The fruits of partnership

"Once finished, the English Heritage initiative, part of a national project, will be available to archaeologists, researchers, metal detectorists, students and planners".

English Heritage (as the name suggests) is supposed to be a body working for the protection of the nation's heritage. Is the PAS's new stance, "partnership with metal detectorists" now being embraced by all British heritage protection organisations (or is that now in name only)? Is Britain going completely mad? Why is it deliberately offering - at public expense - the means for an exploitive minority to more efficiently do what is designated as criminal in other countries? I do not think we can hide information (nor should we) about the location of archaeological sites to stop it getting into the hands of people that will abuse it, but to specifically state that a public resource is being created in a form which will enable it to be used in this way is giving out, surely, the wrong message.

It is interesting that this is billed as part of a landscape archaeology project. Landscape archaeology involves a number of techniques, one of which is controlled (eg., gridded) surface artefact collection. What kind of results can one expect from fieldwalking the surface traces of a site which has been "done over" a couple of times by artefact-seeking "metal detectorists" who've removed a large proportion of the diagnostic artefacts, either for their collections or to melt down as scrap? Given the poor level of data retrieval and recording by the majority of "metal detectorists" in the UK, despite a decade or more of "outreach" and "partnership", the two notions may be said to be completely incompatible. What a terrible mess British archaeologists are getting themselves into.