Home to the first recorded town in Britain, Essex has a vast wealth of history. However, historical accounts of the county have tended to focus on the major settlements and have left large parts unexplored. Through the work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), alongside continuing professional excavations, it has been possible to fill in those gaps. Not only have there been many objects recorded with the PAS that are individually significant, but recording these finds has allowed us to identify many new archaeological sites that had previously been unrecognised. From Bronze Age hoards to...

Delving into the Portable Antiquities Scheme archives to explore 50 finds from Britain's Roman history.

British Bronze Age artefacts made from copper, bronze, gold, flint, jet and shale are renowned throughout Europe for their beauty and exquisite craftsmanship. In England and Wales, many new discoveries are made each year by members of the public and recorded with the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme. Recent nationally important finds include the gold lunula from Tarrant Valley (Dorset) and the gold and silver striped penannular ring from Havant (Hampshire). The metalwork hoard from Boughton Malherbe (Kent) is the third largest metalwork hoard ever discovered in Britain. Here,...

The Portable Antiquities Scheme celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 2018, and has been operating in Buckinghamshire since 2003 when the scheme went national. Today the scheme runs in England and Wales, with thirty-nine Finds Liaison Officers recording objects discovered by members of the public. Working with local archaeology finders, including metal detectorists, this has allowed for both the discovery of new significant objects and sites across the country. This is a unique scheme, allowing anyone to add to the archaeological record, which in turn has helped research projects using the...

Roman coinage represents the largest single category of object recorded through the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), with over 300,000 single finds in addition to several thousand hoards. This dataset, unparalleled anywhere else in the world, provides a unique perspective on the province of Roman Britain and its interaction with the larger Roman Empire. By exploring 50 key finds of Roman coinage it is possible to shed light on all aspects of Roman Britain from the conquest in AD 43 through to the Roman withdrawal by c. AD 410. Unusually for a Roman numismatic dataset, the...