Detecting Under the Microscope 14: "Rescuing Archaeological Evidence from the Fields", Are They?

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John Winter's text about the nasty arguments made up by the "detractors" of the erosion of the archaeological record by artefact hunting and collecting suggests that artefact hunters are doing everyone a service by "saving" archaeological artefacts from the deleterious effects of being in the ploughsoil. However to have any validity as an example of public-spirited altruism he would have to show that this is indeed the case. We may note that the PAS Advice to Finders in the form of a FAQ "asks" and answers the question:

"WHEN I GO METAL-DETECTING I OFTEN PICK UP WORKED FLINTS AND PIECES OF POTTERY AS WELL AS METAL OBJECTS.WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THESE AS WELL?"

The answer (predictably) is:"Yes - because these finds also provide important
archaeological information".One might assume that dog-walkers and rose gardening old ladies are also enjoined to bring that sort of material along to the Scheme too. But the metal detectorists are out there 'researching' where they are going to find "productive" sites, and one of the pointers is the presence of archaeological material such as pottery and tile lying on the surface of a ploughed field. So how many of the 8000 metal detectorists out there hoovering the fields of Britain for artegfacts all over England and Wales are "saving" any quantity of this "threatened archaeological material (threatened by the same agricultural machinery as metal objects, frost and chemicals in the case of pottery, tile, glass, wall plaster and a host of other types of archaeological evidence). A search of teh PAS database reveals that among the 470 000 records today there are 692 records involving "pottery" (that is 0.147 of the total). Are British landscapes so devoid of ceramic evidence for past activity, or are artefact hunters more attracted to picking up decorative and curious metal fragments than more mundane pottery? Are artefact hunters really "picking up pottery as they go "metal detecting"? Or is that just a fantasy of the supporters of a "partnership" with artefact collectors? What about flint artefacts then? The results for this are a bit better: 11093 objects (2.36%), but considering that this is the primary collectable artefact type from sites for a span of the history of the British Isles about 10 000 years long (just to take the Mesolithic to Early Bronze Age) that is not surprising that these items are being collected - but again selectively with a preference for recognizable tool types than actual evidence of the full range of activities going on within the areas being collected from. Where I lived as a kid in England, almost every field contained worked flints of one sort or another, and if you looked hard enough many of them had a Roman sherd or two, where is the evidence of any sort of balanced recovery of evidence recovery by these "amateur archaeologists with metal detectors" in the PAS database?