Metal-Detecting Brits Unearth Medieval Church Artifacts
Archaeologists are using over a million amateur finds to study pilgrimage sites, the Black Death, and the Protestant Reformation.
Much has been written about religious life in the medieval era, but thanks to the British fancy for metal detectors, archaeologists are hopeful about gauging just how much more has gone unwritten.
Earlier this month, the University of Reading announced that it has been awarded a million pounds ($1,245,330) by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council to study the role of religion in medieval life, for which the university will employ a unique source of data: the findings of hobby metal detector users that have been logged in the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme.
The museum’s scheme was founded more than 20 years ago, in part to quell archaeologists’ fears that hobby metal detector users were disturbing the historical record.
“At the time, there was this boom in metal detecting, with lots of archaeological findings being discovered, and not really any mechanism to record them at all,” Michael Lewis, the scheme’s director, told Religion News Service. “So the Portable Antiquities Scheme was set up to provide a mechanism, on a voluntary basis, to record all the other sorts of discoveries that have been found.”
Since then, metal-detecting hobbyists in Britain have had more than a few minutes of fame thanks to a BBC show, Detectorists, that debuted in 2014. Detectorists wasn’t their only time in the limelight; three shows about the hobby specifically in Britain made it onto Detect History’s list of its 10 “Best Metal Detecting TV Shows.”
Though archaeologists once worried that the fad would hamper their work, they are now seeing it as another way to further understand our past.
“The reason that we’re interested in this is that sources ...