40 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
buried is one reason that Viking hoards
and Roman caches of silver denarii are
still there for the finding—or, for that
matter, for the stealing.
G
areth Williams, the curator of
early-medieval coinage and Vi-
king collections at the British Mu-
seum, became entranced by the Norse
world as a small child, while paging
through a library book. His grand-
mother, encouraging his passion, made
him a helmet and a shield out of card-
board. He went on to study medieval
history at the University of St. An-
drews, in Scotland, where he com-
pleted his Ph.D., and then joined the
British Museum. Williams, who has
a well-developed salt-and-pepper beard
and a lively manner, still needs little
persuading to dress up like a Viking;
he makes educational videos for school-
children in which he wears a belted
jerkin and a helmet made from leather
boiled in beeswax.
In the summer of 2015, he was
approached by a contact in the coin
trade. As Williams told me recently,
the contact informed him that sev-
eral pieces of what appeared to be a
Viking hoard were being offered to
dealers. Some of the coins were Two
Emperors, a type so rare that numis-
matists knew of only two extant ex-
amples: one was discovered in 1840,
the other in 1950. A Two Emperor
coin had never appeared on the open
market, and a single one was valued
at a hundred thousand dollars. A hoard
with a substantial number of rare coins
could be worth more than ten mil-
lion dollars. The fact that individual
coins were being offered to dealers
suggested that the hoard was in dan-
ger of being broken up and vanish-
ing onto the black market. Accord-
ing to Williams, the contact told him
that he hadn’t personally seen the coins
but “understood immediately from
the description that this must be un-
declared treasure.”
The word “treasure” conjures every-
thing from a religious relic to a pirate
chest spilling over with booty. But
in British law the term has a specific
meaning: the Treasure Act of 1996
defines a treasure as any object that is
more than three hundred years old and
at least ten per cent gold or silver. Be-
cause finds of single coins are quite
common, they are exempted from this
rule, no matter their metallic content
or rarity, but a find of two or more
coins in the same place—and certainly
of a hoard—qualifies as treasure, and
the finder is legally obliged to report
the discovery to local authorities.
The Treasure Act was passed, in
large part, because metal detecting
had become such a popular activity.
During the Second World War, the
technology was used to help sappers
find buried mines, but by the nineteen-
seventies detectors had become con-
sumer products that were relatively
inexpensive and easy to use. Hobby-
ists began spending their Sundays
scanning beaches, parks, and archeolo-
gical sites. Scholars warned that trea-
sure hunters were vandalizing history,
seizing finds as trophies and subvert-
ing the possibility of archeological
interpretation by destroying the con-
text of their discoveries. Detectorists
resented the stigmatizing of their
hobby: many of them are amateur his-
tory buffs who eagerly take their finds
to local museums. As with so many
aspects of English life, the conflict
was inflected with class antagonism;
working-class hobbyists often felt that
they were being maligned by a pro-
fessional élite.
In 1983, two detectorists in Surrey
found a number of coins at the site of
a Romano-British temple in the vil-
lage of Wanborough. They informed
local curators, but before the site could
be properly excavated illicit treasure
hunters, known as nighthawks, de-
scended. As many as forty of them
scanned the site by moonlight, plun-
dering antiquities and selling them
for profit; some dealers bought ob-
jects straight out of the ground. The
looting of Wanborough helped usher
in the Treasure Act. It replaced an-
cient common law holding that, when
the owner of a buried treasure could
not be identified, it became the prop-
erty of the Crown. Under the terms
of the current law, treasure still be-
longs legally to the Crown, but in prac-
tice it often ends up in a museum. (In
the U.S., comparable laws vary from
state to state, but most of them stip-
ulate that someone who finds an ob-
ject of value or a stash of money is en-
titled to keep it if the owner cannot
be located.)
The Treasure Act provides an in-
centive for detectorists to declare their
discoveries by establishing the right to
a reward for the finder, who typically
receives half the market value; the other
half goes to the landowner. Some forty
Finds Liaison Officers across the U.K.
urge detectorists to report not just dis-
coveries of gold and silver but also
those of more humble metals, which
can help explain the daily lives of ear-
lier Britons: fallen brooch pins that
might indicate the route of a Roman
pathway; copper pennies dropped in
a medieval marketplace.
Last year, detectorists in England,
Wales, and Northern Ireland were re-
sponsible for thirteen hundred trea-
sure finds, far exceeding the number
made by professional archeologists.
The expansion of the pastime has been
encouraged by a popular sitcom, “De-
tectorists”—created by and starring
Mackenzie Crook, of the original ver-
sion of “The Office”—about the quest
of two amateurs to make a great dis-
covery. (“It’s basically the Holy Grail
of treasure hunting.” “Well, no, the
Holy Grail is the Holy Grail of trea-
sure hunting.”) The show’s represen-
tation of the detectorists is wistful;
their search is not just for treasure but
for companionship and masculine
identity. The hobby is so predomi-
nantly male that the code of conduct
of one large Facebook group reminds
members that it is not a dating site,
and advises, “Please do not contact the
ladies you may fancy and send inap-
propriate proposals.”
Detecting tends to be either a sol-
itary pursuit or undertaken in trusted
pairs, with a pact to share spoils. Prac-
titioners establish personal territories,
known as permissions, by developing
relationships with farmers, whose
freshly plowed fields can dislodge new
