Time Travel

One of the fascinating aspects of researching hoards is that the material also illustrates the history of artefact studies through the centuries. Some of our hoards were accidental discoveries in the 19^th and early 20^th c., for example, Amesbury, found in 1843 by farm labourers. Hoards like this were often broken up after discovery. Objects were sometimes bought by antiquarians and later made their way into museum collections. Today, remaining artefacts can be distributed between several different museums, and parts of the hoards are often lost. For the Amesbury hoard, we know it originally had coins in it, but none of them survive today. The coins are briefly described in a record of a meeting in 1857 at the Society of Antiquaries in London, where some finger-rings also found in the hoard were exhibited. The finger-rings do still exist –  they are in the British Museum. They will be among some of the first objects that we’ll be studying for our new hoards project.