What do you do when you find artefacts?! Do you put them in a museum, sell them in an auction, or just keep the items? Rukiye Shahla Babaoglu (9)

Hi Rukiye,

The artefacts we find are carefully cleaned and catalogued, before being sent to specialists to study. These specialists can include people who are experts in particular materials, such as pottery, animal bone or metal work, or period experts who study the Romans, or the Medieval period and so on. There are some experts who do, for example, pottery but are especially good at one period, like the Romans and are also the leading expert on a particular type of pottery such as Samien Ware.

The specialists write a report for us on their findings and we use this information when we write up our reports on an excavation. After we have done this, the artefacts are either stored safely for other people to study, or they are passed to museums to put on display if they are particularly important.

It is important to say that the owners of the artefacts are the owners of the land the artefacts came from. They usually make an arrangement with the archaeologist to pass the artefacts to a museum. However this is different if the artefacts are ‘Treasure’. This is a legal word meaning that they must be reported. Museums then have a chance to buy them for their collections from the owners.

Artefacts are ‘Treasure’ if:

They are gold or silver objects and over 300 years old.

They are a group of coins over 300 years old (but not for single coins).

If they are any prehistoric ‘base metal’ artefacts from the same archaeological feature.

Hope this helps!

Ian