Everyday and ceremonial objects that tell us how people lived, worked and worshipped.
In 1837 workmen taking stone from a burial cairn on Bodmin Moor found a gold cup beaten from a single sheet. It went to the Crown, spent a century in royal palaces, and now stands in the British Museum beside the Ringlemere Cup.
In 1939 a self-taught archaeologist uncovered the outline of a 27-metre ship under a Suffolk burial mound, and inside it the richest Anglo-Saxon burial ever found: a helmet, gold and garnet fittings and silver from Byzantium.
In 2001 a detectorist in Kent found a crushed gold cup in a ploughed field. It was a rare Early Bronze Age cup, and the excavation that followed his report found an ancient monument hidden beneath the field.
Found on the Isle of Lewis by 1831, the Lewis Chessmen are 93 pieces carved from walrus ivory and whale tooth in the late 1100s, among them the famous shield-biting warriors. They are now split between London and Edinburgh.
Over 21 years and more than 1,000 visits to Margam beach, detectorist Peter Hughes recovered around 870 coins from a ship wrecked in 1583. The collection is now on show in Swansea.
Found in 1989 by a man with a newly bought Radio Shack metal detector, the Boot of Cortez is the largest surviving gold nugget from the Western Hemisphere. It went back to auction in 2026 and failed to reach its reserve.
A thin strip of Bronze Age gold, found near Hilborough in Norfolk in 2025, has been declared Treasure. It probably came from a bracelet or torc worn 3,000 years ago, and Norwich Castle Museum hopes to acquire it.
A detectorist in the Chilterns found a hoard of Roman bronze objects, including a rare rattle complete with the peas inside it. He and the landowner have given the whole hoard to the Discover Bucks Museum.
