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Welsh artefact hunter "Roman Ray" is having difficulty articulating his disappointment. out yesterday on my local mountain ive been detecting for ten years on and off. i have found alot of artefacts and coins on gilfach goch mountain in the past.encluding one hammered.one gold half soverign.[...] i have had about 40 silver coins of this mountain in ten years.and also my brother m.c.hammered has had around about the same figure of silver coins as myself.plus nobby and pipster have had a few silvers off it to in the past..but i think the mountain has given me all it had to offer.yesterday i detected it for around six hours and only had i bet just over 10 signals [...] i dont think ill go up there anymore.which is quite sad in a way..lol.knowing ive had thousands of hours of fun detecting up there i think ive done it now.[I did not make this up - this text is a genuine product of the British education system]. Replying in the same thread, "Chef Geoff" reckons he has a remedy, the depth advantage approach, to get the material preserved deeper in the soil, safe from ordinary detectors:
Well the day had to come Ray.while "Paulywow" commiserates:
It sounds about time "a man with a minelab" had a go
sorry to hear what seems like a good site is coming to a end,but i know the feeling the productive farms that ive just started on now are great for finds but i know {as other good farms in the past} that the finds will gradually get less and less as time passes, but that is the nature of tectin even on ploughland the frequency of finds dwindles with time but we all look foreward to the next piece of land,When you've "done" (trashed) one site move on to the next. Just show a handful of your recordable (over 300 years old) finds to the PAS and the British archies will give you hugs and kisses of gratitude and say their "system is working".
The accessible archaeological record is finite, once it has gone, it has gone.
Vignette: Magic mountains
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2 comments:
Astonishing. Actually records the "strip mining" of a finite, non-renewable, non-sustainable resource, EVEN ON THEIR OWN TERMS, i.e. the context-free removal of metal objects.
This will directly impact our knowledge of the past in Britain-- i.e. the use of the countryside. So the idea of using archaeology to find out the "making of the English landscape" in Roman or post-Roman times, through detailed test-cases, focussed excavation, rescue excavation and synthesis, is simply gone.
Yes, I think the "its only from the topsoil" and "there's plenty to go around" apologists in the archaeological midst in Britain simply don't do landscape archaeology.
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