Speaker: Dr Ed Caswell (Oxfordshire Museum Service)
Thursday 15th May 2025
7.45pm, The Northcourt Centre, Northcourt Road, Abingdon OX14 1NS
Every years tens of thousands of artefacts are found by members of public in England and Wales. The Portable Antiquities Scheme provides a free service to record these chance finds and has resulted in the largest database of its kind anywhere in the world. With over 50,000 objects now recorded from Oxfordshire alone, these data present numerous opportunities to tell new stories about our past both at a local parish level and at the macro scale. This presentation will present an introduction to the PAS, its aims, methods, recording biases and some of the stories that can be told with this ever growing archaeological resource.
Edward started as the Finds Liaison Officer for Oxfordshire in 2020 following volunteering with the PAS in Durham during his undergraduate studies and working as a Finds Liaison Assistant for Devon and Somerset. He has an undergraduate degree, masters and PhD in Archaeology from Durham University. He has also worked as a community archaeologist on excavations across England and worked with Historic England on a non-invasive survey placement.
Edward loves studying and writing reports for artefacts of all time periods. He is particularly passionate about the meta-analysis of legacy datasets (a posh way of saying looking at the patterns we can see in big datasets just like the PAS database!) and in understanding the nature scale and effects of the large social transformations occurring in Britain during the Bronze Age through integrating, burial, settlements, artefacts and landscape evidence.