mcg spring meeting presentation: the staffordshire hoard

The Staffordshire Hoard

Daniel Pettdpett@britishmuseum.org

Nothing could have prepared me {…} I saw boxes full of gold, items exhibiting the very finest Anglo-Saxon workmanship. – Duncan Slarke

The Hoard

......for one warrior stripped the other, looted Ongentheow's iron mail-coat, his hard sword-hilt, his helmet too, and carried graith to King Hygelac; he accepted the prize, promised fairly that reward would come, and kept his word. .... they let the ground keep that ancestral treasure, gold under gravel, gone to earth, as useless to men now as it ever was. ~ Beowulf (Heaney)

£3,285,000Split 50:50 between landowner and finder

(after being declared Treasure, and a Midlands Museum was identified as acquirer)

£50 - £100Split 50:50 between landowner and

finder (after being declared Treasure, and an acquiring museum is found)

Normally, Treasure comes in at around

Web development

• 1 week before inquest• Very loose brief

provided by Staffs CC– Black!!– White writing– Set of photos provided

from Dan Buxton & Dave Rowan

– Everything to be released under CC-NC-SA

• Cost £0• Built in 12 hours with

help from Kate Kelland• Images to be offloaded

onto flickr for resilience• Hosted on our new

servers• Built with customised

textpattern (PHP) CMS

“A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use CMS” www.textpattern.com

Opensource!

Textpattern in the wild (Heritage)

Thames Discovery Palestine Exploration Fund Prescot Street Dig

Simple interfaces

Combined these

Flickr api leveraged

Village game

Initial impact

• 2000 conn/per sec to server on launch day

• Never went offline• Only experienced slow

performance• Content caching helped get

the site through the initial onslaught

• ¼ million visitors in 3 days

Day Pages

24/09 1,306,545

25/09 1,772,572

26/09 553,285

27/09 351,070

28/09 267,385

29/09 164,039

[..] Present ~ 25,000

Launch

Flickr daily views @ launchDay Flickr views

24/09 281,970

25/09 161,630

26/09 59,200

27/09 47,900

28/09 32,770

29/09 22,030

* As far as I am aware, this doesn’t include API views, of which the website made use and I used elsewhere.

Referrers and search [flickr]

Very few people clicked through from staffordshirehoard.org.uk – were they stuck in the silo there?

Always get lots of searches for our female Time Team staff

Flickr stats

Processed from - http://stats.vispillo.org

Shallow surface find

New images captured

Kevin Leahy at work

Unpacked vs packed

Fred Johnson in his new suit

Misleading press

• Never any suggestion BM would acquire

• Stated from the start we would only step in as last resort

• Out of c.800 cases we acquired 10 last year

Front page feature bbc.co.uk

The BBC broke the embargo, and revealed the findspot! The site was sanitised by launch day.

Daily Telegraph: 25th September 2009

www.finds.org.uk

All hoard details will go on here. Each record will have:• full description• photograph(s)• geospatial attributes• multi level access• ability to study objects with comparanda

A typical record

The end.

www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk or www.finds.org.ukSome new pictures behind the scenes pictures of the hoard were

released yesterday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/

CC-NC-SA licenced