Exploring the relationship between metalwork, ceramic material and historic human activity.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a project run by the British Museum which records finds made by metal detectorists. The result of this project is a vast quantity of closely dated and accurately located finds which can shape our understanding of the landscape since the Iron Age. This data is, however, currently underutilised within studies of the historic landscape, in part due to issues of interpretation; how are the distribution of finds related to settlement, agriculture and other activities? My PhD research will compare the distribution of ceramic material produced by 'fieldwalking' with metalwork recovered by detecting to identify the signatures of settlement, manuring and other human activity in the pattern of small metal finds recovered. From this, a method to utilise the relationship between metalwork and past landscapes will be developed, something that can be applied to data from the PAS to change our understanding of settlement in the Roman and medieval periods.
Through the use of test metal detecting and fieldwalking in East Suffolk, on targets provided by traditional forms of archaeological study, typical assemblages recovered from archaeological sites of a known date and size can be ascertained, enabling the relationship between ceramics, metalwork from the plough soil and past human activity to be understood. This relationship can then be extrapolated to aid in the identification of settlement and past human activity in PAS data, accounting for biases inherent in the method of deposition of objects in the plough soil as well as the patterns of searching by metal detectorists.