MCG Spring meeting presentation: The Staffordshire Hoard

The Staffordshire Hoard
Daniel Pett
dpett@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)

£3,285,000
Split 50:50 between landowner and finder (after being declared Treasure, and a Midlands Museum was identified as acquirer)

£50 - £100
Split 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

Flickrapi 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
Launch

Flickr daily views @ launch
* 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]
Always get lots of searches for our female Time Team staff
Very few people clicked through from staffordshirehoard.org.uk – were they stuck in the silo there?

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.uk
Some new pictures behind the scenes pictures of the hoard were released yesterday:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/
CC-NC-SA licenced

MCG Spring meeting presentation: The Staffordshire Hoard

by dejp3 on Jun 18, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

Statistics

MCG Spring meeting presentation: The Staffordshire Hoard — Presentation Transcript