U.K. treasure hunters are finding a record number of ancient artifacts—but who gets to keep them?

By any reckoning the outing had already been a spectacular success. After a couple of hours tromping around a patch of muddy farmland in Staffordshire with their metal detectors, Jonathan Needham and his best friend Malcomb Baggeley had turned up a silver shilling from 1942 and, far more thrilling, a fourth-century Roman brooch. The men were ready to call it a day but decided to take a quick shuffle through the tall grass in an adjacent field to wipe the mud from their boots.

That’s when Needham’s metal detector gave a faint ping, suggesting something buried deep underground. Intrigued, they began digging. Two feet below the surface they unearthed a curiously shaped piece of metal.

“At first I thought it was just an old drawer handle,” recalls Needham, a retired tree surgeon. “But it didn’t look quite right for a drawer handle.”

As he turned the object over in his hands, it began to look and feel suspiciously like it might be made of gold. He took a photo with his phone and posted it on a treasure hunter’s forum, hoping somebody might be able to identify the curio.

Shortly after posting the picture, Needham lost his cell signal. When it returned 20 minutes later, his post had gone viral. He and Baggeley might not have recognized what they’d found, but others did: It was a solid gold cloak fastener from the Bronze Age, 3,000 years old and extremely rare.

(How was King Tut’s tomb discovered 100 years ago? Grit and luck.)

Napoleon once described Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. Were he alive today, he might revise that to a nation of amateur archaeologists. Armed with trowels, gumboots, and metal detectors, rank-and-file Britons are digging up their island home as never before in search of buried treasure. And they’re finding it in staggering quantities—Iron Age gold coins, Roman bronzes, Saxon silver, Viking loot, medieval rings, bracelets, lockets, and brooches. The finds are coming so thick and fast that curators at the British Museum are spending half their working hours dealing with the backlog.

According to the latest annual report from the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, which logs archaeological discoveries made throughout the year, a record 1,384 bona fide treasure finds were made in 2022. It was the ninth straight year that more than a thousand discoveries were logged, with 2023 set to make it ten in a row. Preliminary figures, not yet released, show another 1,367 treasure finds amid a bumper haul of 74,506 artifacts. And as with every other year, nearly all the finds were made by amateurs. Professional archaeologists accounted for only three percent.

“It underscores what a significant contribution the general public is making to the field of archaeology,” says Michael Lewis, the British Museum’s Head of Treasure and Portable Antiquities.

But who owns these artifacts?

One of the most intriguing finds was a delicately carved, bone rosary bead dated to about 1450 and found by a “mudlarker,” the nickname given to enthusiasts who scour the muddy shores of tidal rivers.

“I was crawling along on my hands and knees and saw this tiny skull face looking up at me,” recalls Caroline Nunneley, who made the discovery along the Thames near Queenshithe, in the heart of London. “When I picked it up and turned it over in my hand, I saw the face of a beautiful young woman on the other side. It was a memento mori, meant to remind the wearer of the passage of time and their own mortality.”

Whatever resentments and jealousies academics might harbor at the successes of enthusiasts like Nunneley and Needham is tempered by the fact that the vast majority of their finds would never figure in an archaeological excavation. “Most of these finds are made on cultivated land,” says Lewis. “If metal detectorists didn’t find them, they’d just be lost to plowing.”

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Moreover, treasure finds made by laymen are not lost to historians and museums. Under British law, any find over 300 years old and containing more than 10 percent gold or silver must be turned over to a representative of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The curators at the British Museum research the object and write a submission to the coroner’s court, which makes the final determination if the find meets the legal definition of treasure.

If it does, the find becomes crown property, available for local or national museums to purchase for the public benefit. If there’s interest, an independent valuation is made and the finder receives the assessed market value, a payment that’s shared with the landowner on whose property the find was made.

Penalties for not reporting treasure can be severe. Last April two men landed in court charged with attempting to sell 44 extremely rare silver coins from the reign of Alfred the Great. The coins were part of a Viking hoard they’d unearthed in Herefordshire years earlier, and which is said to have been worth millions. Instead of a jackpot payday, however, the men got five years.

What really counts as treasure?

With metal detector enthusiasts making thousands of rare and unexpected discoveries, government officials last year expanded the definition of treasure to include objects of historical significance that are made of non-precious metals. One example is the Ryedale Hoard, a collection of ancient Roman bronzes—including an 1,800-year-old bust of Emperor Marcus Aurelius—found in a field in Yorkshire during the pandemic lockdown in May 2020.

(What were Marcus Aurelius' rules for life? Look to his self-help classic.)

Because the figures were made of bronze, they were not considered treasure under the old definition, and the finders were free do with them as they pleased. They were sold at auction for £185,000 ($234,500 US) and were saved for the nation only by the generosity of the American buyer, who donated them to the Yorkshire Museum.

“Historical significance is a more subjective criteria that requires a judgment call on our part,” says Lewis. “We don’t want to be heavy-handed, and on the other hand we don’t want to lose anything.”

Reporting potential treasure finds is a legal obligation, but reporting non-treasure artifacts is purely voluntary. Nevertheless, the public has enthusiastically embraced the finds register. Nearly 1.7 million artifacts have been logged in the PAS database, including their dates, locations, and descriptions. Freely available to researchers, the database is providing archaeologists and historians with a priceless tool that has already been used in 927 research projects.

Lewis is involved in one of those projects, a study of medieval ritual landscapes. It’s a particularly fitting use of the database, he says, for religious objects found and recorded by ordinary people in the 21^st century will help us better understand the lives and beliefs of ordinary people in the 14^th.