BENEATH OUR FEET

“The past belongs to everyone.”

Lewis and Richardson, both of the British Museum, were inspired to assemble this book by the BBC TV series Digging for Britain, which describes the exploits of two English hobbyists who scour the countryside with their metal detectors. Readers will not regret looking it up. Organic objects decay (mostly); stone and bone survive; metals are a mixed bag. Amateur searchers, with or without detectors, find bottle caps, discarded toys, and metal scraps. Less often, items from distant times turn up—buttons, bullets, arrowheads, coins, jewelry, tools, and weapons. Almost no one finds a treasure trove or “hoard,” but “almost no one” among thousands of searchers produces a steady stream of bonanzas that will dazzle readers poring over the hundreds of crisp images. People on this island seemed to love burying stuff, and even Stone Age inhabitants had a taste for gold and knew what to do with it. Gold does not decompose, but it’s an exception, and most of the text describes efforts to find, extract, clean, reassemble, decipher, and interpret long-buried relics. Despite the lovely images, this book alone should not be anyone’s introduction to prehistoric Britain. The authors deliver a short summary of the era at the beginning of each chapter but stay focused on the objects themselves: the finders’ experience as well as that of the landowners. Rich hoards have sold for immense sums to private collectors, but precious metals and “treasures” belong to the nation, and public-spirited owners donate what they find.

A spectacular overview of extraordinary finds, dug up by ordinary people.