Staffordshire hoard worth ã3.5 million
The Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found, has been valued at ã3.28 million ($5.5m).
The independent Treasure Valuation Committee reached the figure after meeting at the British Museum on Wednesday.
The money will be split equally between the finder, Terry Herbert, and the landowner, Fred Johnson.
The two men and the two museums which hope to acquire the hoard - Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent - have all approved the valuation.
Professor Norman Palmer, chairman of the Government-appointed committee, said: "It is of course immensely important that this extraordinary hoard is acquired for public benefit and I know that the two museums are anxious to raise the funding to keep the hoard in the West Midlands as soon as they can."
A fundraising campaign is being launched to help the two museums buy the hoard, highlights of which are currently on display at the British Museum in London.
A selection of objects from the hoard of over one thousand items - most of it gold and silver and thought to date back to between 675 and 725AD - will also go on display at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery from February 13 to March 7 next year.
Mr Herbert, 55, of Burntwood, Staffs, a jobless council tenant on disability benefit, discovered the hoard while searching the field near the M6 toll road between Lichfield and Tamworth on July 5 using his 14-year-old metal detector.
He has described unearthing the treasure as "more fun than winning the lottery" and said he hopes to buy a bungalow with some of his windfall.
Mr Johnson, 65, described the valuation as a "fair and reasonable figure".
I bet he did! I've already asked Santa for a metal detector this Christmas.
Weird Science Factoid: City dwellers have longer, thicker, denser nose hairs than country folk do.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
