Originally from Florida, Yara Souza is an archeology student at the University of Newcastle, in England. Sick, she had to give up participating in her first excavation in 2024. The budding archaeologist, however, caught up well this summer with an unexpected luck, reports the American magazine Popular Mechanics. After only an hour and a half of work in the ground of a site located in Relim (county of Northumberland), in the north of England, it exhumed … a medieval gold object dating from the IXe century.
The beginner did not come back to having found an archaeological piece of such importance so quickly. “I couldn’t believe that I had found something so quickly during my very first excavation”she said in a statement from her university. For her, it is a striking moment, almost restful, after the missed occasion of 2024 on the site of Birdoswald, near the Hadrian wall.
The choice of the Redesdale site for the 2025 archaeological excavation campaign is no coincidence. Already in 2021, an amateur prospector had discovered a similar object there. The place is crossed by the A68 road, heiress of Dere Street, a major Roman road which linked York to Edinburgh and also served the religious centers of Jedburgh (south of Scotland) and Hexham (north of England).
A strange artifact
The updated room, a few centimeters long and decorated at one of its ends, intrigues researchers. Since gold was reserved for the elites and bore a strong symbolic dimension, the object could have had a religious role or ceremonial. Some specialists even believe that he may have been voluntarily buried in this strategic location.
Built by the legions between 79 and 81 AD, Dere Street has long been borrowed, well after the end of Roman domination in Great Britain. For James Gerrard, professor of Roman archeology in Newcastle, the discovery of Yara Souza clearly shows the high status of travelers who still frequented this secular road in the Middle Ages.
The artifact, considered exceptional by experts, will be analyzed in detail before being presented to the public at the Great North Museum: Hancock, Natural History Museum in Newcastle.
