George Fowles is a young metal detectorist who has been recording with the scheme since 2015. George and his brother Harry have recorded over 32 finds so far and record both at their local metal detecting club and at various museum finds days. As part of the Festival of Archaeology we wanted to find out …more
Between 1887 and 1888 my Great Granny Ellen emigrated with her parents at the age of 4 or 5 from Liverpool to Dublin. One hundred and twenty years later I retraced her steps emigrating from Dublin to Liverpool. Our stories linked through time and place are echoed in the stories of those objects which travelled …more
Every month at the Museum of Liverpool a hundred of so finds come in to be recorded on the database. Many of these finds have been recovered from the plough soil in the previous months and are well looked after by their finders. However there are always one or two which arrive ‘treated’ with olive …more
Happy New Year! Metal detecting is a popular hobby and metal detectors a popular Christmas present so I thought it would be a good time to blog about what’s what for new and young people taking up the hobby with the help of some Lego friends. To seasoned detectorists and archaeologists much of this is …more
National Museums Liverpool will be carrying out essential internal works to the Museum of Liverpool, which will require the venue to be closed for a period of several weeks. The Museum will therefore be closed from 31 December 2016 (closing at 5pm on Friday 30 December) and will re-open in late February 2017. Background …more
Merseyside Maritime Museum played host to the recent Portable Antiquities Scheme’s PASt Explorers’ conference on September 29th. The conference was a celebration of our volunteers with a variety of volunteer speakers discussing their experiences of volunteering with PAS. It was great to be able to listen to the experience of volunteers and to realise that …more
Sometimes all that glitters really is gold and every once in a while we are given a genuine piece of bling to record, such as this gold half noble of Henry IV, (AD 1399-1413) which was discovered in St Helens by a metal detectorist in 2012. Currently on the PAS database we have 1, 200,145 …more
A lot of the finds recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme tend to be made of metal, even though we are always more than happy to record objects made from other materials. We see lots of coins and buttons and buckles, but rarely do we get to record stone axes. Therefore this one, found while …more
