrecks, so we’ve dated it to the 16th century.”
Teresa Gilmore
Finds liaison officer, East Staffordshire and North-West Midlands
Based at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Teresa Gilmore’s work takes her to a variety of other locations, including meetings with detecting clubs in country pubs and assisting field units at muddy archaeological sites.
“I also attend open-air gatherings but strong winds aren’t good for recording details,” Gilmore says. “I worked at one where our shelter simply blew away.”
FLOs record a description of the find, its location and dimensions, often referring information to experts for interpretation before returning it to the finder, providing it does not qualify as treasure, she adds.
Detectorists generally have a good idea of what they have got, but some are prone to convincing themselves that what they have found are automatically the finest in all the land, Gilmore says.
“They might bring a medieval coin in and declare it’s rare when it’s obvious that it is run of the mill. Members of the public who reckon they have found stone tools that sit perfectly in the hand are harder to convince. Even when you tell them it’s just a pebble, they are certain they know the whereabouts of Excalibur.”
Gilmore’s patch surrendered the extraordinary Staffordshire Hoard in 2009, a discovery that encouraged a new generation of detectorists into the proverbial field.
“They don’t stay long, mainly because they think they’re going to find gold quickly, which they won’t,” she says. “After a few bags of modern rubbish, they get disheartened and the equipment is thrown in the shed.”
But Gilmore’s admiration for diehard detectorists remains undimmed. “Rain boosts conductivity in the clay soil that we have around here, which tends to produce a better signal,” she says. “But field conditions can be horrendous.”
Dot Boughton
Finds liaison officer, Cumbria and Lancashire
“All FLOs have an area of expertise and mine is Anglo-Saxon metalwork,” says Dot Boughton. “Unfortunately, we don’t get any of that up here. Thankfully, I love artefacts in general and deriving information from them, where and how they were found.”
Boughton’s patch takes in digs, detector clubs and museums across north-west England and her location owes much to the intransigence of the education system in her native Germany.
“I asked my professor in Berlin if I could do something about British archaeology, but the department there was east European-oriented,” she says.
“He told me that there was no future for me there, so I followed my Anglo-Saxon forebears, moved to England, did a master’s at Oxford and now I feel totally at home.”
Boughton admits to feeling a tinge of jealousy when an FLO colleague down south reports a juicy Anglo-Saxon find. “But I reckon that if you have to drive on motorways for your job, my route on the M6 between Kendal and Carlisle is preferable to the M25, so it all evens out.” Her eureka moment came six years ago, when a detectorist showed her pieces of Viking silver jewellery and coins he had found, part of what was to become known as the Silverdale Hoard.
“Unfortunately, the lead container that most of the hoard was in was damaged, so we couldn’t research it properly to get the full background story as to why it was there,” she says.
“We want detectorists to literally drop the spade and ring us when they find something so a site can be excavated properly, but many just can’t resist taking things out of the ground.”
She adds that the most frequent question she gets asked is “What is my find worth?”. “It’s never ‘What does the archaeology or workmanship tell us?’. Finders often don’t like the answer so they ask to see a specialist at the British Museum for a second opinion.”
Adam Daubney
Finds liaison officer, Lincolnshire
“Enviable archaeology combined with lots of arable land make Lincolnshire a hotspot for detectorists,” says Adam Daubney, who relies on two volunteer groups to help him record a phenomenal number of finds.
“My philosophy is that this is a better approach than merely being selective about what you record,” Daubney says. “There are FLOs who might love Romans but do not care that much about Vikings, and they record accordingly. We see so many important objects every week, stuff that adds to the knowledge of existing sites and other things that are completely new.”
People find the strangest things in the strangest places, Daubney says. “A member of the public walking along Skegness beach found what looked like a stone oil lamp in the sand. I realised it had to be ethnographic and research suggested it was a Hindu lingam, an item of worship kept in a personal shrine in a house.
“The local Hindu society said whoever owned the piece probably became unable to carry out worship rituals so the onus was on them to dispose of it in running water to let the gods take care of it. Even though it was only 20 years old and obviously not treasure, it was still fascinating from an archaeological point of view to see how different modern cultures engage with objects. When we see Roman or iron-age artefacts, we tend not to dwell on how people actually related to them.”
Some seemingly modest discoveries can turn into game-changing archaeological adventures. When a detectorist unearthed an eighth-century silver stylus and other objects from a field in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Daubney recognised them as Saxon artefacts usually only found in high-status sites. A full-scale archaeological investigation was launched and the area was declared an important Anglo-Saxon trading site based on an island in the marshes.
“The detectorist was recording everything with GPS, and several years and some 1,000 objects later, we are still finding out more with this invaluable distribution map,” says Daubney. “It’s a real success story for the PAS – without a finder reporting these objects, the place would never have been found.
“These sites are exceptionally rare and difficult to find using traditional archaeological methods as they don’t show up as crop marks or look special in trenches.”
This was fostered 20 years ago by the Treasure Act and the introduction of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) with its army of museum-based finds liaison officers (FLOs) recording interesting discoveries.
Michael Lewis
Head of portable antiquities and treasure, British Museum, London; former finds liaison officer, Kent
“The positions became a little entrenched,” says Michael Lewis of the archaeological community’s attempts to restrict the activities of detectorists in the 1970s and 1980s. “Now, of course, the information they can provide complements other approaches to understanding the past. If they didn’t explore field plough zones and report back to us, a great many important objects would be lost forever.”
The PAS established a code of practice between detectorists, landowners and archaeologists aiming to set some ground rules, Lewis says. “Their activities aren’t regulated, so we’re really appealing to detectorists’ better natures. While there are individuals who pay no attention, vast numbers do and we record around 80,000 findings each year.”
Back in 2000, while looking for his first museum job, Lewis applied for an FLO post in Kent, despite having no experience in that area of work. “These days, interview panels represent the PAS, county archaeologists and local museums, but there was a detectorist on mine,” he says. “I was presented with an array of objects and asked what I made of them. I didn’t have a clue and there’s no hiding place in circumstances like that. Surprisingly, the post was offered to me and I was thrown in at the deep end, as so many of us were at that time.”
Just a year into the job, however, Lewis had a day to remember when a detectorist prised the lid off an old ice-cream container to reveal what he had found in a potato field – the Ringlemere Cup, a bronze-age gold vessel of international importance.
“It had a massive dent in the side where it had been hit by the plough,” says Lewis. “There had been no other evidence that the site was notable, but the discovery went on to reveal a lot of ancient activity, including an unknown Anglo-Saxon cemetery.”
Lewis later found another use for his detecting skills: a five-year stint as a special constable in the Metropolitan Police’s art and antiques unit.
“Although I concentrated on fine art forgeries, I did the police training at Hendon and was involved in all the usual street stuff too. You could, for example, be sent from Scotland Yard to take a statement from an antiques dealer in Mayfair, but if someone had their bike nicked or threw a punch, you were expected to deal with that on the way.
“You couldn’t say, ‘Sorry, I only investigate fake paintings’.”
Anna Tyacke
Finds liaison officer, Cornwall
While many FLOs have a background in field archaeology, Anna Tyacke brought considerable curatorial experience to her role at the Royal Cornwall Museum (RCM), having looked after the collections in Truro for 13 years. “Like a lot of museums, we have lost a lot of specialist posts and I’m not costing too much,” she says. “But as an independent institution, our council funding has been reduced. Trying to defend the archaeological side of things has been difficult.”
Tyacke is assisted by volunteers, some of whom receive specialist training through the lottery-funded Past Explorer programme. Her assistants include a former director of the RCM and an ex-policeman.
Recent important discoveries include the first iron-age coin hoard in the county found since 1749. “We’ve had to go about this one carefully because the finder is a nervous man with a heart condition and the rarity of the find means we’ve had to ensure no details leak out,” says Tyacke.
The museum is trying to raise funds to purchase the hoard, which also features Roman republican denarii coins dating back to the 1st century BC and Armorican (an ancient region in northern France) coinage. This highlights the international trade routes of the time, Tyacke adds.
Another recently discovered hoard comprised 179 Roman copper alloy sestertii coins featuring every emperor from AD69 to AD269. “It looks like it was a curated collection of two centuries of the same coin,” says Tyacke, who also sees many maritime objects.
“There’s a theory that the Romans sent boats full of old coinage they didn’t want to use any more to Britain for use there. But some were wrecked on the west coast of France. A fisherman brought me an amazing Spanish costrel, which is a portable drinking vessel, that he had dredged up off the coast of Brest. Normally, they are made of leather but this one is ceramic and a similar shape to ones found on Armada wrecks, so we’ve dated it to the 16th century.”
Teresa Gilmore
Finds liaison officer, East Staffordshire and North-West Midlands
Based at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Teresa Gilmore’s work takes her to a variety of other locations, including meetings with detecting clubs in country pubs and assisting field units at muddy archaeological sites.
“I also attend open-air gatherings but strong winds aren’t good for recording details,” Gilmore says. “I worked at one where our shelter simply blew away.”
FLOs record a description of the find, its location and dimensions, often referring information to experts for interpretation before returning it to the finder, providing it does not qualify as treasure, she adds.
Detectorists generally have a good idea of what they have got, but some are prone to convincing themselves that what they have found are automatically the finest in all the land, Gilmore says.
“They might bring a medieval coin in and declare it’s rare when it’s obvious that it is run of the mill. Members of the public who reckon they have found stone tools that sit perfectly in the hand are harder to convince. Even when you tell them it’s just a pebble, they are certain they know the whereabouts of Excalibur.”
Gilmore’s patch surrendered the extraordinary Staffordshire Hoard in 2009, a discovery that encouraged a new generation of detectorists into the proverbial field.
“They don’t stay long, mainly because they think they’re going to find gold quickly, which they won’t,” she says. “After a few bags of modern rubbish, they get disheartened and the equipment is thrown in the shed.”
But Gilmore’s admiration for diehard detectorists remains undimmed. “Rain boosts conductivity in the clay soil that we have around here, which tends to produce a better signal,” she says. “But field conditions can be horrendous.”
Dot Boughton
Finds liaison officer, Cumbria and Lancashire
“All FLOs have an area of expertise and mine is Anglo-Saxon metalwork,” says Dot Boughton. “Unfortunately, we don’t get any of that up here. Thankfully, I love artefacts in general and deriving information from them, where and how they were found.”
Boughton’s patch takes in digs, detector clubs and museums across north-west England and her location owes much to the intransigence of the education system in her native Germany.
“I asked my professor in Berlin if I could do something about British archaeology, but the department there was east European-oriented,” she says.
“He told me that there was no future for me there, so I followed my Anglo-Saxon forebears, moved to England, did a master’s at Oxford and now I feel totally at home.”
Boughton admits to feeling a tinge of jealousy when an FLO colleague down south reports a juicy Anglo-Saxon find. “But I reckon that if you have to drive on motorways for your job, my route on the M6 between Kendal and Carlisle is preferable to the M25, so it all evens out.” Her eureka moment came six years ago, when a detectorist showed her pieces of Viking silver jewellery and coins he had found, part of what was to become known as the Silverdale Hoard.
“Unfortunately, the lead container that most of the hoard was in was damaged, so we couldn’t research it properly to get the full background story as to why it was there,” she says.
“We want detectorists to literally drop the spade and ring us when they find something so a site can be excavated properly, but many just can’t resist taking things out of the ground.”
She adds that the most frequent question she gets asked is “What is my find worth?”. “It’s never ‘What does the archaeology or workmanship tell us?’. Finders often don’t like the answer so they ask to see a specialist at the British Museum for a second opinion.”
Adam Daubney
Finds liaison officer, Lincolnshire
“Enviable archaeology combined with lots of arable land make Lincolnshire a hotspot for detectorists,” says Adam Daubney, who relies on two volunteer groups to help him record a phenomenal number of finds.
“My philosophy is that this is a better approach than merely being selective about what you record,” Daubney says. “There are FLOs who might love Romans but do not care that much about Vikings, and they record accordingly. We see so many important objects every week, stuff that adds to the knowledge of existing sites and other things that are completely new.”
People find the strangest things in the strangest places, Daubney says. “A member of the public walking along Skegness beach found what looked like a stone oil lamp in the sand. I realised it had to be ethnographic and research suggested it was a Hindu lingam, an item of worship kept in a personal shrine in a house.
“The local Hindu society said whoever owned the piece probably became unable to carry out worship rituals so the onus was on them to dispose of it in running water to let the gods take care of it. Even though it was only 20 years old and obviously not treasure, it was still fascinating from an archaeological point of view to see how different modern cultures engage with objects. When we see Roman or iron-age artefacts, we tend not to dwell on how people actually related to them.”
Some seemingly modest discoveries can turn into game-changing archaeological adventures. When a detectorist unearthed an eighth-century silver stylus and other objects from a field in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Daubney recognised them as Saxon artefacts usually only found in high-status sites. A full-scale archaeological investigation was launched and the area was declared an important Anglo-Saxon trading site based on an island in the marshes.
“The detectorist was recording everything with GPS, and several years and some 1,000 objects later, we are still finding out more with this invaluable distribution map,” says Daubney. “It’s a real success story for the PAS – without a finder reporting these objects, the place would never have been found.
“These sites are exceptionally rare and difficult to find using traditional archaeological methods as they don’t show up as crop marks or look special in trenches.”