Piledal Revisited

A Test of Metal Detectors on a Bronze Age Site

Abstract

Metal detectors are increasingly coming to use in Iron Age and medieval archaeology, but in theory it should be possible to use them on some Bronze Age sites as well. This article is a presentation of a test of detectors on a Late Bronze Age urn cemetery. The cemetery is situated near Ystad in Scania and was, due to destruction by ploughing, excavated in the 1970s. Most discovered urn graves in Scania from recent decades have been equally damaged, and the grave goods are therefore often missing. In just a few days of work, the experiment recovered as many objects as the excavation, objects of better quality and better preserved then these as well. We also tested if the method can help to determine whether a small hill is a ploughed-out grave mound or not, and discovered that it could.