Treasure hunters have re-discovered a long lost piece of Henry VIII's crown

Originally published at: Treasure hunters have re-discovered a long lost piece of Henry VIII's crown | Boing Boing

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Julian Evan-Hart, editor of Treasure Hunting Magazine, said he was “99.9%” sure it was the real thing.

Editing a looting propaganda magazine does not make you an expert on 16th century religious art.

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So far all of the digging in my yard has turned up…a bunch of dirt that I put plants into. I keep hoping I’ll find pirate treasure, though!

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This seems very very very hard to believe. Of the tiny minority of people who spend time treasure hunting, one of them just happened to check the 0.000000001% of Garbage Island’s topsoil that contained, not just a discarded golden jewel, but a specific artefact with a history that is remembered centuries later?

Unless there is some missing part of the story, this seems less probable than a winning lottery ticket being struck by lightning in a haystack. I gots to assume it’s a forgery, or at least he is lying about the provenance.

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The improbable is not always the same as what is impossible.

I mean, this is the country wherein they somewhat recently found Richard III buried under a parking lot.

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For the rest they should check the house of the widow next door.

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It’s a question of degree though. Richard III was found by people who weren’t looking for graves, and a grave is bigger, and anything in a town will be dug up sooner or later, and a person is much more likely to be buried in the first place than a jewel, etc.

Unless there is a reason someone might dig where this figurine was left – like if it was in a house, a notable location, or even a road or hedge – the odds appear to be slim enough that you can call it “impossible” without fear of contradiction.

The finder is a detectorist, so it’s not like he was digging down at a random spot and happened to (literally) strike gold. Rather he was scanning a fairly large area for any sort of metal find. Still unlikely that he would find something like that but with the tens of thousands of detectorists out there sooner or later they must hit upon something like this.

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tudors-henry-sneer

also, I believe Hank had the imperialist shitbag’s great great grand uncle executed, correct?

tudors-cromwell-um-no

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@OP is a shitbag, signed Oliver Cromwell the 9th

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I acknowledge that stuff gets found all the time, and that the UK has a critical mass of detectorists operating in a target-rich environment. And yet I get a very splinters-from-the-cross vibe from this. How many other major finds does this guy have? How many more will he have?

I have a metal detector. I took it around a marker that noted where my ancestors stopped on the Potawatomi Trail of Death hoping maybe I’d find something I could date to back then. I found pull tabs and a coors light can from the 80s.

In general, it sucks the US is so new most of it has no chance of finding cool things old roman coins or bits from a royal crown.

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But… you never know!

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But what was his gold dance like?

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At least you’re less likely to destroy archaeology in the process?

(Note: this is strictly about metal detecting. Native American archaeology is still very much at risk in the US, as is historical archaeology, but in both cases it isn’t the scourge of metal detectorists that are the reason)

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Don’t know who Patryn are but Charles I was not Henry’s son.

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Or brave saviour of the parliamentary system? We report, you decide.

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It just says that he was painted standing next to it, not that he was Henry’s son, though.

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Mass slaughterer of the Irish? We report, you decide.

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Well they kept on failing to vote for him so he had them purged repeatedly until they did and then just became dictator for life. So not really that.

Whatever else he may have been, democratic was not it.

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