Thank you to everyone who has responded to our Finds Day survey. We had 45 answers which has given us plenty to think about. There were several reasons for doing this survey. The first one being that Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is closed for a significant length of time, so one of our main …more
Category: Finds
West Mids PAS Team Newsletter – Issue 2
Merry Christmas from us all. We hope you will be able to spend Christmas with your families after what has been a very strange year. We have got used to new ways of working from home and meeting with finders when the restrictions allow. But we do hope we can get back to meeting with …more
West Midlands PAS Team Newsletter – Issue 1
If you want to keep updated with the West Midlands FLO’s activities on Twitter follow: Peter @PeterReavill; Susheela @WandWFlo; Teresa @StaffsW and Victoria @FloMidlands
A virtual lockdown museum
This post is inspired by The Museum of London’s Collecting Covid project which aims to acquire both physical objects and first hand experiences of living in lockdown London. The Portable Antiquities Scheme West Midlands office is based at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and like London, Birmingham has seen empty streets, cafes, trams & trains …more
#MuseumFromHome
As part of this exciting day of activities organised by BBC Arts I have produced a small presentation about a Roman Polden Hill brooch. We see many of these brooches, discovered by metal detectorists. In fact there are over 3,000 recorded on our database. In this presentation I discuss a specific example on display at …more
You never know what you might find doing a spot of gardening, but what should you do if you find an object on your own land?
The large majority of finds recorded by The Portable Antiquities Scheme are discovered by metal detectorists, however we also see artefacts found by members of the public and gardeners. You may recall the object voted number one in the series entitled Britain’s Secret Treasures was a Lower Paleolithic flint handaxe made more than half a million …more
The Coundon pendant
The Coundon pendant has been dated to circa AD 1450 – 1550. The pendant is named after a small hamlet which was part of the ancient parish of Holy Trinity, Coventry. Records tell us the church had land in Coundon from at least the early 14th century. The Domesday book of AD 1086 records that Coventry …more
Minted in Coventry in AD 1465
Thanks are extended to Duncan Slarke (Staffordshire & West Midlands FLO 2007-2009) who did the majority of the work on this back in February 2009. This is an update of his work. During the initial three years of his first reign, Edward IV (1461-1470) struck money according to the weight and standards of his predecessor, …more
