English Teenager Finds Bronze Age Ax Using a Metal Detector - The New York Times - 0 views
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On her third day out with a metal detector, Milly Hardwick, 13, found a hoard of items from more than 3,000 years ago. “We were just laughing our heads off,” she said.
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In Britain, the biggest successes often involve discoveries of treasures from ancient eras — like the 3,000-year-old ax that a teenager unearthed in eastern England in September.
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Milly, her father and her grandfather started dancing out of excitement, she said. They kept digging and found a hoard of other artifacts, including socketed ax heads, winged ax heads, cake ingots and blade fragments made of bronze. Milly’s findings were reported last month by The Searcher, a magazine about metal detecting.
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The Bronze Age in Britain lasted from 2,300 B.C. to 800 B.C., during a period referred to as prehistoric England, before there were written records,
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Bronze axes, she said, are “common enough that you would expect to find one, but rare enough to be excited when you do.” She added, “What’s unique about this one is the number of finds in one place, making it a hoard.”
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Over the last two decades, museums around Britain have acquired more than 5,000 artifacts that were found by members of the public, including Bronze Age axes, Iron Age cauldrons and Roman coin hoards.
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The growing popularity of metal detecting as a hobby meant that more historical objects were being found, including some of archaeological significance that did not meet the previous “treasure” definition, which had been in place since the 1990s. In 2019, 1,311 pieces went through the process in which a committee determines whether an item should be considered treasure, the highest number on record. In 1997, 79 pieces were found.
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Since her discovery, Milly has gone out on most Sundays with her grandfather and father in search of more items. She says that when she grows up, she wants to be an archaeologist.