A tiny carved rosary bead found in the Thames mud is among a record number of historic finds made by mudlarks and metal detectorists.
The bone artefact is thought to be a memento mori, used to remind the wearer of their mortality, and shows a skull on one side and the face of a young woman on the other.
Caroline Nunnely, who found it in the summer of 2021, said she first noticed the skull sticking out of the mud on the foreshore of the river in the City of London while she was on her knees looking for finds.
She said: “I handed her to my friend and said ‘Hey look at this’ without really holding her or paying attention to her.
“He screamed and ran away with her, to be funny because he likes skulls, and then after a while he came back and we turned it around and realised it had another face”.
The self-confessed “scavenger” said she was helped in her search by an unlikely ally in the shape of the Thames Clippers whose powerful engines create a wash that takes away the top layer of mud on the foreshore.
She said: “Sometimes people say ‘there’s a big boat coming’ and we think stuff might appear.”
A picture of the artefact, believed to date from around 1450AD, was put on Instagram where it attracted the attention of Antiques Roadshow expert Geoffrey Munn who told her it was “a very rare find”,
The 61-year-old who works in a school in Brighton, started mudlarking five years ago, and said it was “a massive privilege” to be given a licence to search the foreshore.
She said: “I would come up and it would be a couple of hours of being really quiet staring at the ground.
“It’s very beautiful and it’s an amazing place down there. You can hear the city up high but sometimes it’s very hard to know what century you are in”.
The bead was included alongside a 3,000-year-old gold dress fastener and a a hoard of Iron Age gold coins concealed inside a hollow flint container in the British Museum’s latest Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) Annual Report.
The report showed there were 53,490 archaeological finds in 2022 with 1,378 being so valuable or historically important that they reach the threshold of Treasure cases – which must be reported to the authorities.
The museum’s interim director Mark Jones said the finds “reflects every part of human history, from the palaeolithic to more modern times, across the whole of England and Wales”.
