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Did you find the subject of history
tediously uninteresting when you were at school? Were you bored to
tears when being made to learn about our past from chalkboards and
textbooks? If you were, then you certainly weren’t alone.
Perhaps, on the other hand, those
visits to museums ignited some spark of interest in our past but left
you feeling somewhat frustrated. You felt an overwhelming desire to
touch the artefacts and coins that were once the everyday items of use
by our ancestors, but those glass barriers denied you the privilege of
making that physical contact with the past. Again, you certainly
weren’t alone.
Until about three decades ago that
privilege was reserved for the lucky few such as archaeologists, museum
staff, historians, and scholars.
Archaeologists, of course, would normally have been the first to touch
any object that came out of the ground after having been lost or
deliberately hidden for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. These
finds would then have been forwarded to museums, which had the task of
cleaning and conserving the artefacts prior to them being studied by
experts and scholars. Only then would a select few of these treasures
be put on display for the public to admire.
Towards the end of the 1960s, however, new technology appeared that
would change that system and grant the privilege of handling old or
ancient finds to the mainstream public. The hobby of metal detecting
had been born.
Early metal detectors were quite rudimentary. Their basic design gave
them the appearance of a simple transistor radio attached to a stick
with a small coil on the end.
By the 1970s, however, metal detector technology had improved
dramatically. The machines that began appearing on the market were
vastly superior to their rather basic predecessors, and this was
reflected in the number of amazing discoveries that were being made.
The Water Newton hoard and the Thetford hoard are just two examples of
some of the fabulous treasures that came to light in those early years.
Enthusiasm for metal detecting grew and it became an increasingly popular
pastime. Visitors to the coast soon became accustomed to the strange
characters that could be seen pacing up and down the beach swinging
their electronic “wands” in search of lost valuables. |
