Lydia Prosser is the current Headley Trust intern for the Portable Antiquities Scheme working with Rebecca Griffiths, the Finds Liaison Officer for North and East Yorkshire, based at the Yorkshire Museum. Here, she talks about some of her experiences as Finds Liaison Assistant after her first three months in the role.

My main job as Finds Liaison Assistant is to identify the many varied and wonderful objects found by the public and record them on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database. This was a little daunting at first, but I’m finding that the more objects I identify, the easier it becomes.

It’s great to be working at the Yorkshire Museum due to the wealth of the museum’s collection and the wonderful people who work here. As part of my induction to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, I had a tour of the museum and its collections so that, in the words of the curator, I would ‘get to see the shiny things’ before getting used to looking at scraps of corroded metal!

This was fantastic: the Middleham Ring is even more impressive in the cold metal, although, admittedly, I am still ridiculously excited about the scraps of corroded metal that end up on my tray and don’t think that will change.

The best thing about working as a Finds Liaison Assistant is the variety (as well as the frequent cups of tea). A medievalist by trade, I did my first degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and I work at with the Portable Antiquities Scheme alongside doing a Master’s in Medieval Archaeology at the University of York.

Yet it’s nice to be able to develop my knowledge for periods other than the medieval and to cultivate my slightly neglected interest in the Roman era and the Neolithic.

One of my favourite things that I have recorded so far is this little dog-head stud which was found alongside another very similar to it. I was not able to find any close parallels to the stud so it remains a little mysterious, but it was found in an area with a high quantity of Early Medieval finds so I would stake my claim that it is also Early Medieval.

The detail on the stud is quite remarkable: if you look closely you can even see little zig-zag teeth! Here’s the record for it on the PAS database: https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/864965

Part of my role is also going out with Becky to meet the detectorists at Club Days and holding Finds Days where members of the public can bring us what they have stumbled across or uncovered. We recently held a Finds Day in Yorkshire Museum and I was impressed by the diversity of people who attended, all connecting to the past in different ways and curious to find out about their particular artefact or groups of objects.

The next Finds Day at the Yorkshire Museum is 1 December 2017, come along if you have anything you’d like to show!

Find out more about our Finds Days here or visit the PAS website for more information.