If Anita will briefly indulge continued discussion of a 7th-century discovery...My understanding is that the majority of the Staffordshire Hoard was recovered from ploughzone (or plowzone, if you must).   Many of the objects found by the metal detectorist were in fact sitting on, or near, the surface of the field following recent ploughing activity.   How five kilos of gold - and another two of silver - escaped detection in ploughzone for the past 1300 years is a different issue.A team from Birmingham University subsequently went in to excavate the core area of the site where the metal detectorist made his initial find - which apparently came to several boxes even before the archaeological intervention.  Amateur video footage of the Birmingham field crew's work (they didn't want to give away the field's location by calling in a professional film crew) nonetheless shows continued recovery of artefacts through controlled excavation.While not wishing to diminish the research val
 ue of appropriately recorded ploughzone artefacts, it would seem that there's been less disturbance to intact archaeological contexts than might initially seem the case from some of the media reports.Alasdair Brooks