The treasure hunters

On a raw November Morning, Cliff Bradshaw was working a potato field(5) in kent with his
metal detector when he heard a faint, high pitched whine through his earphones(4). it was the
tiniest possible signal, he says. I knew it couldn’t be iron because the machine would have
made a growling noise. I scuffed the ground with my foot and tried again. The sound became
more and more high-pitched as I drug down until it was shrieking in my earphone’.
3 weeks earlier he had found a rare seventh century gold coin on the same site, then 4 spindle
whorls, followed by a sliver strap-end from a Saxon belt and a gilded Saxon button brooch.
Yet he felt this was going tobe different. More than a foot below the surface, he saw the
gleam of what could only be gold. Buried sliver goes grey, bronze goes green and iron turns
rust, but gold coms out of the ground as brilliant as the do it went in. As a symbil of
permanence, there’s nothing like it. That is its magic-for the metalworker, for the collector,
for kings, for lovers, for treasure hunters.
BS threw his excavating spade to one side and scraped with his hands until he had exposed
the whole object. It was a corrugated cup made of sheer gold, savagely crushed on one side
where it had been struck by a subsoiling machine(3), but still beautiful. There were tiny
dots(2) all around the rim and it had a brood, decorated handle secured with lozenge shaped
washers(1). Because of its round base, in its crumpled state it looked like a misshapen heart.
I knew it was gold. I knew it was old. But there was no real jump for joy, says BS. I never
sell my stuff and I honestly didn’t think about the money. I was just shocked. The real
excitement for me was finding the prehistoric borrow where I was detecting-just a foot or so
of raised earth that was once as high as a house. It was difficult to see. no one had noticed it
before.
as he drove home with the cup, BS had a feeling that he had seen an object like it in one of
his archaeological books. he found what he was looking for, his cup so similar to the gold
Rillington Cup, found in Cornwall in 1837 by a tin worker(6), that it might almost have been
made by the same man. Bronze Age. Wow! It was like the find of 3 lifetimes. What I felt was
wonderment more than excitement.
he reported his find to an archaeologist, Keith Parfitt, who had good relations with local
metal detectorists. BS’s discovery in now famed as the Ringlemere Cup(7), only the second
example in Brita in of an Earl Bronze Age gold cup It dates from between 1700 and 1500
BC. Because the cup was more than 300 years old and mode of more than 10% gold, it
qualified as treasure(8) under the 1996 Treasure Act, and a reword of 270,000 reflecting its
value was divided equally between BS and the farmer(9) whose land he had been exploring.
Professional excuvation, with BS as part of the team, will continue on the site for many years,
yielding up more artefacts; more information about society in prehistoric Britain. It’s being
called a ritual landscape(10), he says. the floor our ancestors walked on. U can’t put a value
on that, can u?
This is how archaeological and museum curators would like every story of amateur treasure
finds to end. but they don’t. an astonishing 90 percent of all ‘treasure’ in Britain is uncovered
by ‘detectorists’, as they like to be known, sweeping the fields and hedgerows with metal
detector. The hobby took off in the 1970s and is now practiced by some 30,000 enthusiasts,
often in wretched wintry conditions when agriculture land is fallow. Most of them do it
because, like BS, they love the sense of ‘being in touch with the past’ and hove become
knowledgeable spare-time archaeologist in their own right. But a few blatantly in it for the
money and some sites have been wrecked beyond recovery by their depredations. Without an
accurate ‘findspot’, on exact provenance, all treasure is devalued and archaeology loses the
vital context it needs for on object to have real meaning 11B
Relations between the professionals and the amateurs have often been hostile, archaeologists
regarding nasty metal detectorists as ignorant plunderers and detectorists resenting snooty
archaeologists as high-handed and obstructive. Helped by the Act, which encourages people
to declare their finds by offering a reward determined by a panel of experts, and by the
contribution metal detecting obviously makes to our heritage, the two groups have reached a
state of respectful co-operation.
Richard Hobbs, the British Museum’s expert in prehistoric and early Europe, says it all
comes down to individuals. Some report everything, some will be tempted to slip a gold coin
into their boot. There are plenty of discreet out lets for stolen antiquities. Some countries
have a complete ban on metal detectorists or treat them harshly, he says. But we are after the
same thing. These objects don’t belong to any of us. Hopefully, we are rowing in the same
direction. 12B 13D
This certainly wasn’t true in the 1980s in Wonborough, Surrey, where the site of a Romano-
Celtic temple was plundered by detectorists ‘nightawks’ from all over the country. The
looting and wrecking of Wonborough was a turning point. It worsened
 Only the eagle-eyed will spot a fake
Do nature history distort reality? Of course they do. Go for a walk in a topical rainforest after
watching a programme about one and u will be in no doubt of that. On television, all kinds of
animals appear continuously all over the place. In reality, u may be lucky to see a single bird
or monkey. 22E
But are there distortions that are more serious than that? Does it matter that a programme
about the life of a polar bear, filmed for the most part in the Artic, includes shots of a mother
bear giving birth that were taken in a zoo-and that the commentary did not say so? That
depends on the programme . If the programme claimed to be recording the actual adventures
of an Artic explorer, then that would clearly be wrong. But if its aim is to document the life
history of the polar bear, then I believe that could be acceptable. Filming a polar bear birth in
the wild is virtually impossible. Trying to do so might well danger the lives of both the
cameraman and the cub, were the mother to be disturbed. So the only way to include shots of
that crucial event in a bear’s life is to film it in captivity 23C
It is acceptable – on occasion – to use film to suggest that something happened which did
not? Sometimes it is. That swoop by a peregrine falcon did not, in fact, result in the death of a
grouse. The puff of feathers rising into the sky was thrown into the air by one of the film
crew. With such a shot at his disposal, the skillful film editor was able to create a sequence
representing a successful peregrine hunt – hunt without it costing the life of a bird.
But such stagings must be done with care. Sometimes a film shows an event that not only did
not take place on that occasion, but has never happened-ever. The most notorious example
comes not from television but from the cinema. Producers working on a natual history
documentary for a well known film studio made a film about the Artic. Its highlight was a
sequence featuring lemmings. Every few years, according to a widely believed sstory,
lemming numbers increase to such an extent that the animals, swarming over the tundra,
eventually deliberately commit suicide by swimming out to sea and drowing themselves. So
the film team working in northern Canada paid local children to collect live lemmings. A few
dozen were then taken down to an enclosure on the banks of a river and filmed in such a way
that a few dozen appeared to be plague. They were then chivvied until they came to the edge
of the river bank and tumbled over it into the water. And the film-makers had their sequence.
The need for such tricks has, over the years, become less and less, lense have become more
powerful. The large cameras driven by clockwork that we had to use a few decades ago have
been replaced by electronic cameras, some no bigger than a lipstick, that can be strapped to
an eagle’s back or lowered down a mouse-hole. We can now, with infra-red light, record
what goes on in what appears to both animals and ourselves to be total darlness.
But, paradoxically, these huge advances in our ability to record reality have coincided with
other developments that enable us to falsify more convincingly than ever. Just as computer
imaging can bring long extinct dinosaurs back to life, so the same techniques could also make
living animals appear to do things that a cameraman failed to film in reality – maybe because
he was unlucky or because, in spite of what some book says, the animal in fact never behaves
that way. We can now combine pictures so perfectly that a natural history presenter could
appear to be crouching within a yard of a ferocious animal that he has never ever seen. That
has not happened yet, as far as I know. It would be nice to say that if u or I looked closely
enough, we could spot it. But electronic techniques are now so ingenious that such deceptions
could be almost undetectable.
In these circumstances, television producers and the organisations which transmit their work
have to guard their reputations for honestly with greater care than ever. The BBC Natural
History Unit in Britain already has a code governing the treatment of animals during filming.
The welfare of the subject is more important than the success of the film. There should be no
lighting that makes it easier for one animal to hunt another. It also lays down rules about
deceptions. Telling the story of an animal identified as an individual, but using shots of
several, is now impermissible. Other tricks and techniques we have used in the past, no
matter how well-intentioned, are no longer acceptable.
As film-makers trying to illuminate the natural world, we must be allowed to manipulate
images and use all the devices that recent technological advances have given us. But we must
also recognize our responsibilities to scientific truth. the events and the creatures we
chronicle are more than just entertainment that can be jazzed up to taste.
is likely to have benefited from advances in technology
may show something that never really happens
may nêd to include material not filmed in the wild
is likely to be perceived as ủnealistic by viewers
is likely to give a false impression of the amount of wildlife
may correct common but incorrect beliefs
may not actually show the event it pretends to show
 HYPOCHONDRIA
Every doctor recognizes them. The man who discovers a bruise on his thigh and becomes
convinced that it is leukemia. The woman who has suffered from heartburn all her life but
after reading about esophageal cancer has no question that she has it. They make frequent
doctor’s appointments, demand unnecessary test and can drive their friends and relatives –
not to mention their physicians – to distraction with a seemingly endless search for
reassurance. By some estimates, they may be responsible for 10 to 20 percent of the US’s
staggering annual health care costs.
Yet how we deal with hypochondria, a disorder that afflicts one of every twenty Americans
who visit doctors has been one of the most stubborn puzzles in medicine. Where the patient
sees physical illness, the doctor sees a psychological problem, and frustration rules on both
sides.
Recently, however, there has been a break in the impasse. New treatment strategies are
offering the first hope since the ancient Greeks recognized hypochondria 24 centuries ago.
Cognitive therapy(31), researchers report, help hychondriacal patients evaluate and change
their distorted thoughts about illness. After six 90-minute therapy sessions, one study found,
55 percent of the 102 participants were better able to do errands, drive and engage in social
activities. In the study, the patients, whose fixation on illness had greatly interfered with their
lives, did not see their symptoms disappear, but they did learn to pay less attention to them.
The hope is that with effective treatment, a diagnosis of hypochondria will become a more
acceptable diagnosis and less a laughing matter or a cause for embarrassment, said Or Arthur
J Barsky, director of psychiatric research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is
the lead author of the study on Cognitive therapy, which appeared in the Journal of the
American Medical Association.
An official diagnosis of hypochondria, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is
reserved for patients whose fears that they have a serious disease persist for at least 6
months(32) and continue even after doctors have reassured them that they are healthy.
Researchers have found that hypochondria, which affects men and women equally, seems
more likely to develop in people who have certain personality traits(33). The neurotic, the
self-critical, the introverted and the narcissistic appear particularly prone to hypochodriacal
fears, said Dr Michael Hollifield, and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of
New Mecico.
Sometimes patients become so fearful about their imagined illness that they exacerbate the
symptoms. A headache that you believe is due to a brain tumor is a lot worse than a headache
you believe is due to eyestrain. Dr Barsky said. In the most extreme cases, patients can worry
to the point where they develop delusions or become almost entirely disabled by fear.
The ancient Greeks used the word ‘hypochondria’ to describe symptoms of digestive
discomfort, combined with melancholy, that they thought originated in the organs of the
hypochondrium. The region under the rib cage. The term applied only to men. In women,
unexplained symptoms were attributed to hysteria, resulting from a misalignment of the
uterus.
This view prevailed for 2,000 years, until the 17 century, when symptoms of hypochondria –
digestive trouble, pain, convulsions, shortness of breath and heart palpitations – were seen as
arising from the brain, set off by fear, grief and other feelings. Thomas Sydenham, an English
physician, said that hypochondria in men and women should be considered the same
affliction.(34) Yet doctors could offer little in the way of treatment beyond the traditional
strategies of bloodletting, sweating and inducing vomiting.
In the 18 century, George Cheyne, a Scottish physician, described hypochondria as ‘the
English malady’, nothing that it occurred mainly in people of high intelligence and members
of the upper class, and was caused by moist air, variable weather, heavy food and sedentary
living. But traditional treatments still prevailed. In the 19 century, hypochondria was viewed
as melancholia, a term that covered everything from slight hypersensitivity to physical
symptoms, delusions and suicidal tendencies. Treatment became more humane: spa visits for
exercise, fresh air, nutritious food and relaxation. But some physicians still relied on old
methods, including potions and elixirs.
In the 20 century, Freud recognized that hypochondria had both psychological and physical
properties. Some doctors tried hypnosis and later psychoanalysis to help patients uncover the
psychological roots of their problem. But other doctors held that the suffering of
hypochondriacs must be ‘all in their heads’.
Today, just mentioning the word hypochondria to a patient, Dr Barsky said, can cause
trouble. ‘That comes across as. You’re telling me I’m faker, a malingerer, that it’s all in my
head’, he said. ‘It’s tremendously pejorative.’ Some experts have suggested that doctors drop
the word altogether, substituting the term ‘healthy anxiety’, which has fewer negative
connotations.