Finding Treasure
Taking a walk through the woods with the family pet can sometimes unearth some unexpected surprises. Sticks, stones or even, buried treasure.
In this week’s podcast, we discuss what counts as treasure and how you might distinguish it from trash. We survey the historical legal definitions of treasure, assess the likelihood of a detectorist striking gold and present examples of how finding treasure can ignite our imagination and become a bridge to the past. Finally, we share the treasures we would most like to discover ourselves.
- Detectorists jailed for stealing £12m Viking hoard of gold and silver
- Buried treasure: record UK haul fuelled by rise in metal detectorists
- A Survey of Metal-Detector Users in the UK
- Missing Gold Fabergé Egg Found by Scrap-Metal Dealer
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg, Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing what counts as treasure. Chris, what counts as treasure and I guess why am I asking you this?
Speaker B:Well, my sister put forward this topic and she now works for the company so we felt obliged to take employee recommendations seriously so we advanced it as a topic for our podcast. Anyway, she has a dog and she was out in the woods walking her dog and it sort of spent a long time digging something up and it came back with a stick and it seemed very pleased with itself and so she was wondering, you know, what constitutes treasure, buried treasure? What would you like to find in the woods and how would you distinguish what a treasure is versus a stick?
Speaker A:Immediately, my immediate reaction is that this feels similar to a podcast, another podcast we've done which is about talking with animals and there could be one where you'd get a confusion about, you're talking to a dog and say, I found this amazing treasure and the dog gets really excited because, oh me too, look, check out this stick I've got.
Speaker B:Yeah, well I think it's that interpretation of it but I would posit that a stick isn't a treasure but yeah, I mean, I suppose it makes a change from, you know, early morning dog walkers discovering bodies in the woods which always seems to be the classic one and if you go with the TV detective maxim that the person who finds the body is usually the murderer, there's a lot of homicidal dogs out there. Don't trust dog stroke dog walkers.
Speaker A:No, but I don't, I think even in the context of this example, the dog sounds like a bit of a moron because you can get sticks from above the ground.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, well maybe there was something, you know, particularly valuable, you know, maybe it had been chewed and buried by another dog and the scent of it was, you know, in some way.
Speaker A:So maybe it had some dog feature that was spectacular.
Speaker C:We didn't know. I think it was probably the achievement of digging it out that it was most pleased about.
Speaker B:Yes, well maybe, maybe part of the treasure is the recovery, you know, the Mary Rose.
Speaker A:The real treasure was the journey was, no, what is it? The friends we've found along the way or something. I think we're at the risk of being a bit whimsical here, but aren't we aided in this podcast? What is treasure? I'm sure one of you and your research has dug it up. Thank you. Which is that.
Speaker B:That was a little treasure, frankly.
Speaker A: nt dating all the way back to: Speaker B:I mean, they don't put them there to be stolen, do they? They put them there to utilise.
Speaker C:If they get a ghost version, why do they need to bury the real one? Well, maybe you can't get the ghost version unless you've got the real one there.
Speaker B:Somebody nicks the real version. They've taken your spiritual boat and man.
Speaker A: then suddenly one day in the: Speaker B:So in contrast to the to the lore of the playground of finders keepers losers keepers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A: reasure stats there. Yeah. In: Speaker B:There's a lot of land without treasure buried under it.
Speaker A: those old ring pulls from the: Speaker B:But psychologically, right, I'm just trying to think this through. I have been sort of fossil hunting, but I've never been out with a metal detector looking for treasure. So when you get the signal, right, what sort of ratio of false alarms to actual genuine metal objects do you think you get from experience? Let's call it 50-50. 50-50, okay. Do you explore every one then? So it's not like, you know... So at the beginning of the day, you do. And at the end of the day, you're just going, sod this for a game of LARP.
Speaker A:What's the point of continuing to do it if you're not going to investigate your hits? Yeah, that's the point. There's a tipping point somewhere where you'll start it off and if you keep getting a solid signal, you go, right, I'll do it. And then it's hard to explain. But there's a point where it all intersects between your own tiredness, how cold it is or not, what's happening with the signal, whether you decide to keep doing it or not. But of course, you'd never want to walk away, really, because this could be the one. So you kind of end up hating yourself if you do start abandoning them. So even though it's 50-50, you know, maybe only 10% I might abandon. 50% is very high, by the way. I feel like most pieces of land don't have metal in them. So if you're detecting, you've got a 50% chance. Most pieces of land do have metal in them. No, what I mean is, for any given place you could wave your metal detector, there's a much lower than 50% chance that it has a piece of metal in it.
Speaker B:Yeah, but is it quite rare that the metal detector actually makes a noise?
Speaker A:Yeah, how often does it go off? Let's say you walk, you're doing a minute, you're doing one minute of detecting. How long does it take before you get a next hit on average? Usually a couple of minutes. There are some really hardcore detectorists out there as well. So I think we need to acknowledge that you don't sound like an expert to me. And they probably, if they were listening, they'd be shaking their heads and shouting.
Speaker B:No, but nevertheless, it's an insight into the psychology. And the other thing I'm quite interested in is when you get a buzz and you start digging, I mean, I don't know what the range is of the, you know, the penetrative range of So it gives you some sense of the depth. Of the depth. But obviously, you know, I mean, presumably the size of the object is important as well. So basically, you must dig quite a lot and not actually find the bit of metal that the detector was detecting.
Speaker A:It sometimes feels like that. And that's because I'm also relatively new to the hobby. And I don't know if I'm doing it in the right way. But it sometimes feels like that, that the metal just disappears.
Speaker B:But I would have thought digging is fairly, fairly fundamental human skill.
Speaker C:I suppose you'd have to be fairly meticulous in sifting through the material you're digging out. Absolutely. Because these things can be quite small, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker A: s, late: Speaker B:And they were all sort of explored the same land. That doesn't sound like a very good thing to me.
Speaker A:If you're doing it in a big row, though, presumably you can do it systematically like combine harvesting. There is a kind of a system to it. And also, in this occasion, we were doing the land that hadn't been detected previously. And so that at least gives you a, you know, it doesn't. Yeah. But actually, the most fun I have with our metal detector and actually just sometimes just to make sure it's working is I have to put my hands out like this because I've got loads of metal in my arms from a very serious accident I had where the metal was put.
Speaker B:So one day someone might be digging you up. Exactly.
Speaker A:This is what I always say. They'll dig me up and go, bloody hell, what happened to this poor bloke? And it's fun for all the family when daddy sets off the metal detector using his arms. Anyway, I feel I've taken up a good 10 minutes there. Well, I mean, it's kind of relevant, right? I mean, it's really kind of at the heart of what we're talking about. I don't know what, Peter, move us on. Move us on.
Speaker C:We've discussed what is legally considered treasure, but I think treasure as a concept is quite sort of relative and personal and subjective, isn't it?
Speaker A:And thank you, Peter, because really that's what's bringing us to the heart of this. Otherwise, what's the point of this episode? So go, take us off, lift us off, Peter.
Speaker C:I mean, so a more general definition of treasure is anything that one would value that you discover accidentally, serendipitously. So in the sense of what you value, there are certain shared things. So we all value, to a degree, money because it can buy you other things. But there are certain things that I would value that Fraser perhaps wouldn't. And for example, the exploration of knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge is something that Fraser shuns at every opportunity. So yeah, what does one personally value that you've discovered serendipitously, I think, is an interesting thing that tells you a lot about people.
Speaker A:But also, does it have to be serendipitous?
Speaker C:Well, I think my definition, I posited it does. It has to be something you discover.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. By the way, before you carry on, I'm not going to let that go, by the way. I'm the one who goes out in bloody muddy fields in the search of history and knowledge, right? In the search of loot, that's what you're looking for. Yes, yeah. Peter, anything more, apart from insults to me, anything more to say there before we move on to Chris or Nick?
Speaker C:Well, I think the definition of one, well, certainly my definition of, the things I would count as treasure or the things with the quality of treasuriness have definitely shifted. And now I've got a young child and I'm helping run this business and I've got loads of
Speaker A:So now you treasure isolation and peace.
Speaker C:Yes, exactly. So I treasure quiet time. It's time, actually. It's really just time. So when a meeting gets cancelled that I was going to be at and I don't have to do anymore, it's like, yes, I've got an hour of my life back again that instantly gets eaten up by something else I got to do. But on the rare occasion, it'll be a half an hour to sort of just have a cup of tea and stare out the window. Sure.
Speaker A: into it and it's sort of the: Speaker B:Of wishing for four more wishes. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:No, he just finds a whole time portal where he can go in and spend a few hours, days. So that's this. OK, so you're talking about him getting away from his baby. Well, his baby would still be would be frozen in time while he was in the time portal. So yeah, there we are. That's useful data there. Where are we going with this?
Speaker B:Well, I think in terms of trying to define treasure, right? So we've got a legal definition of treasure for the purposes of, you know, ownership of valuable items found under the ground. And we've got sort of Peter's sense of, you know, subjective value to the individual and there being an unexpected element of it. I think there's actually in Roman law, the, you know, predating English common law and maybe acting as the foundation for it in part. But there's this concept, they had the concept of the treasure trove and in defining it, they talked about it being, you know, an ancient deposit of money of which no memory exists so that it has no present owners. And I think for me, the additional thing as well, as well as it being unexpected, there's an element for a treasure, which is that it has been lost and it's rediscovered again. So, you know, like my sort of example that came to mind recently was one of our colleagues developing a piece of software that's designed to mimic kind of an air defence system, right? And so they've built effectively this game and I think it was Nick was telling me about it and I said, oh, that sounds a bit like asteroids and the computer game Asteroids. And I'd forgotten all about asteroids. And so I went and I looked online, it's effectively been lost to me. I went and looked online and found some website where they've got a live asteroids, you know, play game. And I spent this sort of 10 or 15 minutes playing Asteroids and it was brilliant. But it was the fact that it had been lost and then almost like, you know, the prodigal son, you know, it's sort of that sense of, you know, what is lost is more precious to you when found.
Speaker A:Sorry, I just want to say something controversial, which is that modern computer graphics aren't good enough to play Asteroids because the original Asteroids were used vector graphics, which means that it drew a line. The asteroids are all drawn by a rapidly moving line, specially, you know, designed for Asteroids and you can't get that effect on a pixel screen of any kind. Can you not? No, it's just not the same. Like there's something really luminous about those original arcade games.
Speaker B:Well, and that brings me on to another point, which is kind of linked to this, I think, which is that, you know, a treasure, like this notion of something coming from the past that is better than what we have today, right? You know, like, so you've like Sutton Hoo, right? You know, the classic treasure find. When I went to the, I've actually been to Suffolk to the site and also, you know, seen the stuff in the British Museum, like lots of people. But when you look at that, you go, there's no way we would make this kind of intricate stuff today. And look at this, you know, this comes from the past. And obviously, you know, in the Middle Ages, you know, they looked back to things from, you know, ancient Rome as being, you know, highly valuable and treasures. And so I think there's something about capturing something from the past that is better than what we have today as well.
Speaker A: ring pulls. I'm a big fan of: Speaker B:Yeah, well, I had a similar sort of experience to do with, I was walking with a former colleague of mine who was, he was an archaeologist, he did an archaeology degree. And he always, there's this particular site near us that's kind of got a lot of kind of prehistoric artifacts that are found there. And he spotted this kind of bit of flint and he said, oh, I think this is a scraper. And I wasn't aware of what a scraper is, but basically to scrape the fur off hides, you know, to prepare them for clothing.
Speaker A:I think it's to scrape the layer of fat from the inside of the hide, actually, because the fur is the bit you want.
Speaker B:Well, it depends. It depends on. Yeah, but essentially to prepare the.
Speaker A:I'm not, I'm not a Neolithic man, so I don't really know.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't want woolly pants, for example, would you? The wool goes on the outside. Yeah. Anyway, carry on. Anyway, so I had this scraper and I sort of put it in my hand and my kind of index finger just curled around the top of it. And it and it sat there and the thumb sort of went around this notch and I was like, oh, right, yes, that that kind of that connection with somebody who would have held it, you know, thousands of years previously to to maybe not scrape the wool off their pants, but to do something else was was was a kind of profound moment of connection, really.
Speaker A: en for a coin that's from the: Speaker B:Well, I can I can go first, I think. So in terms of what I'd like to find, I'd like to I think for me, I'd like to find some sort of magical artifact. I think, you know, whether whether it was actually magical or it was just thought to be magical. Previously, I always look back on, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark and think about that. That idea of finding, you know, the Ark of the Covenant or, you know, some amulet that that that may or may not have mysterious powers.
Speaker A:I just think the Holy Grail, the Holy Grail. I think what's so what's so brilliant about the ring in Lord of the Rings is the way that it's lost. Despite its awesome power, it just gets lost. And then the finding of it is so it's so every day. It's great. I think that is really, really good.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah. And and that it has this will of its own to be to, you know, move its way through history as it as it sees fit. But but yeah, no, that that kind of thing. But in terms of what I value, well, that is also something I suppose in a way that I would like to rediscover. Because I'd like a new back, right? I've had back troubles now for for 25 years or so. And and at the time, I didn't value having a back that wasn't bust, you know. And and it would give me so much, so much pleasure to have a new back. I think that the thing that I I currently treasure most would be to not have a ruined.
Speaker A:Well, we talked about we talked about dogs finding bodies in the woods. Get yourself a dog. Go find yourself a recently deceased person and just simple. Yeah, back transplant.
Speaker B:Yeah, spine transplant. Yeah, I suspect it having been buried underground. And the fact that spine transplants aren't a thing might might mean. Yeah, that that isn't quite as simple as it sounds. Quibbles, quibbles.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah. Peter? Well, I've already expressed that the thing I sort of value is that those bits of time I get back. Peace and quiet. I would definitely love to find that time portal in the woods. Also, you could lend it to Chris and he can go forward to the future when back transplants are a thing.
Speaker B:I'd rather go back to the past and do things that didn't ruin my back. What did you do to ruin your back? We'll come back to you in a minute, Peter. Oh, essentially, too much, too much physical activity as well.
Speaker A:You were an aerobics instructor in the 80s. That's right. Yeah, there's one point I don't have back troubles. There you go. The dangers of physical activity. Yes, straighted.
Speaker C:Peter, I just worry about your heart and cardiovascular system.
Speaker B:You can do heart transplants, though. So, yeah, exactly.
Speaker C:But yeah, there's something in what Chris is saying. I think now in my 40s, only just, I'm still the youngest here. I'll always be the youngest here. That's what I've got going for me. But the sort of starting to feel the lost youth thing really creep up, really start to hit now. So, yeah, some elixir or some kind of amulet in the woods that gives me a sort of youth when I'm wearing it would be great. Hmm. OK.
Speaker A:I don't like anyone's answers so far. I've got three real things which I'd like to find. OK. So I'm going to do, we'll do me and then you, Nick. Right. So for me, there's nothing I'd like to find, actually. Wow. You've got it all. I've got it all. I mean, that's everyday, you know.
Speaker C:Or he's about to find it because he's got a metal detector. He's got trains to find it.
Speaker A: or identity photos from about: Speaker C:I was about to say, it'd be very odd if you found recordings of your kids in the woods. I'd be quite worried about that.
Speaker A: egg yet. But give me time. In: Speaker B:But if you did, right? Let's say you found one and it was worth 50 million pounds, right? Would you keep it?
Speaker A:No.
Speaker B:No, right. So what you're really after is 50 million pounds, isn't it?
Speaker A:So what you treasure is 50 million quid. No, I do like the idea of finding the Fabergé egg. I'm after the finding of the egg. OK. I'm not, yeah, I found it on someone's land and you had to give it back to them. Yeah, yeah. So we can make a rule, Nick, that you can have this and this can be your desire. However, it can only be you can only on the condition that you then have to keep the egg. All right. I'm happy with that as well. I mean, I see the finding of the egg is it'd be great. It's the closest you can get to, you know, finding the Ark of the Covenant, I think, and still be potentially real. The JFK's brain. Which was preserved after his death, given, I think, to someone, maybe a member of his family or something, is subsequently disappeared. No one knows. He was shot in the head, right? Yeah. So wouldn't that be cool to have his brain? And the final one, and I'm surprised Chris didn't say this, is the Jules Rimet Trophy, which was the old World Cup, which was stolen.
Speaker B:Found by the dog.
Speaker A:Yeah. But then he was stolen again or something, wasn't it? It's disappeared. Does that reside in Brazil now, though? No, I think it hasn't disappeared, the Jules Rimet Trophy. I thought it disappeared forever.
Speaker B:Well, it was certainly won for keeps by the Brazilians. Yeah. And was it Tickles? What's the dog called? Pickles. Pickles. There you go. Pickles, the dog.
Speaker A:Pickles found the Jules Rimet Trophy.
Speaker B:Yes, it was temporarily stolen, miss. Basically, I think someone stole it and was then like, oh, I'm going to struggle to sell this, aren't I? And discarded it. And Pickles, the dog, found it in a bush or something.
Speaker A: vered by Pickles. But then in:
