These neckrings would have been difficult to put on and take off, as they’re entirely rigid and 1cm in diameter thickness. Neckrings from other sites have evidence of breaks at the back, where the pressure of squeezing them off and on has eventually snapped the metal. That isn’t the case with the Milton Keynes neckrings – these items were either worn rarely, for very special occasions, or were worn continually like a modern-day wedding ring.
Two of the bracelets are a massive, matching pair of C-shaped bracelets with their ends ground flat; the other bracelet has an octagonal cross-section and curves round into a D-shape. The bracelets are also a relatively common type, but again, the size is what makes them stand out. The C-shaped pieces are 383g and 408g – which perhaps suggests that these were special occasion ornaments, rather than everyday wear.
Life circa 1000BC
We don’t know whether the Milton Keynes Hoard was buried for safekeeping or as a votive offering to the gods. People probably worshipped a number of gods, possibly related to nature and seasonal processes, and some of the monuments that we know about are aligned to Sun and Moon cycles. The majority of people lived a relatively simple agricultural existence in settled villages, surrounded by their crops and animals, but clearly they devoted quite a lot of time and resources to their religious practices.
Before the Bronze Age people were buried in communal tombs, and it’s thought that the emphasis was on the ‘Ancestors’ rather than individuals. The Milton Keynes gold was deposited at the end of the Bronze Age, and life was very different. People were either cremated or buried in individual graves in cemeteries, often with grave goods. Children have also been found with richly furnished graves, suggesting that power and status was passed down through family lineages, as well as being ‘earned’ by efforts in battle or other adult activities.
Valuables as precious as the Milton Keynes Hoard may well have been passed between generations of a family or community. We do know that towards the end of the Bronze Age, there was a downturn in the climate, leading to wetter and colder growing seasons. People may well have been suffering if harvests failed, if there were fewer sources of wild game and if animals weren’t thriving. Bone evidence shows an increase in people with diet deficiencies causing conditions like rickets, and smaller children’s bones with evidence of malnutrition.
As the environment got harsher, territorial tensions increased – around 1000BC there’s the first evidence of large fortifications being constructed, that would eventually evolve into Iron Age hillforts. Perhaps it was a community crisis that meant the gold ornaments were buried – and they were either intentionally or accidentally never retrieved.
Written proof
After the find was made and reported, the landowners disputed that Michael and Gordon had been given permission to search on the land. The Treasure Valuation Committee determined that the detectorists had been searching legally and with permission. Because of the nature of the dispute, the Committee reduced the reward the landowners received. The case highlights why getting agreement in writing before you begin metal detecting is of the utmost importance, for all parties involved.
There are search agreement templates online, and they’re also available from landowners’ organisations like the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and the Country Land and Business Association (CLA). Responsible metal detectors and landowners are always recognised for their input in understanding our past.
See also:
Blair Drummond Hoard
Winchester Hoard
Pegsdon Mirror
An exquisite find from an intriguing burial
Date: 80–20BC, Iron Age
Where, when and how found: Pegsdon, Bedfordshire; 2000; metal detecting
Finders: Anonymous
Official valuation: £35,000
Where is it now? Luton Museum and Art Gallery, Stockwood Discovery Centre, Luton
www.stockwooddiscoverycentre.com
This treasure, a copper-alloy mirror, looks immediately familiar even though it’s more than 2,000 years old. Mirrors from the Iron Age period (dating from around 800BC to the Roman invasion in 43AD) are a peculiarly British phenomenon – more than fifty-five have been found in Britain and Ireland from the Scilly Isles to east Yorkshire, but fewer than ten anywhere else in pre-Roman Europe.
The find
The Pegsdon Mirror was discovered by two metal detectorists in 2000, in an area that had already given up other Iron Age objects. When they got the signal, the detectorists dug down through the plough soil and discovered the mirror lying at the bottom of a shallow pit. Its polished metal face was uppermost, and thirty sherds of pottery and a silver brooch were all in the soil together.
The mirror is made from three parts – the plate, decorated on one side and plain, flat and highly polished on the other; a Y-shaped handle that was riveted to the plate; and two small rings that sit against the plate between the arms of the handle. In total, it weighs 370.7g.
It would have taken many hours to polish the mirror side to a point where it gave an accurate and clear reflection. Nowadays we have machines to aid polishing; back then, it required long, patient hours with increasingly fine natural abrasives.
A compass was probably used to draw out the complicated asymmetrical pattern on the mirror back, and a basketry design has been used to fill in the pattern. It’s from an Iron Age art tradition known as La Tène, often described as ‘Celtic’ art. Iron Age mirror designs use ‘positive’ patterned sections and ‘negative’ empty sections equally. The Pegsdon Mirror decoration is very fine, and the accuracy points to it being the work of a master craftsman.
There’s one point, on the left-hand side, where the engraver hasn’t filled in a triangle with the basket weave design. There’s a small chance that it’s a deliberate ‘signature’, but it’s more likely to have been a mistake.
Treasure
The Pegsdon find was made before the nationwide system of Finds Liaison Officers was set up, so instead the finders contacted Gil Burleigh, the Keeper of Field Archaeology in the County museum service. Immediately, Gil thought the finders must have stumbled across an Iron Age burial.
Even though the mirror was not made of silver or gold, because it was associated with the silver brooch, the whole assemblage fell under the rules of the Treasure Act. The Coroner was informed, and news of the incredible find on the hill was announced.
Gil, helped by the finders, returned to the findspot the following year and fully excavated the site. This was indeed a cremation burial, typical for the region.
The original grave pit had been seriously damaged by decades of deep ploughing, and most of the remaining soil had been dislodged when the detectorists made their first discovery. A small patch of soil hadn’t been disturbed, however, and from it the excavators discovered four more sherds of pottery and a piece of burned human bone. The burned bone had become ‘calcined’ – reduced to its mineral constituents. Calcined bone can still sometimes be dated, but a profile of the person – age, sex and health – can’t be established.
Based on the pottery fragments, there were at least two pots in the grave, and the mirror. The brooch seems to have been one of a pair, linked together with a connecting chain, now lost. Despite an intensive search, the second brooch has never been found.
The burial is within a complex, multi-period site combining enclosures, possible houses, trackways and other graves. We don’t know what the features and structures around the burial were – a lot of the archaeology has been destroyed by ploughing over the years.
It was previously assumed that all Iron Age mirrors were linked to female burials, but we can’t be sure of this. There are no definite cases of mirrors being buried with men, but there are a number of burials that we can’t tell the sex from the remains – including the Pegsdon grave. Assuming that mirrors must be women’s objects says more about our own cultural assumptions than it does about Iron Age culture.
The importance of reflections
; We take glass and polished surfaces for granted now, but besides still water, the only clear reflections available to Iron Age people would have been in polished metalwork. Polished items like the Pegsdon Mirror would have been very expensive, highly prized, and it’s quite possible that access to them, using them, touching them and looking in them, would have been restricted.
We live in a society saturated with realistic images of ourselves – we can always see what we look like from the ‘outside’, and we’re encouraged to care about that image. It’s extraordinary to think that most people in Britain, through history, have lived their lives not really knowing what they looked like. The modern writer Margaret Atwood has said that ‘to live without mirrors is to live without the self’.
The Iron Age is often thought to be a time when people truly embraced being ‘individuals’. Being part of a tribe and focusing on the collective good became less important than personal success and status.
But this mirror may have been much more than a functional looking glass for vanity purposes. Mirrored surfaces allow you to control light, reflect and signal; you can see two ways at once, and perhaps look ‘in’ to somewhere totally different. Fairytales often feature enchanted or magical mirrors that have some kind of spirit within them, have the power to ‘trap’ people or souls, or mirrors that can act as a portal to a different world or dimension.
Perhaps these Iron Age mirrors were primarily for ‘ritual’ purposes – fortune telling or accessing the spirits maybe, rather than doing your hair and make-up. Some mirror burials have evidence that the polished and decorated plate was carefully wrapped in a cloth covering. This is either to simply protect it from scratches, or perhaps to ‘contain’ its power when it wasn’t in use. It’s possible that the brooch found at Pegsdon had been used to cover the mirror in this way.
The Iron Age Britons didn’t write, so we have no first-hand accounts of their practices. These 2,000-year-old mirrors will always retain some of their secrets.
See also:
Ashwell Hoard and the Goddess Senuna
Tanworth Comb
Nesscliffe Ritual Spoons
French Forgery Hoard
7,083 imitation coins under a Hampshire shop floor
Date: 1711, Post Medieval
Where, when and how found: Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire; 2010; discovered under the floorboards of a shop
Finder: Anonymous
Where are they now? Returned to finder
Explore:The history and science of coins
www.royalmint.com/discover
This hoard of coins is a mystery in many ways. They were discovered in 2010 under the floorboards of a shop when the plumbing was being repaired.
The copper-alloy coins are very corroded, with many stuck together, and the painstaking work of cataloguing enough coins to properly identify them fell to Paul Wragg, a student at the University of Winchester, supported by Rob Webley, the local FLO, and others. Paul carefully examined the areas showing the date and mintmarks of 700 coins, a 10% sample. Every single one of the sample coins appeared to be a French 30-denier piece, dated 1711, with a mintmark ‘D’, which represents the city of Lyon, France.
Thirty-denier pieces were only ever minted between 1709 and 1713 under the rule of King Louis XIV, for use in the French colonies of Canada and Louisiana (named after Louis). They were made of 80% copper, with a thin coating of silver. On the front side are back-to-back letter Ls, with a crown above and a ring of fleurs-de-lis. On the reverse is a cross with decorative dots and more fleurs-de-lis. The cross resembles the emblem of the royal guard, and for this reason the coin was known as a mousquetaire – a musketeer.
No other 30-denier pieces have ever been found in Britain, which makes the existence of more than 7,000 in one corroded pile, a bit of mystery.
Expert analysis of the coins suggests that they were all made with the same die (the ‘die’ is the stamp used to press the pattern of a coin into the ‘flan’, the blank disc of metal), but there is unusual variation in the size and weight of the flans used. There is always a bit of variation in stamped coins like this, but there appear to be too many very large and very small coins. The average weight was 3.61g, but two coins in the sample weighed less than 2g. The average diameter of the coins was 25.1mm, but some of the smallest coins were 19mm across.
In the hoard there were also blank flans, cut flans and coins that had been struck off-centre. Most do not have the expected silver coating. The experts have concluded that this is a hoard of forged coins, albeit ones from sophisticated forgers who probably used an official, stolen, die.
We simply don’t know why they were deposited under the floor of a building in Hampshire. Perhaps they were stolen and then the thieves realised that they weren’t of any value; perhaps they’re evidence of a failed English attempt to flood French colonies with fake coins. Forged coins are still a problem – the Royal Mint estimates that three in every hundred £1 coins are fakes, meaning that 44 million forgeries are in circulation at this moment in the UK.
Because the French coins were just under 300 years old when they were discovered and made largely of copper, they weren’t defined as Treasure. Once the PAS recorded the find, the coins were returned to the finders to sell or keep as they pleased. What’s certain is that the coins are worth more now than they were in 1711.
See also:
Chinese Coin Hoard
Rosemarkie Trade Weights
Spanish-American Gold Doubloons
Chalgrove Hoard and Coin of Domitianus
The coin hoard that revealed a lost Roman emperor
Date: 251–279AD, Roman
Where, when and how found: Chalgrove, Oxfordshire; 2003; metal detecting
Finder: Brian Malin
Official valuation: £40,000
Where is it now? Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
www.ashmolean.org
In 1901 a small, rough coin was discovered and shown to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It appeared to be Roman, from the 3rd century AD, but it had the face and name of a unknown ruler on it – Domitianus. The curators took a cautious approach and decided that ‘unknown’ meant ‘unlikely’. An influential scholar in Italy didn’t see the coin himself, but nonetheless dismissed it as a fake. The small, rough coin was recorded with the condemning verdict: ‘of doubtful authenticity’.
It was ignored for close to 100 years, until the discoveries of a metal detectorist in a field in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, gave Domitianus and his coin an extraordinary reprieve.
Brian Malin, a keen detector, unearthed a coarse greyware pot with a hoard of almost 5,000 bronze coins in it, dating from 251–279AD.
Between 260 and 274, Britain was part of a breakaway ‘Gallic Empire’, but was eventually retaken by the ‘official’ Roman leaders based in Italy. More than 200 Romano-British coin hoards have been found from this breakaway era. The war was expensive, lots of soldiers needed paying and more coins were being struck. Ordinary people feared for their safety and valuables, and the economy was suffering. Each coin could buy you less, so people were having to store more – often in the ground. So although the Chalgrove Hoard was special, it wasn’t thought to be extraordinary. Hoards like this might make the local papers, but they don’t normally re-write the history books.
The Chalgrove Hoard reached the British Museum for assessment under the Treasure process. One coin out of the 4,957 coins stood out. The name was unfamiliar for a Gallic Emperor – Domitianus – but a directory of Roman names identified the 1901 ‘doubtful authenticity’ piece. Could this one coin in the new hoard add evidence for the existence of a lost emperor?
Digital images of the French and British Domitianus coins were compared side by side. French and British colleagues agreed – both coins had been stamped from the same die, and they were both genuine.
We don’t know anything else about Domitianus – perhaps his reign was so short that he was never documented by the official Roman historians, and only just long enough to star
t stamping his own coins. He’s now referred to as Domitian II or Domitian of Gaul, so he’s not confused with the better-known earlier Roman ruler Domitian, from the 1st century AD.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford acquired the Chalgrove Hoard for £40,000. But the real reward is that Domitian of Gaul has won his place in history – and that’s thanks to an amateur metal detector and professional specialists working together.
See also:
Anarevitos Stater
Ashwell Hoard and the Goddess Senuna
Marcus Aurelius Bust
The Roman sculpture sat in a fireplace for thirty years
Date: 160–200AD, Roman
Where, when and how found: Brackley, Northamptonshire; 1976; found during farmwork
Finder: John Lewis
Where is it now? Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
www.ashmolean.org
John Lewis was ploughing a field in April 1976 when he felt something ‘clunk’ beneath his tractor. The something was a 16cm-high head and shoulders bust of a man with curly hair and blue glass eyes. It looked unusual, but when John showed it to the landowner, he was told he could keep it. John took the bust to the local museum, who thought that it might be a Victorian imitation of a Roman portrait bust, didn’t want to buy it and told him he could keep it.
‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ lived in the Lewises’ fireplace for thirty years, a quirky ornament and nothing more.
But in 2009, John and his wife Joan decided to take their quirky bust to a Finds Day at Banbury Museum organised by the local Finds Liaison Officer, Anni Byard. When Anni saw their object, she ‘almost fell off her chair’. The half-life-size bust was so perfectly preserved it was hard to believe it wasn’t a fake. But X-Ray Fluorescence testing, which analyses the chemical composition of glass, ceramic and metal, proved its authenticity – it was Roman, made from two kilos of heavily leaded bronze, with deep blue almond-shaped eyes made from glass discs. The glass had been decoloured with manganese and antimony, typical for Roman glass, then coloured deep blue by adding cobalt.
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