Fragment of a Bronze Age copper/alloy knife recovered from a previously undiscovered burial site near Morecambe Bay
Image credit Stuart Noon
Dalya Alberge, writing in The Guardian yesterday, reports that –
A significant early bronze age burial site, believed to date from 2500BC, has been discovered near Morecambe Bay. Grave goods could include objects ranging from daggers and ceramic vessels to jewellery, textiles and material such as amber, jet and gold. The site will be excavated in July. Archaeologists were alerted to its existence by Matthew Hepworth, a nurse, who unearthed a well-preserved bronze age chisel using a metal detector.
Ben Roberts, a lecturer in later prehistory at Durham University and the British Museum’s former curator for European bronze age collections, said: “The potential is huge because untouched, undiscovered sites are very rare indeed. What’s really special about our site is that no one knew about it before … The barrow appears to be intact and it’s pretty substantial.”
Hepworth followed the correct procedure on discovery of the chisel, notifying the authorities under the portable antiquities scheme. He is now being given a rare opportunity to work alongside the professional archaeologists in an excavation that is being partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Morecambe Bay excavation is being partly financed through a crowdfunding project, DigVentures, a social enterprise founded by three archaeologists – including Wilkins – to address the severe cuts in local authority and university-funded research archaeology.
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15/03/2016 at 9:29 am
Roy Goutté
Yet another important find reveals itself due to the honesty of a metal detectorist. An un-recorded and hitherto unknown burial site unlikely to have ever been discovered by archaeologists has once again made its presence known, thanks entirely to one of the many, many honest detectorists out there intent on not stealing our heritage like another Heritage site keeps boringly proclaiming, but for the good of the nation.
Credit where credit is due; a much better approach which will encourage newcomer detectorists to follow suit. If only the blinkered ones would learn!
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15/03/2016 at 3:37 pm
The Heritage Trust
Coincidentally, Helen Castor and guests have just been discussing on BBC Radio 4’s Making History programme a new theory (based on inscriptions found on a handful of pre-Roman coins) that, “…the people of Norfolk had as strong a relationship with the Continent as they did with the rest of Britain – and, as well as speaking the Celtic Brittonic language, would also have conversed with their trading partners in the Germanic languages that would eventually become English. If true, this thesis completely changes our ideas that our language came with the Anglo-Saxons after the Romans left these shores.”
All this from a few coins; imagine how much more we might learn about the origin of English on these shores if a hoard of similar coins were to be found.
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