Gold, Garnet and the Treasure Act: a new acquisition and some essential guidance

Description: KAS Honorary Curator Dr Elizabeth Blanng unveils a significant addition to the KAS Collection, an item of Early Medieval jewellery which has been recovered from private ownership. Se will be discussing the significance of the object with Kent Finds Liaison Officer Jo Ahmet, a specialist in this particular period. Jo goes on to explain how the Treasure Act applies to ojects that are found whether through metal detecting, excavation, mudlarking or just randomly walking in a field or in your garden. This is a must watch for anyone considering what to do with their historical objects. Thanks for supporting our work on educating the public on the archaeology and history of Kent You can join the KAS by visiting the website and clicking the 'Membership Form' button or contact our Membership Secretary https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/join-kas To contact Elizabeth: elizabeth.blanning@kentarchaeology.org.uk To contact Jo: flo@kent.gov.uk @kent_finds And don't forget to buy Jo's book 50 Finds from Kent: https://www.waterstones.com/book/50-finds-from-kent/jo-ahmet/9781445697826 Thumbnail image credit (Elham Cross): Lloyd Bosworth

Transcript: hi good evening everyone welcome to the kent archaeological society monthly online talk it's a great pleasure this month uh to be joined by my colleague elizabeth dr elizabeth banning um and she has been a trustee of the kent archaeological society for a number of years elizabeth just said a few words about her studied music at the royal holloway college at the university of london and then after some years in tokyo she returned to the uk where she embarked on an archaeological degree at the university of kent part-time with a ba and an m.a and then graduating with a doctor in classical and archaeological studies in 2015 and her thesis was landscape settlement and materiality aspects of rural life in kent during the roman period and this actually won the kent archaeological society has to prize today she will be talking um with joanne um who she will introduce in a little bit about one of the well currently uh potential acquisitions of the kent archaeological society collection we have an extensive collection she will say something about that as our curator our honoree curator this is an item of early medieval jewelry which is going from private ownership um hopefully to the ken archaeological to go on display as part of our collection um and she as she will introduce will be talking to ken feins liaison officer joe ahmed so i will now hand over to elizabeth this talk is one of the series that ken arcological society is doing uh we exist and have existed for many decades to encourage wider research and education and understanding of the historic archaeology and the kind of history of kent the ancient county of kent and we would really welcome your engagement if you're not members to think about becoming members and also to follow us online we'd really really be happy and keen to extend uh our network's membership and so we're really really grateful for those who are not members um tonight to consider that and for those who are members it's a very warm welcome to you so now i will um pass over to dr elizabeth planning thank you very much hello and a very well welcome for me as well uh joe and i are going to talk to you tonight about treasure and i feel i should say at the outset um that although this was built as a curator talk joe for very good reasons is going to do most of the heavy lifting uh you'll see why later um the reason that we're going to talk about treasure as kerry has indicated is that in fact this is breaking news we are not in the process of acquiring we now actually officially do own um a significant and very interesting recently discovered item of medieval jewellery um the confirmation came through this afternoon so i was very pleased about that as many of you all know the society already has an important collection of early medieval artifacts these are mostly from the cemeteries at biphons sar and liminge and i'm sure many of you will have seen items from this collection on display in mason museum now the object we're going to be talking about tonight was found by a metal detectorist paul haig and i believe paul is with us tonight so welcome paul um paul reported it to the possible antiquities scheme and it duly went through the treasury process so at this point i would really like to thank paul for making sure that this piece of kent's history and archaeology was saved and made available for study and eventually we hope for display and as i expect durable talents this hasn't always been the case with similar items in the past so the item is a pendant it's a cross it's made of gold set with garnets it's a type of artifact which is well recognized but not particularly common and it is i think quite an important class of artifacts which has a lot to tell us about society at the time it was made but having picked it up and called it treasure and telling you it's important and uncommon i'm not going to say don't be disappointed when you see it's also extremely incomplete i expect some of you may have seen in the papers recently piece of research that said the secrets of happiness is to lower your expectations um and that's been one of my rules of life a long time and i can assure you it works so lower your expectations and prepare to be wild this is the cross and now as you can see if you put this down to your friendly neighborhood early medieval jeweller all he'd give you would be scrap value but for archaeologists treasure isn't found in gold it isn't found in jewels it's found in what an object can teach us what does it tell us about its owner about the person who commissioned it the person who made it how it was made where the raw materials came from the trading connections these imply what does the biography of the object sellers what was its journey from the craftsman's bench to its eventual destruction in this card what did it say about society at the time as archaeologists we study people but through the lens of the objects that they left behind like this one so this beautiful but very damaged object actually holds a whole treasure house of information far beyond its intrinsic value as gold and garnet and joe will unpack this for us later now i was so glad that jojo agreed to present tonight because he's not only our local flow he's a specialist in early medieval jewellery and his research focuses particularly on garnets so he's ideally and suited to interpret this find now when i first saw this image my first reaction was wow the second was what a shame it's so damaged my third thought as the kasq was if that were whole we could never afford it and finally i thought it would be lovely to be able to see it as it was originally and so i put some thoughts into how we could have a reconstruction knee first of all i was looking at having the possibility of having a copy made by a jeweler who specializes in replicas of ancient pieces but there were some problems with that idea not least in replicating the shape of the central garnet and that as we will hear is significant so then i thought of my talented friend mr lloyd bosworth and i should perhaps mention here that we've also just welcomed lloyd as a new trustee of the ks now some of you might have seen that wonderful turning 3d model of the bridge helmet on the canterbury roman museum website well that's one of his creations so who better i thought to approach to see if we could get a replica of the ellen cross and this is the result which i think you'll agree is absolutely stupendous i am so grateful to lloyd it's a good thing he enjoys doing things like this because i can't begin to imagine how many hours or days he put into this on his own time i might said and i know from the correspondence we've had over the last weeks that it certainly has been a lot and i owe him more than a few drinks so here it is alongside the original and this reconstruction is informed by other examples of of similar items and in particular across found at fernando near maiston which i'm sure joe will speak about later and lord has also done a second reconstruction to show how it might have been worn as part of a composite necklace now obviously we don't know that it was if it was worn like this there is an example in the british museum of across on a similar necklace although they might actually have been two separate items we don't know um but it's quite nice to flesh the image out so to speak although i believe the flesh and the clothing actually caused lord an awful lot more trouble than reconstructing the cross itself and i'm really rather lucky that he's still speaking to me right so that's a basic introduction to the cross and in due course i'm going to hand over to joe to talk in more depth about it but before that i wanted to take the opportunity to ask him some questions about the journey that this object took from when it was found to the ks acquiring it and about the treasure process in general because most of us don't have direct experience on it and as you might know there are changes of books so welcome joe um it's very nice to have you here this evening and i'm very very grateful for your participation in all of this um so do you want to start i think you prepared some slides to illustrate the things we're discussing so if you want to start sharing so yeah well um thank you for having me and i'm looking forward to the questions both from you elizabeth and from our audience as well as getting to talk about this fantastic object okay joe so just to begin with um how long have you been our flow oh um officially since i think june 2017 right so you've been with us quite a while now right and the first thing i knew about about this cross was when i got one of the occasional emails i get from you saying please can we speak urgently um but um so could you fill in something a bit of the background and tell us something about how this discovery was actually made and about how you first came to hear about it yes so as the kind of day-to-day uh running of the pas and ken i spent a lot of time answering emails and uh just happening to check one of my emails from the finder saying oh i think i've got a bit of anglo-saxon gold here and i was like okay often i get emails like that and it's not what uh what is suggested or it's something else or not gold but as soon as i saw this image which the finder took and had sent to me um straight away just looking at that kind of beautiful twisted gold wire filigree and those garnets i knew he knew exactly what he'd found um and that was at the beginning of february 2018. um unfortunately we haven't got any pictures of it in the field often we have a picture of the finder showing off to the camera um but in this case there was a rather i think quite a brutal hailstorm going on and so it was a question of making sure both the finder and the object got back to their car safely um so it was found in the parish of ellum this is one of the largest parishes in the county which is the only reason i'm saying its name because as it's so large it'll be difficult to track down exactly where the fine spot is and obviously we have considerations about protecting that fine spot um paul emailed me where we found it and we made sure we had all the information to report to the coroner which is part of the treasure process which i'm sure we'll get to and then we just have to arrange handing it over to me so okay so what happened next what so what are the processes that something like this has to go through and how does the value get put on it so the treasure process can be quite long and i have a set of all set of slides hopefully that will show off how this is so it's split roughly into four phases there's the first stage which is the initial reporting which is making sure we've got all the information that we need to get it legally reported to the coroner so this includes the fine spot when the object was found so the coroner can see that the finder got in contact with them or indeed me within the 14 days allotted under the treasure act the finders details and the landowner's details as well as any occupied that may be present this is then sent to the british museum where they issue what's called a treasure number in this case it's 2018 uh oh off top of my head i comment what the rest of the the number is um but i'm sure it'll pop up again uh and then we enter the kind of bare bones of this information onto the port volunteer christie's schemes publicly accessible database the next stage is uh writing the official report on the object this will be a report that is either written by the curators of the british museum or approved by the curatorial staff of the british museum and this fulfills the element of the treasure act to kind of prove that the object is a treasure in this case i wrote the report and submitted it to dr sue brunning the early medieval curator at the british museum who approved it uh with very few alterations the next stage and this is what the final uh database uh entry for the cross looks like so this is all visible on the ps database and is effectively a carbon copy of the treasury report that is submitted to the curatorial staff the next phase is stage 3 which is the local interest this is the stage in which we look uh to discuss the acquisition of the object with local institutions these institutions generally have to be accredited by the museum's association uh which means in kent we have quite large gaps across the county in terms of coverage because most museums have a set um acquisitions area or a particular um period that they're interested in so for me today it's the early medieval for canterbury it's um canterbury district as a whole dover it's doping district and uh the bronze agent is kent so for the lm cross in this phase maidstone museum initially expressed in interest which means we then go on to the final phase which is the outcomes now this is split in two which is uh no museum interest in which case the crown's interest which oversees the treasure act is disclaimed or there is interest with which means the case goes to a formal inquest with the coroner who decides whether the object is legally treasure and whether or not it should go on to be valued um and then the museum requested to pay this valued uh valuation um the coroner makes the decision based on evidence provided by myself and or the curatorial staff at the british museum although the landowner and the finder are allowed to add anything that they wish to at that stage as well as uh the treasure evaluation committee which is part of this last phase and this is how evaluation is put on an object so the archaeological importance of the object is considered the completeness or condition of the object and this decision is made by a group of academics curators members of the antiquities trade and in also um other learned members so i think lord renfrew is still on the treasury evaluation committee um there is an agreement reached within the committee and then this uh price effectively is sent to the museum saying this is how much we've agreed would you now raise the funds to pay for this object and unfortunately in this case mesa museum were not able to um uh fulfill the valuation and so it moved towards being disclaimed after which point um i tried other museums so the british museum and i then came to ken archaeology society as a important local heritage body once it was clear that no accredited museum was able to purchase it um so and i think that we use the tvc valuation for uh kas to um uh agree a price with uh on the object okay thank you that's great we've just had a communication actually from uh jillian to say that the parish name is pronounced elim not ellen which is something we were discussing yesterday yes the actual pronunciation should be i had been pronouncing it for quite a long time and then but somewhat bamboozled with our discussions yesterday which is um well there's one of the great things about ken is we do have some excellent um uh parish names like bouton malibu which i still can't pronounce yes absolutely trustly yes um so joe we keep talking about treasure but um what exactly is the definition of treasure um and lots of people i think still talk about things that are the treasure trove but i'm i think that's not a term that we actually use now is that right yeah so what is treasure yeah that's exactly right so treasure trove is an interesting one as it's still colloquially used by a lot of people but it's also not entirely to say that it isn't relevant and we'll get to exactly why that is so in 1996 the treasure treasure trove laws were entirely rewritten as the treasure act and this specified that any object over 300 years old which is our first thing um and precious metal was to be considered treasure so we've got silver in this case a silver annular brooch or gold so we have these two lovely rings here one of them being medieval which is the top right and the bottom one is the uh momentum moreover in commemorating jane brodnax which is now in the heritage center at god motion park and that one's really interesting because it's connected to a person uh that we have historic records for the other particular common group are groups of precious metal coins so this is gold or silver in groups of two or more so you know gold's quarter status like in the bottom left or hammered what is referred to as hammered silver medieval coins like this group in the top right also it's a mixture of medieval and post medieval coins there uh and these have to be found in close association now the trick here comes with what counts as close association and it is dependent on where you are geographically in the period of time so if you have a medium size filled with two gold iron age coins at either side there's a fairly good chance the curated the british museum will say they probably relate to each other their similar date and go through if you've got a medieval market site with lots and lots of silver coins scattered across it there needs to be a much clearer association between the coins that i potentially treasure and that is part of the treasury report writing process is to make the argument to the coroner as to why these would qualify the other group is based metalcoin so here we have the thurnum horde which is a group of iron age cast potent bronze units and this is a really good example of a group of base metal coins of 10 or more again this can be tricky for roman sites uh because you will have a roman villa site or similar roadside site with huge scatterings of bronze coinage and you have to have really clear indication as to why they're related in this case there's a nice part of coins found roughly in the hole with uh quite with a few actually quite a lot scattered in the other area but they are all very similar related types with this dense concentration so in the beginning of the 2000s it was realized it was being realized that objects were being missed important objects a particular note was groups of prehistoric metal work such as bronze axe hordes like we have two here and so it was decided that uh but the treasure act was amended to include groups of two or more base metal objects of prehistoric date and this is effectively prior to the roman conquest now there is some recent um interesting interpretations of this lord because obviously the romans show up in kent in 1843 but they weren't in northern northern bristol by that point so there is or northern what is now northern england um at this point and so exactly when prehistoric is is again down to the report writing and the decision of the coroner in some ways so this is a great example of a prehistoric uh metal work this was reported to myself and we were able to go out and because the finder had left uh the symbols that he could detect under the top soil in situ we were able to go out with a group of volunteers from the sean woods team and andrew mayfield the community archaeologist for kent and excavate them and we recovered 18 in total but they are very varied so in this group we had a very homogenous board of axes we have mixtures of scrap objects and other hordes ingots or even very odd depositions we had one horde that went well one group of objects that went through the treasure act that were from a group of pits that were into cutting but at the bottom of each one was a single paste at pow stave and here is one of those other oddities which is a group of plate metal which taken to lebron's age the other group of objects are those associated with treasure finds so the treasure act specifies if there's any objects associated with the object that classifies as treasure this would also be treasure and this ranges from you know ceramic vessels containing a horde in this case a bronze age plate horde within a pot or base metal objects found with them so we have a great assemblage here from the anglo-saxon period so we've got a lovely silver buckle and belt fittings keystone garnet disc brooch we've got uh gilding uh garnets and white inlay and then the base metal proper alloy buckle and together they form one treasure case now trove so trove isn't entirely gone anything that would have been covered by trove that isn't currently covered by the treasure act would still count as trove so this is basically groups of precious metal that has been hidden with the intent to recover i think the most famous one in recent years is the so-called piano hoard where a group of early oh well uh late 19th to early 20th century gold sovereigns were found hidden under the keyboard of this piano and that would that qualifies as trove as clearly someone or apparently someone was intending to retrieve this gold and never was and never was able to and no uh owner can be just uh discovered i don't know why i keep losing thank you joe that was really interesting and very very helpful i think um i believe the um the treasure act is currently being revived um there's certainly there's a consultation went out recently um what changes do you think we're going to see so that's a difficult uh question to answer um mainly because it went out to consultations so the archaeologist got to suggest one thing the academic's got to suggest another thing metal detector spots is just another thing museum's got to uh got to suggest another thing one of the suggestions and this is the one that is causing most interest for me in kent is single gold coins from the roman period to roughly the 13th century now for many parts of the country this wouldn't be a huge um addition to their workload but i see maybe two uh gold roman coins a year often an anglo-saxon or early medieval premises which is another gold coin and one medieval gold coin and it might be that this would increase my workload of treasure by upwards of 10 percent in a year um so just depends on how many i have fine so could be a significant increase for me um and there have been other attempts to make sure important objects like the crosby garrett helmet which is this amazing roman cavalry helmet uh that was found are protected for the public now exactly how that is done is currently still being debated and the dcms which is obviously you know uh has to try and take all of this on board has tried to come up with a way of dealing with this and there is oh if it's worth ten thousand pounds but obviously there is you know an object that comes out the ground is not likely to be worth that directly but could be after it's been conserved how is how we how as the flow is meant to know how much it's worth and that kind of thing so it's it's it's an interesting process we'll have to see what they do um one of the other main things is to try and streamline the process so trying to make the treasure act process a lot faster a lot easier to go through currently there's quite a lot of backwards and forwards in between the flows the finders the coroners the british museum and where they tried to find some way of making this a bit easier for everyone involved so we have to see what happens currently they're still the government is still kind of mulling over what to do about it really and i think with covid and various political things going on they've had other things to distract them indeed indeed um that's been a lot of quite detailed information thank you very much joe um but so could we just sort of summarize this if some general advice if we find something that we think falls under that what should we do so the treasure act specifies if from the point of which you suspect something might be treasure you need to notify the coroner within 14 days of you suspecting its treasure in reality in kent the coroner will direct you straight to me anyway um so it's best to get in contact with me and we'll contact the partner and generally as long as i've got all the information within that 14 days we can get it processed all okay now it doesn't necessarily mean the object has to be with me within those 14 days but it does need to get to me within a reasonable time obviously with covid that hasn't been able to um be as simple um but you know as long as we've got all the information we have a picture of the object we've got a record of it we can start processing it and that's the important thing and does this uh for those of us who are involved in field work does this apply to items found on excavations as well yeah so this is one of the things i think some field archaeologists often forget is this does apply to them um this is both in terms of commercial community and kind of academic digs and you'd be amazed at how many uh particularly commercial units um perhaps um only realize an object is treasure a couple of years down the line once they're processing their post-dates now in reality a lot of units so like uh have particular fine staff the the responsible treasure person and often those units do have those treasure people are the people that always have them there on time they notice them really quickly and they make sure the flow's aware now the difference in this situation is that what happened who writes the report and what happens to the object we as archaeologists we don't want to disrupt uh kind of a site um site archive so it's usually hoped that the agreement between the diggers the the field unit or the those carrying out the excavation is that all objects found will be deposited with the site archive regardless of whether or not they are treasure so in this case the uh the object if it was treasure would be what we call disclaimed to the archive so it will just be sent back to the archive and deposited with that whether wherever it ends up um this isn't always the case and there are some long running cases which i shan't mention um that there is been uh some uh discussion about what happens to the object now um the other point is about report writing so often the units will produce a report on the object as part of their final postdecks and just kind of cut it out and send that to the british museum for approval um and and yeah and they publish their own reports that way um i haven't seen any of them be particularly edited by the curatorial staff which is usually a good sign um but yeah obviously the curator staff at the british museum are um the people responsible for signing off on reports so reports may get changed and can you clarify what happens about rewards um who gets these is it just automatic that the finder and the landowner get a 50-50 split so if the object is acquired under the treasure act that is what the treasure act is set up to do if the object is disclaimed returned to the landowner the finder or the tenant depending on what their prior agreements are it's entirely down to them how they split the objects or if they were unfortunately to sell the objects on the open market how they split that money but uh the kind of treasure act does kind of define i think i've got a bit on that yes define the kind of 50 50 split obviously we're you know as archaeologists we also want to see objects in the museums um so they can be lovely displayed this is a particularly great example of a whole a horde of late roman silver or the canterbury horde which is on display um bit before the treasure act but i think it's a great example of uh how it's being displayed um there can be uh mitigating circumstances on how much the award is paid to the landowner or the finder depending on their actions so if best practice wasn't followed if the finder didn't have direct permission if the tenant didn't have permission if and best practice could be everything of making sure it's reported on time to making sure in-situ archaeology isn't disturbed uh making sure you know you abide by other kind of agricultural you know things such as uh stewardship countryside stewardship uh you know rspb sanctions as well on the land so if there's rare nesting birds if you've gone on detecting there and you find something that might be taking into consideration as well okay it's interesting um i'm wondering about the scale of all this joe um how many treasure cases have you dealt with do you think since you've been our flow so i haven't done a full total but we do have numbers so this is something that i had to put together recently actually um to work out how many treasure cases we're getting kent now this the the treasury cases for 2020 and 2021 there is obviously a significant limitation that's because of covid and there is some late reporting of objects because of this um but these are all the ones that have been reported from the county over the last five-ish years we frequently place in the top uh group of counties for the number of treasure cases reported and frequently within the top three of those only have one flow as some counties have more than one um and therefore a little bit easier for them to process and do all of their jobs um 2017 was a bit of a trial by fire for me as it was the year i started being on the flow full time we had 81 treasury cases which put us i think number three or four i think we're only four or five behind number three in the country um that included nine bronze age hordes i think five of which came out of one weekend which ks hopefully or members of ks hopefully dealt with and have done so as further research off which is the battlesmith group but we've had consistent consistent increases um which obviously put pressure on me and the coroner's service um and we've recently been awarded some funding uh to recruit a treasure intern to help deal with this and uh this includes writing up site reports for you know uh treasure cases where we've had to go out and do excavation work um i couldn't tell you how many treasure cases i've dealt with in total as i've assisted uh other flows with treasure from their area and i was actually my predecessor's intern from and volunteered from 2014 and i was indeed helping them with treasure cases then as well thank you thank you that's uh yes it's quite something to think about and it's it's fantastic to hear that actually we've got extra funding to deal with to help to deal with this um i'm wondering do you um have any favorites amongst the the case you've dealt with was anything that you'd like to highlight is particularly interesting or unusual yeah i mean the treasure cases that often stick in my mind are ones that for better or worse have been complicated those that particularly have a particular resonance so they're connected to historic people we've been able to track down or even those that pertain to my particular interests which are kind of object biography and also as we've mentioned garnet and early medieval jewellery this is a particular recent one which comes from the isle of sheppy which is the east church ring i've managed to misspell each church there never mind um which is a beautiful late 15th early 16th century hybrid of iconographic kind of religious ring and a signet ring um the bull's head is a very interesting symbol especially being found at east church as it does have connections with the berlin family although this symbol is also associated with many other families that have bull in the tiles so ball and various other family names like this because they were really into their puns at the time um and this one hasn't been the this kind of sydney hasn't been found on any impressions from the berlin family so probably possibly not them but it's a nice thing to think about particularly as the family had connections with each church this which is fragments of the linen bucket which is um a oldsford swallowing type bucket which is from the iron age it's just found with another bronze vessel and there's also the uh the only example which i'm afraid that our full images from this still haven't happened but as if we could look at the right plate there's a horse's head towards the left and then a of fan-shaped tail and it's actually the uh only representation of a hippocamp or seahorse in latin art anywhere in europe other than on coins and those coins are found in kent so it's an interesting little association and the bucket itself has lots of repairs on so there's a pair of these kind of figurative heads uh on each side and uh unfortunately i have got a picture of the one that i'm not going to be talking about but the other one this one has been repaired so this bucket had quite a long life um this is the hall place horde which is the horde we saw earlier and this was just a great example of everything being done right with the fight um unfortunately a lot of bronze age hawks are found plowed out or partially plowed out and people get quite carried away from them so we don't always get to see them dug archaeologically so it was really great for the finder to have stopped looked at the two power staves he had from the plow soil seen that he had signals further down took a picture of everything and emailed the flow and we were able to get our archaeological excavation out to go and look at this and we learned all kinds of stuff with this uh power stay uh ford including how cold it was possible for archaeologists to work in before their brain stopped working as we were trapped in the middle of a snowstorm towards the end of the day for this one um but luckily we were had uh uh sophie adams came to the rescue late on the day and was able to help us do the final bit of lifting and uh was able to do a kind of mini excavation once we block lifted the final components of this horde to if we can see the picture on the right is one of the axes and we can see really see the edge surviving there so it's a great example this is just been uh acquired by canterbury uh museums this is a very rare roman magic amulet uh which is formed by two uh pieces of sheet gold pressed together and has kind of protective symbols around and attacking the evil eye which is in the middle so i think the only thing we can see really clearly of all these is the scorpion which is a kind of nine o'clock which is attacking evil eye but there's other things on there there's a thunderbolt uh there's an elephant there's a wind phallus and various other kind of what we call a portrait or magical symbols that the romans considered would bring a lot luck and fight off the uh evil eye and then finally this is another group of anglo-saxon material which is actually in the collection of ks um and this unfortunately was part of just a grave disturbed by the finder but it was just uh this broach this square-headed approach that made up part of the assemblage was just it's just one of my favorite objects i've ever seen it's got that beautiful big mask of a dragon on and i just i i just kind of adore it that is yes this is wonderful um so obviously we know that this one has come into the chaos collection what what's happened to all these other treasure cases um you i think you've alluded to this already but you know how easy has it been to find suitable homes for them i don't think any of us really we don't really like to think of these bits of our heritage being sold off his private hands but we know that our museums are under bay severe constraints i think obviously i can't go into any separate museums and talk about how they're dealing with it but i think one of the things that is quite telling is even years where we've only got maybe you know 40 or 50 cases in a year we're possibly only looking at between five and ten percent of those going into collections now it's really important they're still recorded with the pas so at least there's a permanent record of them but you know there's you know potentially internationally important pieces nationally important pieces even regionally important objects that are just not getting into collections now some finders uh very kind and landowners kindly donate objects and this is you know significant loss of money for them um sometimes the objects are quite badly battered so it's you know they're slightly cheaper for museums but there is a real problem with this and i think it's a problem we've seen nationally um and obviously the other point is we don't have a full museum coverage of the county so there's large swathes of the county particularly in places like swale where there is no museum accredited that we can offer treasure cases to and even if there was there's a fairly good chance they won't be able to afford to it's not always that the funds couldn't be raised but it's also man hours curatorial staff have to make sure their collections are being presented well make sure their collection's surviving you know and all the other jobs that go along with it so looking at to do funding applications to an objective treasurer which might need a kind of six month turnaround in the kind of funding bid might not be viable for them and that's something that you know we'd hoped the treasure would take into consideration but it's it's it's one of those things that can be quite heartbreaking um particularly you know if you get things like this group of objects here which almost didn't find at home indeed yes it's almost a case of being a victim of your own success isn't it yeah i mean that was one of the things that the pas has done in general is particularly for counties like ken and other south eastern counties like essex hampshire you know we're we're high populations high density of archaeology and only one flow and so there's only so much we can get recorded outside of treasure um and you know so there's always gonna be a lot of data and there's always just gonna be a lot of people out there finding things i should say not all of our objects are found by metal detectors we do find stuff by mud locks i've had numerous gold uh rings found in people's you know back gardens or you know things like that so it's just a metal to tetris yeah well thank you joe i'm i think i'm conscious of need to move on really i'm sure there'll be some more questions for you and so just a reminder if you do have questions to use the question and answer function at the top of your screen but uh so i know i'd like to ask jose to talk in more detail about the elon cross itself thank you yeah so i i have to admit when i first saw this cross i was kind of gobsmacked and so a lot of my discussions on it can get a little bit passionate so you'll have to forgive me if i go off too much on how much i like the object so obviously when you're looking at a stray find like this you want to look at where it's come from within the landscape and obviously i can't talk too much about that because we need to kind of protect the fine spot itself what i can say it's on the top of a chalk ridge way um with um overlooking uh valley although you don't think you can directly see that from where it was found but we've got very distinct geography archaeologically speaking we haven't got anything clear within the immediate area and uh the the parish as a whole while it has produced some sporadic early medieval material of a similar date indeed some quite quite impressively um what would what people would term high status material we're not seeing anything that wouldn't really be unusual for east kent so we now have to think about how the object fits the kind of wider metal work and object types of the period one thing that i should bring up though is one of the few objects that was found nearby was this tiny little squashed piece of gold which is in fact another part of a uh anglo-saxon necklace and actually if we look at the reconstruction that was done we can see some of these little bullet pendants placed and this was found only a filled away from the inland pendant and i only realized that when i was researching this uh power uh this this presentation so it you know although we can't say for certain it's very possible that this could have been associated whether or not with occupation with unknown cemetery or even with a kind of single necklace itself now what i find quite interesting with the enum cross this fragment and the reconstruction is when we look at the desperate necklace which i believe elizabeth mentioned although not by name we can start seeing how some of these necklaces may have been now the desert necklace wasn't uh was found in the ninth er the 19th century and the exact position of all these elements within the grave are not known so we don't know if it was one necklace or two necklaces or how it was strung around the body what we do know is it was in the grave of someone that appeared to be biologically female and um was apparently the only find within the grave although again with antiquarian excavations there can be some real variety in the quality of their excavations now the desert necklace is interesting because the cross is so plain these kind of crosses are a known phenomena particularly associated with the 7th century so this is just after the anglo-saxons or the the century just after the anglo-saxons are officially beginning to convert after the augustine mission at the very end of the sixth century there are a great swathe of varieties of these often quite high quality so gold garnet we do start seeing some similar features even across quite disparate groups so if we have a look at the kramer house uh pendant it is actually across we can see with it the cross shape within the decoration there then we've got them over kind of cross potent looking stuff with the wilton cross and the more recent trumpeting cross as well we've got the lovely garnet and central decoration here but if we look at the top of the wilton cross we have very similar loops going on um the trunks cross is quite different as it appears to have been fastened or sewn onto a garment there was a pair of lint uh gold and garnet linked pins found in the grave the woman however it isn't quite clear how they all relate together and it might be the link pins are to do with the headdress although i have heard a suggestion that maybe they're faster than the cross on but i know there's a lot of disagreement with that we then also have the trumpet that sorry the thernum cross which is on the right here this is the only known picture which is uh unfortunately we don't know who the woman is and we don't know what happened to the cross unfortunately as this is the image of it in the newspaper reports at the time just before it was sold at sotheby's so if anyone does know what happens to it i know myself and various other early medievalists like helen geek are quite keen to track it down there's also the x uh the ixworth cross which again we see a a loop with very large loop but um while not the lovely filigree ones of the previous examples it has that still kind of similar kind of bi-conical uh with a rim at each end and a central bridge and one of the uh i think they're quite striking things amongst these is is the use of garnet now it would be remiss of us to not mention other pendants as there is it obviously overlaps so if we see this is the wind farthing assemblage that was reported as treasurer about i think eight years ago now uh it was the brave of a high status woman and we see another small filigree pet uh what's called a pectoral cross here uh some kind of broaches and biconical beads what i think is quite interesting is how similar these biconical beads are to the suspension loops we see on the previous crosses there's also a large decorative pendants of milleforad glass so this is from silbert's world grave 172 in kent and there is a particular miliforei type we see a lot of in kent um there's also the carnelian pendant which has a very distinct kind of ribbed loop here which is a very common type of loop to see on pendants in gold at the time and as we can see this was used in this kind of style of loop was used on the reconstruction uh for those of you interesting with the pendant on uh the kind of oval pendant there is reusing a roman intaglio probably in carnelian rather than garnet and is also in uh it was like thankfully donated to maidstone museum where you can go and see it what i find very interesting however is the the way that this has been set independent which is very similar to other uh some of the pectoral crosses so there's definitely an overlap in the construction here so one of the things that's very interesting with these objects is that all of those that are from sealed archaeological uh context barring two which i will mention um seem to be associated with women now that there is a lot of wealth buried with women during this period from the sixth maybe later century onwards we see consistently more wealth being buried than with men now for a long time there was a lot of questions where the material like at sun who was the quality of sun who or predator was going and then we're seeing stuff like the staffordshire found out so there is kind of comparative or masculine material or material associated with men out there but there is this real real show of kind of wealth within women's graves and it's really interesting that we do get this overlap with these crosses because women really drive the conversion in anglo-saxon england early on we see first of all first of all augustine being invited over by queen bertha of kent we then also see powerful women founding monastic institutions like kent zones ends with to the point of which if one examines things like the ecclesiastic gender anglorum or the ecclesiastical history of the english people written by bead several centuries later we see at least 16 women in charge of abby's and this is roughly a third of all of the outbeats that he lists and we have to also remember that these abbies and these institutions aren't just religious houses they are positions of power within the landscape whether that's the social landscape but then that's literally the landscape itself and their kind of territorial holdings or within the kind of economic landscape so there's a clear historic evidence of women in positions of religious power and it's really interesting to see that association between these overtly religious pendants and this kind of period of time where women are holding such power now after saying all of that there are two notable exceptions here one of which is the cross of some cuthbert which is was found in the burial shroud of the remains of saint cuthbert at durham abbey when that was opened in the 19th century now there has been some interesting discussions about why some cuthbert was wearing this cross you have to remember he is someone that eschewed earthly possessions and got close to god by standing in the sea and that kind of thing so could this have been cuthbert's cross well it's been repaired quite a lot which is and it has been worn quite a lot there's quite a lot of patterns of wear on the reverse um the other the other example and i'll get back to why it may or may not be his in a second the other one is in the staffordshire horde now as we've said the staffordshire hoard is a collection of overtly masculine objects or objects that we would associate with men you know the kind of warrior class and that kind of thing so what is this kind of pectoral cross which is generally associated women doing there now maybe they just happen to be in the loop that happen to be material captured from a woman but there is another object there which might explain this now this thing bamboozled many early medievalists on its discovery it's a beautiful uh piece of garnet closing a filigree and glass work but it's been identified as part of a priest's garment now there is other overtly religious things in there in the staffordshire such as the processional cross that might also be a priest uh priestly so it's possible that a few of these crosses are associated with men but their advert associated with women may also be kind of speaking to the anglo-saxon's attitude to priests in general we know that some anglo-saxon priests references to anglo-saxon priests although pagan ones seem to imply that they cannot perform the usual duties of men they weren't allowed allowed to write stallions for example um and so it might be we may be having a glimpse into how the anglo-saxons were interpreting uh gender representation or even how their priesthood classes uh fitted into that but um two objects however do not really draw much conclusion but i think that's a really interesting association there i'm gonna just cover a last few bits here which are more to do with kind of my general musings about the cross the conditions across and indicate some elements of it so the gold and kind of garnet technique is something that i think we think that we will recognize this kind of um iconically anglo-saxon one of the things that is notable have is in the seventh century despite having the kind of pinnacle of the craft with you know sutton who the staffordshire horde and the kind of really high status uh close on a kind of uh composite broach series which is still associated with ken um we do begin to see a drop in the quality of materials towards the middle of the seventh century we're seeing more obviously recycled material the garnets seem to not be fitting so well the closing a is more kind of less well executed they're shoving kind of bits and bobs in to try and keep the garnets it in and the closing a can not properly fit them there's a great example here which is the milton broach which is now the victorian albert museum so could the elam cross be an example of an object that's being broken down for this well i think we can't really be s yes there are in fact examples of other pectoral crosses where they've clearly had been kind of fit this kind of slightly ropey construction here's the example from the the whole nest cross where the garnet is clearly poorly executed the central stone isn't um properly set and indeed the kind of uh engraving in the middle uh relates to a type of kind of counter inlay where gold or even enamel would be inlaid into the garnet uh but uh really relates to kind of mid 6th century technique when these crosses are generally dated to the 7th century to kind of coincide with the christianization of the the country the damage here we cannot be certain has happened before it went into the ground but very well very well may have been there were similar kind of breaks on some of the material within uh this the staffordshire horde and one would be surprised if all of this damage was purely from the plow the other point is the central cabochon here so this kind of flat topped stone is very very easy to find comparisons within particularly kentish archaeology so this these kind of keystone garnet disc broaches are very popular in the middle of the sixth century and here we have one with a very similar stone uh from grave 44 leminge which is now the ks's collection these are particularly common on this type but they are increasingly rare after the middle of the sixth century and we may be seeing reuse of the union cross uh sorry we might be seeing the in across using one of these early ones so we're seeing two lots of release we're seeing the reuse of the mirror materials uh in the construction of the cross and then the element cross being cut up for yet more reuse and the reason the reason why i think it's really important to highlight particularly this kind of stone is that they are circulating within northern europe and particularly we see them here in kent after the kind of production of the stones begins to of these stones begins to filter now we know these stones are being produced not in europe these are a kind of intaglio stone so the kind of roman signet rings that are being produced in the fourth and fifth centuries in uh suspenia and as the fashion fintaglio stones falls you see the jewelers and various other people starting to try to come up with a way of dealing with this clearly massive backlog of these stones so we start seeing the earliest clausenate utilizing these intaglio stones so i think this is a really interesting point to put the cross into context there is another potential explanation for the use of that central stone it's the even cross could be earlier now these pictorial crosses i've said tend to be dated to the seventh century and i know i do apologize i'm having a bit of a a kind of ramble here around my ideas on this because i've only kind of really been thinking about this in the last couple of days but the cross itself and the filigree on this cross does suggest it is one of the earlier examples the execution is somewhat better than some of the later ones the kind of it if honest is also a little bit of gut feeling it just feels earlier now we know that christianity despite what beed and his contemporaries would like to think had survived in brit in britain after romans left you know places like uh some albans survivors christian shrines and we know there's quite a lot of marrying uh backwards and forwards across the channel it could be the you know frankish christian ideas appreciated coming in for augustine's mission could this have been a cross belonging to a christian before augustine i think i'd be pushing it to say yes or no but i just thought that would be it was an interesting idea to raise and maybe that central garnet is more contemporary with those earlier discourages so thank you for listening um to me um if you do have any queries about treasure or finds recording and can do email me flo kent.gov uk um as always support your local museums and archaeological societies a lot of them are struggling right now um keep track of both ks and me on twitter as well um i think i'll head back to elizabeth now for some questions okay thank you very much that's absolutely fascinating um and there's clearly a lot more thought that needs to go into this for this item this is a huge amount of potential in it um so everyone i'm i'm conscious the fact that joe and i between us have actually talked for a rather long time um but we do have a few questions so if people want to stick around um we will we will do we will deal with some of the questions that we've had um so the first question we had was could an individual with an interest pattern county so i suppose i think you were talking about how the the whole county isn't covered by um so this becomes certified to purchase but it does it does use the word individual so yeah i mean the treasurer act is set up to make sure objects get into public collections so this is museums and this is why everyone that is allowed to acquire through the treasure act has to be accredited by the museum association um i wouldn't be actually surprised if it be something worth kas working towards in the long run um as you know places like hampshire trust and sussex archaeological society are accredited um but yeah and it's not something an individual would be allowed to do i'm afraid um and not something i'm afraid i would encourage either no quite um and another question i think anders actually did answer this on the chat but but just for the benefit of those who aren't following um also did you say that the elam cross was saxon and would the location not appear in uh the uh exploring kent pass website no uh the the data set of the pas is a fantastic tool it's possible you know the envy of europe in some ways unfortunately the dutch are catching up with their pan system but the material goes into the kent herr but on a layer that is invisible to members of the public you need to kind of uh be part uh kind of vetted individuals to be able to use the past data set and this cross went on to the past data set there has only been two locations i think have been recent finds that have gone on there and they were emergency ones ahead of planning um just to make sure that they were there and visible within the data set and they were subsequently removed right okay and i think the same uh same question said um i think asking whether the roman horde from breedhurst believed to be legionnaire's stash would that be treasure trove please or would be would it be chose please um i don't there's a lot there's a lot of hordes from ken if it was found prior to 1996 and it was precious metal so dinari or silaqua or the gold acrylic nest it should have gone through its trove whether or not it did unless it's a different matter particularly for older uh assemblages if it's a site find um i don't does anyone in the chat know uh what date the british hoard was found somebody might mention it later but i haven't got it we'll uh we can come back after somebody answers that um somebody else is asking why is one rare gold coin of any age not treasure uh the answer is the iron age um and uh the proliferation of material in the post-medical period so the iron age i think i've had discussions on this recently in kent in particular we have in terms of single gold iron age coin fines um they're just not that rare and one of the key things with the treasure act is making sure material that go the you know public good and be safe for the public good so there's only so much we can do in that regards and for example if we were to search stator which is a gold coin on the pas database um nationally single coins there's 21 000 um so they're using gold gold much more prolifically during the iron age in the post-medieval period uh the the the coinage is being produced at a phenomenal rate as well um i think there could be arguments for gold coins particularly up until the you know the coming of milk coinage under uh charles ii to probably go through but there's only so much that could be done by by myself um and as you may have guessed from my uh discussions on roman single coins i'm not sure i'm totally on board with that although i'm sure that dr samuel head of the british museum would wrap me across the knuckles for saying so um and i suppose it also goes back to the thing that you know we're looking talking about archaeological treasure aren't we which is why we're expanding the definition to non-precious metals because it's not just the fact that it is gold it it's it's the archaeological significance to the item which is being recognized by the act yeah i mean one of the things the treasure act is it did give impetus for the existence of the pas in terms of non-treasure fines i should say the treasure i don't i forgot to mention this only covers england wales so in scotland they've got a form of treasure trove law which basically covers everything that's old um under their scheme but they've got far fewer people metal detecting so there has to be a balance really between what we can achieve using the voluntary skill of the ps and what we can enforce under law if metal detecting is not going to be licensed effectively um which you know is a whole other debate um so it's it's it's it's a very it's a complicated subject and one i have to you know be wary of my answers on because i will almost certainly tread on someone's toes whether they be archaeologist metal detectorist or auctioneer or member of the dcms um but it's it's it's one that's constantly up for debate and i think if you if one if one is interested in there is a book called uh the treasure treasure the treasure treasure and the law or the treasure act and the law um which is worth a read if if one wants to get their head around both the way it functions and the kind of arguments to and through i've just seen actually the same question who actually has uh elaborated and said my question was referring to rare gold coins well the question therefore comes comes down to what classify exactly is rare because what you know there's plenty of coins that are still listed as rare within the numismatic literature which thanks to metal detecting our last 15 20 years aren't um you know you know there was a recent find of a very rare carousel gold coin which found in kent which still disappointed never could see in person that really should have been in a collection in ken but unfortunately uh was sold on the private market um and that is the kind of coin that um changed the treasure at could help and you know that coin has really interesting story to tell about the kind of uh you know uh breakaway britannic empire um but yeah it's it's it's a difficult question and one that i i frequently uh have new mismatches with a coin advice that study coins i'm glad to say we've got david holman uh with us tonight who has just posted that the red girl hoard not breedhurst was found in 1957. so that that answers that question um um now this oh yes somebody's asked what happens to a girl coin found on an archaeology dig it should go into the archive as any other find if the treasure act changes its definition and we start seeing single gold coin fines uh classified as treasurer regardless of whether or not we consider iron age coins or post medieval coins get folded into that hopefully they don't because the amount of paperwork will drive me mad um but they would still be you know the law would still apply for that to them in those circumstances okay now there's one here that i think is more directed towards me um is the kas collection catalogued and the catalog accessible does it say what if anything may be viewed and where and when that's a an extremely good question um there is the old original 1890s um catalogue in an early edition of arc archaeological canciana the cataloguing of the kas collection is is problematic the it's a very long-lived collection it is in maester me it makes her careful and maester museum um over the years um in the past it was very common for the ks curator and museum creator to be the same person and generally over the last century or so um the the collection has got a bit mixed in with the uh maisto museum holdings so made stone museum with the aid of some ks volunteers has recently they were not finished yet they've they finished the archaeological collections i believe um been doing a huge in audit of the collections and there is now um a database which contains all the kes material it's not in a publishable state i'm afraid it's still got a lot of data cleaning to go through so it is not published i hope very much that we will be able to do this and we'll be able to get something which is accurate and coherent and can be published on the web ultimately my my by design my you know my real wish is that we could actually digitize the collection itself and have the articles themselves or substantial number of them because there's also a lot of corroded metal for instance and hot shirts um but that we could have the um you know the highlights of the collection available online uh but that is a that's a long-term goal um the the articles that are on on the show are in the archaeology gallery at maester museum so they're available during normal museum opening hours right i'm writing a paper for a phd which should rewrite history could i go through my university to answer to access the pas yes if you yes there you would uh send an email to the central unit and that past pas data set as long as your lecturer kind of vouches for you um your supervisor that should be viable although there will be restrictions on exactly what you can do with it and what data you're given thank you and now somebody has asked is it known whether garnets had a special significance or meaning to people at this time other than its value or attractiveness yes so this is this is something i've spent a lot of time thinking about um and there is a great deal of debate about this um i think one of the things we cannot overlook is the the sheer number of garnets being produced and exported along the silk road into the mediterranean in europe during the period there was i think the supply helped them become popular because they're a lovely shiny stone stone and they contrast really well with gold i don't think we can deny that red is important though we do see this in ireland where they're trying to replicate garnets so this is still seen as an important color exactly why we're not certain but one of the things to remember is how good it is to contrast them if you look at old english there's a real kind of uh predilection for talking in contrasts and kind of just descriptive qualifiers when you're talking about color that will almost always feel very contrast focused um which which is interesting and there are some great papers on there out there uh out there on that um my particular you know that one of the greatest examples is that is that kind of red as blood white snow kind of uh attitude you often see particularly with the uh sixth early seventh century material garnet paired with kind of a white collar or white substance to really contrast with it and with the gold itself it is worth noting noticing knowing that while ghana is popular across northern europe there are parts of kind of western europe that don't do that so there's a real much more polychrome network going on in spain during this time they're using a lot more glass um and glass in anglo-saxon jewelry tends to be quite sparsely used in contrast to the garnet so basically probably we're not certain is the answer okay here's a good question how do you become a flow um one of the things that if you get to know the pas and ever record with more than one flow or go to a conference and see different flows talking is almost every flow is different i had a commercial archaeological background and then uh was always more interested in objects particularly of the anglo-saxon period and then when it did a masters in artifact studies other flows have come from curatorial backgrounds we even have one flow that was just really good with big was what i say just was really good with big data and the kind of databases and became the fl and was originally a geoark and just kind of stepped sideways into kind of fines and data analysis so basically there's lots of roots but the clear the the important things are liking objects and liking people absolutely um and an interesting question from anders here um what can the kas do to support the pas scheme so that's one for you and i to discuss i think but well i think i think we've had quite a lot of you know that there was support with the battles hordes that was really important on the day um there's you know pointing people in my direction you know if they email the ks what's this that kind of thing um i think i've had quite a few i think i think have three different african spears come through the the ks that way which is feeding into a new new interest of mine um but you know it's it's it's that an encouraging best practice whether that's with metal detectorists uh whether that's with archaeologists making sure you know community projects report treasure and we had had you know a hoard of roman points from otford last year which was you know good best practice being involved there um and also making sure there's links between metal detectors and archaeologists are there you know like a lot of melt detectors are really enthusiastic and you'd be amazed at the difference a metal detectorist who knows what they're doing knows their machine will make an archaeological data site in terms of recovery yeah yeah well i think i think that's the end of the questions actually and i'm very impressed actually i think we've had up to about 61 attendees here and 45 of you have stuck it out um despite us taking up an enormous amount of time here so thank you very very much um joe uh for giving us all this amazing information and thank you very much to all of you who have attended and all of you who have asked questions i hope you found it interesting and as the late dead is norton used to say if you have been thanks for listening good night you