Post by jadedsage on Oct 28, 2004 13:07:31 GMT -5
Maev Kennedy
Wednesday October 27, 2004
The Guardian
The Norfolk gardener was quite irritated at finding bits of rubbish mixed with the expensive topsoil he had bought: he picked out what he took to be foil from a champagne bottle and unrolled it - to reveal a lost world of Roman magic.
Experts from the British Museum and Oxford University have been poring over the scrap of gold foil, no bigger than a postage stamp, which went on display for the first time yesterday, with other archaeological finds reported in the past year.
"It meant nothing to me at first, I wondered if it was a scrap of decoration from a garment or a piece of furniture," said Adrian Marsden, the finds officer in Norwich whose desk it first landed on. "Then I suddenly saw the Greek letter A, and I knew what we must have."
It is a lamella, a magical charm, one of five found in Britain, and of no more than a few dozen from anywhere in the Roman empire.
The scrap of gold was one of 47,000 items reported by the public, most of them worthless but fascinating snippets of history.
Treasure - precious metal, coin hoards, and associated objects - must be reported by law, but for other finds there is a voluntary reporting scheme, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, whose annual report was launched yesterday. Treasure finds are predicted to rise to 500 this year, from 234 in 2002.