The Viking and Anglo-Saxon Landscape and Economy (VASLE) Project

Recently the role of metal-detected objects in the study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian England has greatly increased through reporting to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) and the Early Medieval Corpus (EMC). There are now thousands more artefacts and coins known than a decade ago which, in conjunction with fieldwork, have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the early medieval period. The VASLE project was the first attempt to examine this data on a national scale. Such an approach enables the detailed analysis of the nature of portable antiquities data, the biases within such datasets and the relationship between patterns of recovery and historic settlement.