Portable Antiquities Scheme: Telling it Like it Is

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This intelligent response by Heritageaction (identity known to me) is in danger of being lost in the long exchange about the PAS below a recent post about its latest piece of story-spinning. It might usefully start a new thread of its own, though I think we can confidently predict that nobody at all from the PAS will be joining in the discussion. Here HA responds to a suggestion by a London antiquity collector that other countries are in some way "jealous" of the way England and Wales (fail to) protect the archaeological heritage in the ground from being looted away by artefact hunters armed with metal detectors. [The bold font is mine, but I could easily get carried away here and put quite a number of the things HA writes here in bold to emphasise them, a number of crucial and eminently cogent arguments are succinctly presented here, it's worth reading several times]:

By what measure [is] the loss of 2,500,000 artefacts (with their associated contexts and sites) [...] compensated for by the far, far smaller number of artefacts reported to PAS [?]. The laissez-faire/voluntary reporting/PAS system effectively says “It is worth entirely losing most of the record in order to get to hear about some of it”. I disagree.

One might ask why anyone would support such a proposition when it is avoidable at a stroke of the legislative pen? Well.....

First, it wasn’t intended to work like this. It was intended that the great majority of detectorists could be persuaded. It is now brutally clear they can’t. All that remains is to admit the experiment has failed. How much longer will that take, and at what annual rate of cultural loss?

Second, quangos like all life forms fight like tigers for their own survival and by a quirk of fate, Britain has set up a taxpayer funded quango whose survival and continued funding depends not only upon emphasizing its own success but also, tragically, praising the very activity whose depredations it was set up to reduce. Imagine, the only country in the world funding a vast pro-metal detecting PR department when elsewhere it is simply heavily regulated or banned!

Third, yes, many archaeologists go along with it (though not with huge enthusiasm in most cases), why wouldn’t they, given the spin and the constant parading of a few “good guys” rather than the majority of others? They are also constantly told the division is between a few criminals and the “responsible majority” which is a complete falsehood. The division is between a few criminals, a minority of responsible detectorists and a majority who are most certainly not responsible. The harm detecting causes reflects those three groups. The worst damage is perfectly legal. Ever heard PAS admit that? Yet it’s pretty clearly in their stats.

I’m not an archaeologist, I’m just an ordinary punter and taxpayer, but I’ve studied all this for almost as long as Paul – for many hours every day for many years. I don’t believe the official line, full stop.

Fourth, the support PAS has overseas is not really what they say it is. It is absolute amongst dealers all right (what does that tell us?) But it is not at all widespread amongst archaeologists in my experience. In fact I would say most that I have been in contact with think Britain is irresponsible with it’s heritage and have no time for the way metal detecting has been officially protected, promoted and flattered. A good proof of that is this: of 197 countries, 197 have declined to adopt the PAS model.

That includes the US where many of the people advocating this as 'the best system' for heritage protection actually live and trade dugup antiquities. Not for nothing is the destruction of archaeological sites by looters armed with metal detectors known in several regions of the continent as "the English Disease". Is that an expression of admiration? Let us be clear here and differentiate between the reporting of accidental finds, the reporting of finds made deliberately during the exploitive destruction of the archaeological record by artefact hunters, and protecting the archaeological record from deliberate destruction. these are three different things, and in which of them is the "British System" praised abroad? Primarily in the first, never in the third. Setting up a PAS in Basra self-evidently would not have stopped the looting of archaeological sites in southern Iraq.

Vignette: No bull (Copyblogger).
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