Where Does This Stuff End Up?

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The Polish auction site Allegro has a number of "interesting" offers in the ancient coins section, including antiquities, that some of us like to keep an eye on. Just now I spotted a seller from Warsaw with three metal items for sale today, an early medieval iron firesteel ("from a foreign collection" - difficult to say, it's an unspecific type) a brooch ("professionally repaired" - it is a Balkan/Pannonian fibula with the pin replaced ) and this:

Klamerka XVI-XVII w
Oryginalna klamerka datowana na lata 1550-1650. Wymiary: 29.59x28.32x9.79 mm. Klamerka pochodzi ze znaleziska w Wielkiej Brytanii, została zbadana przez archeologów a następnie zwrócona znalazcy. Dzięki temu posiada bardzo dobrą jak na tego typu przedmiot dokumentację. Nabywca otrzyma oprócz klamerki numer w bazie danych finds.org.uk na podstawie którego będzie miał dostęp do kompletnej dokumentacji sprzedawanego przedmiotu (zdjęcia, opis, datowanie, źródła bibliograficzne, miejsce znaleziska itp).

Since Google translator does not cope too well with that, I'll translate:

Buckle, 16th to 17th century. Original buckle dating from the period 1550-1650. Dimensions: 29.59x28.32x9.79 mm. The buckle was a find in Great Britain, has been studied by archaeologists and then returned to the finder. Thanks to this it has very good documentation for this type of object. The buyer will receive in addition to the buckle itself, its number in the database finds.org.uk on the basis of which he will have access to the complete documentation of the item (photos, description, dating, bibliographic sources, findspot, etc.).

This is actually the first time I recall seeing a PAS-recorded find from the UK on Allegro in a good few years of monitoring what goes through it. The starting price is 45 PLN (GBP 9.17).

Well, fortunately I do not have to buy the buckle to get the PAS number, looking through over the unsegregated mass of similarly dated items brings us to LVPL-11D583, found in or near Crowton, Cheshire by [Restricted identity] and recorded by Miss Teresa Gilmore on 4th May 2011. There is no proper grid reference for the findspot "Centred on field - Grid reference accurate to a 100 metre square".

Well, Mr Restricted-identity, "passionately intrestid in 'istry" no doubt, got his identification done at public expense and then pretty rapidly got tired of the object he'd dug up, and flogged it off - (and since its not included in the sale) having presumably lost the paperwork from the PAS in the meantime. Was there an export licence? Who knows? Who knows where it was between the tekkie flogging off a bit of "his history", and the Polish dealer getting hold of it? Certainly it is very unlikely that the PAS has a record of the subsequent history of this item. How many other things found by Mr Restricted-identity Northwestern metal detectorist has been dug out of the ground and pretty quickly afterwards sold off and ended up abroad? How many of them have been authenticated and the sales-spiel given some detail at public expense by the PAS? It is not by any means illegal, but is this too "responsible artefact hunting" in the eyes of the PAS?

Oh, and as for the "bibliography"... Does the PAS really think there is any kind of a connection between the lappets on the side of the loop here and the horse heads on Late Roman buckles? That really is an extremely dotty idea. Actually an even cursory look at the thousand or so buckles of the same date in the PAS database shows there is nothing particularly atypical in the projecting lappets on this buckle. The only other parallel cited is a "metal detecting" finds book - real cutting edge archaeological research going on in the PAS, no? So on what basis is the buckle dated, on the say-so of a metal detectorists' book rather than any evidence from stratified examples?

Photo: another freshly dugup archaeological find from England now being bought and sold abroad (Photo from PAS database, the only record now in Britain of this item)