Last year, British teenager Milly Hardwick was exploring a field with her metal detector. Suddenly, the device started to beep—the detector had sensed something metallic hidden underground. It turned out to be an amazing archaeological find: a collection of 3,000-year-old axes and blade fragments from the prehistoric Bronze Age.
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Teen Treasure Hunter
JAMES LINSELL-CLARK/SWNS
ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME FIND: Milly Hardwick, 13, used her metal detector to locate a hoard of ancient artifacts in eastern England.
SWNS.COM
METAL DETECTED: This ancient ax head is made of bronze—a mixture of the metals copper and zinc.
Metal detectors use electricity to generate a magnetic field—an invisible force field created by moving electric charges. As the detector sweeps back and forth over the ground, the magnetic field moves too. It causes any metal object it encounters to emit its own magnetic field in response, which the detector senses. “It’s like it senses a disturbance in the force,” says Brian Jones, a physicist at Colorado State University.
Metal detecting is a popular hobby in Britain. In the past two decades, museums there have acquired more than 5,000 artifacts discovered by members of the public like Milly.
OXFORD ARCHAEOLOGY LTD
MILLY’S DISCOVERY: An archaeologist photographs a pile of artifacts Milly helped discover.
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