LOOKING FOR TREASURES
Twice a month, Brian Spencer gets up early in the morning, puts on old clothes and rubber boots, drives to the center of London, and parks near the city's River Thames. He goes down to the thick mud1 at the edge of the river. Walking slowly through the mud, he occasionally stops and picks something up. "I'm searching for objects that haven't been seen for hundreds of years," he says. "Last month I was lucky. I found two coins and an earring from the 18th century."(lines 1–5)
Spencer, a biology teacher, is one of the many people in England whose hobby is searching for very old objects. "The mud of the River Thames is a great place to find them," he says. "That's because, for over 2,000 years, London has been a large, crowded city, with many of its people living near the river. They used to throw in all sorts of broken household items2. Sometimes they dropped various small objects when walking in the streets, and those things were carried into the river by rain. So today, if you look very carefully, you might find some treasures lying in the mud."(lines 6–11)
Thousands of people in England also regularly go looking for old metal objects in fields in the countryside. One of these people is shop assistant Angela Carson. "Each of us brings a metal detector3. We move it slowly across the field, waiting for the sound it makes whenever it detects a metal object under the ground," she explains. "Of course, we can never go into a field without permission from its owners. But usually they are happy to allow us to search there because they're curious to see what we might find."(lines 12–17)
However, according to the law in England, people cannot always keep what they find. Any object that seems to be more than 300 years old must be examined by experts. If they decide that it is important, it is given to a museum and the government pays the finder4 what it is worth. "Last year, I took several objects I had found to be examined," says Carson. "Most of them were returned to me because they were not very special. But one was a rare silver coin. So the government paid me, and now it is on display in a museum in London!"(lines 18–23)
"A few people have become rich from finding valuable objects," says Spencer. "But nobody who goes searching in the mud or in the fields does it for the money. For us, it is just a wonderful way of connecting with the past."(lines 24–26)