Experience: I discovered pharaoh's gold

In 1972, when I was six, my aunt took me to see the T­utankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. I've been hooked on Egypt and archaeology ever since – I spent most of my childhood looking for tombs in our garden in Watford. Although I make my living as a writer and hold no formal ­archaeological qualification, I have worked on digs whenever I can and learned on the job. The one I'll ­always ­remember took place more than 10 years ago, working as a field ­archaeologist and diarist with a team digging in the Valley of the Kings . I was part of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project and we spent four years excavating in the valley, around the tombs of T­utankhamun and Ramesses VI . As well as ­digging new ground, we were given ­permission to re-excavate a small existing tomb, KV56. I was in charge of this re-excavation. Discovered in 1908 by English archaeologist Edward Ayrton , KV56 had yielded one of the most ­spectacular arrays of ­jewellery found in the valley, hence its ­nickname: the Gold Tomb. Early each morning two Egyptian workers and I would clamber down a ladder into the tomb and spend the day there, coughing and sweating, painstakingly trowelling our way through the 100 years' worth of dust and rubbish with which the ­chamber had become clogged. I have never been as happy in my life, ­although getting stung by a scorpion wasn't much fun. Our first season of ­excavating didn't ­produce much: a dog carcass and one of Ayrton's old cigarette packets were probably the most exciting finds. It was the second one when things started to get i­nteresting. One morning one of the workers and I were ­scraping away in a corner of the burial ­chamber when we noticed ­something glinting in the lamplight. It was a small plaque, or rectangle of beaten gold, beautifully worked and stamped with the cartouche of the pharaoh Seti II . Ayrton had found 13 identical plaques, part of a chain that would have hung around the pharaoh's neck. This was one he'd missed. On one level it was simply a pretty, if extremely rare, trinket, ­adding nothing to our knowledge of ­ancient Egyptian history. On another, it was a truly remarkable find – an object that no one had seen or touched for three millennia and that had once been worn by a man ­considered to be a living god. I felt wonder, of course, and ­excitement, a breathless racing of the pulse as all those childhood ­fantasies of discovering buried treasure suddenly became a ­reality. Also, a strange fleeting sense of dislocation, as if for the briefest of instants I'd been allowed a glimpse into a long-lost world. Mainly I was just anxious to get the object ­photographed, recorded and put away safely. I have a reputation, sadly deserved, for spectacular acts of clumsiness, and didn't want this find to become my latest victim. Over the ensuing weeks and months we excavated a ­succession of ornaments that had slipped ­under Ayrton's radar – the first, and so far as I am aware only, items of pharaonic jewellery to have been found in the valley since Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun in 1922. They are currently in secure storage in Luxor – in, appropriately, an annexe of Carter's old dig house – but I hope that one day they will be reunited with the Gold Tomb's other treasures in the Jewellery Room of the Cairo Museum. I'm proud that, in a very ­minor way, my name will always be linked with one of the world's great a­rchaeological sites. At the same time, when I think back to the years our team worked in the valley, it's not the gold that gives me the most pleasure. It is the day-to-day objects we unearthed: a collection of copper chisel heads; an ostracon – a small flake of limestone – b­earing a cartoon of a man masturbating; a pair of beer-jar stoppers; the l­eftovers of someone's fish s­upper. These are the remains not of ­living gods, but of the men who dug and decorated the tombs – people who went to work, sniggered at rude jokes, had a beer and a takeaway at the end of the day. People pretty much like you or me. That's why I love archaeology: because it doesn't just show us how different things were, but also how similar. • Do you have an experience to share? Email [email protected]