The Portable Antiquities Scheme

Early this year, a metal detectorist called Tom Redmayne was searching in a muddy field in the parish of Fulstow in Lincolnshire. He had already found Roman pottery (Samian ware from Gaul), some late Roman coins and several lead weights. Then he found several pieces pieces of lead, two of which were folded over.When he [...]

Last week, Sean Gillies, the lead developer for the Pleiades project at University of North Caroline blogged about his experimentation with an application he is building called Mush. He’s taken 2 georss feeds and has combined them using a PULL method to determine the sphere of influence. He writes more about this at Import Cartography [...]

Over the last few days, I have been adding to the Roman coins pages. Ian Leins has had a splendid volunteer (Natalia Bauer) who has scanned some rather nice images of the 3rd Century AD Roman Emperors and I’ve now incorporated these into our most popular resource, the Roman coins guide.
I’ve also adapted the content [...]

The TWFY feed alerted us to a section of Lord Howarth’s speech in the House of Lords debate on “Government: Draft Legislative Programme” yesterday. Lord Howarth said:
My last wish is that the Government will pledge themselves to sustain the portable antiquities scheme. This is a voluntary scheme for recording archaeological finds that are made by [...]

Last week was National Archaeology Week, co-ordinated by the Council for British Archaeology. The Scheme ran a wide variety of events and talks which reached a grand total of 6919 people with nearly 45% being children. The spreadsheet found below records how many people attended each event, the number of objects offered up for [...]