Ancient objects with modern meanings: museums, volunteers, and the Anglo-Saxon ‘Staffordshire Hoard’ as a marker of twenty-first century regional identity

ABSTRACT

The Staffordshire Hoard is the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever found. On display from soon after its discovery in 2009 during fundraising to secure it for the region, the Hoard has become a source of local pride in Staffordshire, receiving over a million visitors. This article explores the Hoard as a marker of identity, both in the past and in the present, and evaluates how the ‘treasure process’, museums, and museum volunteers are shaping public identification with the Anglo-Saxon past of the Mercian kingdom. Drawing on focus-group data, we argue that aspects of the naming and display of the Hoard have encouraged its inclusion in existing narratives of belonging and ‘authenticity’ in Staffordshire. Such archaeological discoveries have the potential to provide points of continuity between the post-industrial present and the distant past, and stimulate a reconsideration of the present status of the region in contemporary cultural and political discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Staffordshire Hoard
• material culture
• Anglo-Saxon Archaeology
• regional identity
• museum volunteers
• heritage

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding this research. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of staff at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, and at Birmingham Museums Trust and the Staffordshire Hoard Mercian Trail in facilitating this research. We thank the anonymous reviewers, editors and colleagues for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Funded by DCMS to encourage voluntary recording of archaeological objects found by the public in England and Wales; http://www.finds.org.uk.

2. Papers from a PAS symposium on the Staffordshire Hoard: http://finds.org.uk/staffshoardsymposium

3. Figures provided by the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

4. These extracts have been modified slightly to ensure anonymity and legibility.

5. ‘Morling and the Hoard’ was funded by Arts Council England's Cultural Olympiad programme.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Programme [grant number F/00 212/AM].