A man searches with his metal detector. Photograph: Ace Stock Limited / AlamyThey are known in the trade as "grot pots" – buckets and Tupperware boxes that amateur archaeologists and metal detectorists fill with battered, corroded, base-metal coins and other finds. And in these murky vessels our history is being rewritten.
As the money that funded an unprecedented explosion of professional archaeology during the economic boom years runs out, public hunger to peel back the past beneath our feet is helping to fill the gap. So the grots are identifying lost villages and settlements, Roman forts and temples, previously unknown trade routes; even mapping the slow ebb of the Roman empire from Britain.
By law, you must have a licence to excavate or remove even a pebble from a scheduled ancient monument or listed building, and all treasure finds anywhere must be reported. But anyone can pick up a metal detector – there are an estimated 180,000 in Britain – and take it into a ploughed field with the permission of the landowner. Fired by an unprecedented public interest in archaeology, thousands of people are doing just that, and the finds they report, often almost worthless in terms of cash, are proving true treasure.
"This is revolutionary stuff," says Sam Moorhead, a coins expert at the British Museum, who is in charge of the coins reported under the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS). "Gold doesn't map settlements – high-status coins could be hidden or lost anywhere. But where you've got 100 grots, you've got a settlement."
The grots have only been reported since 1996, when the PAS began establishing a national network of finds officers, to record and crucially map all the archaeological objects found by amateurs. The scheme has gradually forged a truce between most career archaeologists and the metal detectorists many previously regarded as little better than looters.
Reports of finds from bronze-age arrows to second world war cap badges are now running at 50,000 a year. Gradually, the detectorists realised that the archaeologists were interested in the rubbish in their grot pots. This week the scheme recorded its 400,000th object, a classic grot from Lincolnshire (see box, page 7) that has turned out to be a fabulously rare coin.
The grots have identified a Roman fort in Cornwall, where only three were known before. They've pinpointed a settlement on the edge of Dartmoor: "I've been there," Moorhead says. "It's bleak, bare and windswept even today. Nobody guessed the Romans were ever there."
Moorhead is just back from meeting an elderly man in Warwickshire who over half a lifetime has collected more than 1,000 coins in one small rural area where history says nothing interesting ever happened. "I guarantee that something major will be found," he says. The grots are tracking the extent of iron-age trade before the Romans arrived, and what happened as they left. "It's rewriting the history I learned. The old theory was that there was relatively little currency circulating in East Anglia in the late-Roman period – we know now that's not true because coins are pouring out of the ground."
Link to this interactiveThe PAS has grown at a time when archaeology has never been more popular. Millions tune in to programmes such as Coast and the apparently immortal Time Team. University courses are full. The annual festival organised every summer by the Council for British Archaeology, with thousands of open days, site visits, lectures and special events, is the largest in the world. The CBA estimates that more than 200,000 people are now involved in local archaeology groups, some mounting remarkably professional long-term projects.
The Sedgeford project in Norfolk, for example, which is directed by archaeologist Neil Faulkner, has just completed its 14th season. It is entirely community based, and has grown from a small excavation in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery to researching the entire history of the district. Each year, experienced volunteers join passionate amateurs and students in a project that combines research, training and sheer fun. Finds include a cow bone stuffed with gold coins and, three years ago, the missing finial of a beautiful torc – an iron age necklace – that was found more than 40 years ago.
Public interest has been fired by an incredible goldrush in British archaeology since 1990, when developers were first compelled to pay to record the archaeology that would be trashed by the buildings, roads, bridges or train tracks they wanted to construct.
As the economy boomed, things as wonderful as anything Carnarvon and Carter found in Tutankhamun's tomb have poured out of the ground, some found by metal detectorists, many by developer-funded excavation: a Roman lady rested in London in her sealed coffin on a pillow of bay leaves; a king lain with his finery heaped up around him in Southend; an archer waiting to be discovered at Amesbury with all the latest fashions in continental daggers, hair ornaments and pots; a Roman glass dish made of 1,000 tiny glass flowers that was held together by London mud; and a little enamelled bronze bowl – a Roman officer's souvenir of his time on Hadrian's Wall – turned up on a Staffordshire moor.
Some of the treasures could be from a child's romantic story: a Saxon princess's brooch studded with garnets from India found in the heart of Covent Garden; a silver gilt cup – a chalice, most unlikely to have been given up voluntarily by a French monastery – stuffed with Viking gold and silver loot found near Harrogate; a hoard of 824 gold coins minted by Boudicca's Iceni tribe found in a field near Wickham Market in Suffolk; a kilo of pure gold fashioned into exquisite iron-age jewellery found scattered across a field near Winchester.
But as the economy has crashed and burned, so has developer-funded archaeology.
It's lonely in Paul Belford's office, at Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire. His archaeology unit was set up as an offshoot of the hugely popular museum, at one of the key sites that fuelled the industrial revolution. Like other small independent units, it competes for contracts from developers to carry out the archaeological investigation on their sites. Although Belford's unit has won some major contracts, with developers paying more than £100,000 for the research and excavation, most of their work is on small local schemes, such as a housebuilder putting a few units on to a small plot. Such projects might earn the outfit only a few thousand pounds, and were the bread and butter of their finances – but their former clients are being hit hard in the recession.
"Even in the good times this was never very profitable, but it was enough to keep things going," says Belford. "Of course there is now much less of this sort of work – and much more competition for it. As a result we have really suffered in the last 12 months.
"The other very serious issue is of developers themselves going bust, or refusing to pay money that they owe for projects. We have some bad debts of this sort, and I know of a couple of other units in the north of England that have been very badly affected by this issue."
Hundreds of miles away, Andy Greenspan – not his real name, as he desperately wants to keep his job at a much larger unit in the south-east – reports similar pressures. "Developer work is currently through the floor and still descending." There have already been many redundancies, including staff with 20 years' experience. Their management, competing with many others to submit the lowest tender, is no longer budgeting for overnight accommodation, and is also extending the working day and week without overtime.
"Perhaps I expect too much; management acting in an ethical manner to their staff or developers not reaching for the minimum costs because there is work of archaeological significance under their proposed new development," he says sadly.
Belford and Greenspan's experiences are reflected across the country. The Institute for Archaeology (IfA) has been monitoring job losses since the credit crunch began. "Since the summer of 2007, approximately 660 jobs have gone in the UK – nearly 10% of all the jobs in professional archaeology," Kenneth Aitchison, head of projects at the IfA, reports.
Only last month one highly regarded employer, the 15-year-old University of Manchester Archaeological Unit, closed: Aitchison's survey suggests it will not be the last. The looming replacement of the legislation compelling developers to investigate their sites is also causing concern; archaeologists worry that it may be weakened, particularly if, as seems likely, next spring brings a change of government.
Some archaeologists – though not the young professionals with mortgages to pay – believe the juddering halt in developer-funded digging is a useful, enforced pause for thought.
"This is indeed a time for cool heads, a time to stop and think about what we're doing, for a bit of housekeeping, to clear out our cupboards and write up all those reports – and to plan what we need to do next," says Professor Geoffrey Wainwright, former head of archaeology at English Heritage, and president of the 300-year-old Society of Antiquaries of London.
Percival Turnbull, director of a small archaeology unit based at Barnard Castle in Durham – "still managing to keep our heads above water, so far" – agrees. "The quantity of data unearthed [in the last decade or so] should be enough to keep generations of research students going for evermore: I certainly hope so, because there's not much point in unearthing all this stuff unless someone is going to try to work out what it all means."
Others would like to see more use made of the public's passionate interest. "One result of the sudden flood of developer funding was that it had the effect of professionalising archaeology, to the virtual exclusion of the public," says Roger Bland, a coins expert at the British Museum and now seconded as director of the PAS. "There's never been so much archaeology on television, but there again, if people are really interested and want to do it themselves, it's not easy. You might wonder if part of the massive increase of interest in metal detecting as a hobby is a result of that frustrated enthusiasm. There must be dividends in finding a way to harness that interest and energy."
At the National Trust, which already has hundreds of people paying to join archaeology and conservation work camps, head of archaeology David Thackray is plotting just such a project, which will long outlive him. The predictions on his desk suggest climate change and rising sea levels threaten thousands of miles of UK coastline, and at least 500 archaeological sites on National Trust land, from bronze-age promontory forts to 19th-century farm buildings.
"This is a 50-year project," he says. "If I were to hire every professional archaeologist in the country, it would hardly be enough to record, excavate and in some cases rescue these sites. The only possible way forward is to engage with local archaeology groups all over the country to adopt these sites, to monitor, research and in some cases join with us in working on them."
What joins the pessimists and the currently optimistic is the fear that things are going to get very much worse, as government spending cuts bite. Already English Heritage has seen its government grant eroded, and fears worse to come. The Heritage Lottery Fund, which has invested millions in archaeology, is seeing receipts from ticket sales fall, and has lost money to help pay for the 2012 Olympics. The PAS itself barely escaped swingeing cuts last year, after the Museums Libraries and Archives quango that administers it suffered a 30% cut in its government funding.
Professor Mark Horton, of Bristol University, says: "The big picture is why, with public interest in archaeology at the highest level for decades, there is less archaeology actually going on than 20 years ago?" Horton has a gung-ho approach to his profession reflected in his position as adviser to last year's rip-roaring BBC1 archaeology drama Bonekickers, mourned by diggers throughout the land, who had been glued to every episode in a mixture of slack-jawed incredulity and weeping hilarity. He is not a man to relish sitting around twiddling his thumbs waiting for the economy to recover.
He has excavated in Zanzibar, Egypt, the Caribbean and Europe. He is speaking as he packs to go to Heligoland with Coast, and as soon as he gets back is heading to Mongolia. However, he says, such jaunting about the world is no longer an optional extra, but essential for many senior archaeologists either to earn a living, or to impress their universities back home and secure future research funding. At home, he says sadly, the situation is dire. He believes that the impact of the recession will be a drastic scaling down of excavation, which he believes will play into the hands of some who feel invasive archaeology should only be done if there is a real threat to the site. "The heritage police have got their way, and we can leave our past pickled in aspic."
Wainwright does not agree. He is not even as pessimistic as many of his peers about the commercial sector. "Archaeology is always the first to anticipate those fabled green shoots – developers see things starting up again; they have a site they know they're going to want to develop in eight months' time or a year, and they want to get the archaeology done."
Percival Turnbull is philosophical and borderline optimistic. "I do think that we've lost as well as gained: lost much of the community of purpose that united us as archaeologists; the extraordinary special local knowledge and other expertise which had been built up in many places; the sheer fun of it all. On the other hand, I don't expect ever again to spend an evening washing string so that it could be re-used".
A common coin proves to be an extraordinary find
The disgusting-looking coin below is worth fractionally more today than it was 1,800 years ago, when you would have needed a wheelbarrow-full to pay a legionnaire's monthly wages. Yet it has coin historians at the British Museum dancing with excitement.
Earlier this month it became the 400,000th object logged since 1996 by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), which encourages voluntary reporting of all archaeological finds by amateurs and metal detectors – and it is a fabulous rarity.
It was found by a Lincolnshire lorry driver, Tim Camm, who has been metal-detecting for 30 years, and has reported sackloads of coins to his PAS county finds officer, Adam Daubney.
The copper alloy coin from the very brief reign of emperor Tetricus I – despite the sun-god rays on his head, the ruler of the breakaway empire of Gaul and Britain lasted barely three years before surrendering without a fight to Aurelian – was minted in Gaul between 271-274AD. His currency was so debased that his two mints were churning out more than a million coins a day, and yet this horrible little scrap of metal is only the fourth of its kind found anywhere in the world. The British Museum, with one of the best coin collections in the world, didn't have one – but it has now because Camm has presented his battered treasure, with pride.
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