Today we got up and went to see the HOARD at The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. The Keele and Staffordshire Universities’ Forensic Science units teamed up with the museum to have a hands on activities of how forensics solves problems and how some of the same skills used in Forensics are used in treasure hunting. It was a great day full of activities. Alexandra really loved the CSI parts: finding the “baddy” using shoe prints, fiber analysis and DNA. She also like panning for gold, using the microscope to search for gems and shoe prints. 
The Staffordshire Hoard (Staffordshire is the county where we live) “The largest ever find of Anglo-Saxon gold treasure has been unearthed in a Staffordshire field.
The finds, known as The Staffordshire Hoard, comprise in excess of 1,500 individual items, mostly gold, with some silver. Many are decorated with precious stones.
Most of the treasure appears to date from the seventh century, and the supreme quality ...indicates royal ownership. The hoard includes a strip of gold which bears a biblical inscription in Latin, quoting chapter 10 verse 35 of the Book of Numbers: “Rise up, o Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face”. ...
The vast majority of the items are ...war materials from the battlefield. The artefacts were discovered in what had been the heartland of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia which was militarily aggressive and expansionist during the seventh century under kings Penda, Wulfhere and Aethelred. Some items are decorated in what is known as ‘Anglo-Saxon Style II’ which consists of strange animals, interlaced around each other, with long intertwined jaws. Many objects are inlaid with garnets.
The hoard was first discovered in July (2009) by metal detectorist Terry Herbert on private farmland, with the written consent of the landowner. ” http://www.stokemuseums.org.uk/pmag/hoard/hoardpage
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