My journal note about the Dirham Background Radiation has been accepted by Fornvännen, Sweden's premier archaeology journal!
"In radio astronomy there is something called the cosmic background radiation. It is faint, it is everywhere, and it is a remnant of the Big Bang. My investigations with the Swedish Metal Detector Association and three county museums in recent years have uncovered something I like to call the Dirham Background Radiation. ... 1/2
... Put briefly, it seems that if you send 25 detectorists onto the land of a farm in agricultural southern Sweden for three days and keep them from moving around too much, they always find a few dirham coins ... regardless of previous archaeological indications on the site, and even if you find little else. This has potentially dramatic consequences for our idea of the size and geographical distribution of Scandinavia’s dirham importation in the AD 800s and 900s."
@mrundkvist
Personally I would advocate the term "Dirham Coin Background", as it is much less likely to lead to panicked people calling Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten with questions about how safe they are from the new Radiation they just read about.
