[html] Fandt den her på news.sci.archaeology:<br />--------------------------------------------<br /><br />From The Times<br />January 22, 2008<br />'Scrap metal' was Bronze Age hoard<br />Simon de Bruxelles<br /><br /><br />A coach driver discovered Britain's largest hoard of Bronze Age<br />axeheads while waiting for a party of school-children at a Dorset<br />farm.<br /><br />Tom Peirce, 60, asked the farm's owner if he could use his metal<br />detector in one of the fields during his lunchbreak. Within minutes he<br />heard a loud beep and found part of a bronze axe.<br /><br />Over the next three days Mr Peirce and two other metal detectorists<br />unearthed more than 500 items of Bronze Age metalwork, including 268<br />complete axeheads. The axes, buried at three separate locations more<br />than 50 metres apart, could be worth tens of thousands of pounds,<br />which Mr Peirce would share with the farm's owner, Alfie O'Connell.<br /><br />Axeheads were used as a form of currency during the Bronze Age, about<br />3,000 years ago, but some experts believe that the hoard may have had<br />some ritual significance such as an an offering to the gods.<br /><br />Mr Peirce, from Ringwood, Hamp-shire, who has been metal-detecting for<br />five years, said: "When we took them out of the ground some of them<br />were so pristine you would think you had just bought them at B&Q yet<br />they were 3,000 years old.<br /><br />"We were very lucky because there was not much else in the field. If<br />we had tried another place or walked in a different direction we'd<br />never have found them. This was a once in a lifetime find."<br /><br />Mr O'Connell, 62, who has owned the farm near Swanage for four years,<br />said: "Within about half-an-hour of Tom searching he came rushing over<br />to me looking shocked. During the war a plane had crashed in the same<br />field and for a minute I thought he had found a bomb. We went back up<br />there on my tractor and saw the axeheads. I didn't have a clue what<br />they were. I thought it was scrap metal at first. It is very<br />exciting."<br /><br />The axeheads, which are four inches long and two inches wide, are<br />being assessed by the British Museum, which may buy them.<br /><br />The coroner for Bournemouth, Poole and East Dorset will hold an<br />inquest at which it is expected that the axeheads will be declared<br />treasure-trove. If so, the landowner and finder would receive a reward<br />reflecting the market value of the hoard.<br /><br />Andrew Fitzpatrick, of Wessex Archaeology, has been asked by the<br />British Museum to look for signs of a settlement. He said: "The<br />artefacts could have been used as a form of currency and buried at a<br />time of crisis but many people believe they were buried as an offering<br />to the gods.<br /><br />"A lot of Bronze Age objects like this were buried in the ground and<br />it is a bit of a coincidence that many people didn't go back for them."<br /> [/html]
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