Detecting Under the Microscope: Eleven Rings from Avebury

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Followers of the ongoing open discussion of antiquity collecting in the British Isles may recall the fuss over the organization of the commercial artefact hunting rally at the World Heritage Site of Avebury and the refusal of the PAS (who had a forum in those enlightened days) to condemn those of their partners who went along to do some artefact hoiking.  Heritage Action went along and took some shocking photos at the risk of getting beaten up - such is the transparency over the way the British treat their archaeological record.

Anyway a reader (who coincidentally also happens to be a pal from Heritage Action) was doing some Internet trawling (or is that "trolling", eh, BM?) and found eleven quite clearly metal detected objects all for sale, and all from, guess where? Avebury. Here are the links to the eBay numbers of items offered on an Internet portal near you by Cambridge internet dugup antiquity seller "decorativehandpainted2010":

251132580259
261083836216
251132578564
251132547659
261083813988
261083813229
251132543032
261083811404
261083810505
261083806811
251132534230

The description typically reads something like:

Circa 12th-15th century AD Found in Avebury,Wiltshire
Inner diameter **mm [...]  Iam a good seller and I do things properly.My service is flawless.

"Doing things properly" sadly does not extend to supplying  a PAS number for the item concerned (he has one item with what sounds like a Treasure report, is selling other silver artefacts apparently without). Twelfth to fifteenth century falls within the recording requirements of the PAS. Are these items on their database? Shall we look? Well, if I tell the reader that the entire database contains just twelve artefacts from "Avebury Wiltshire", most of which are flints, they might not want to bother looking for these eleven rings there. This is of course wholly typical of the thousands of artefacts offered on eBay weekly, monthly and yearly. Also it is notable that the seller says:

Postage to: Worldwide [...] Seller posts within 3 days after receiving cleared payment

What about the time receipt of an export licence takes? No mention there of any delays possible. Are these going abroad with some kind of instant export licence, or are they going abroad without? 

Now we are "told" that the PAS is monitoring eBay sales. They are not doing it very well if a seller (incidentally, unless he's moved, who lives just down the road from Roger Bland in Cambridge) is openly selling Roman and medieval silver rings on the Internet right under their noses. He's got 75 "British artefacts" on sale, including silver with no upfront mention of Treasure process documentation.

But what about the eleven unrecorded finds from "Avebury"? The whole area around Avebury is a World Heritage Site, why does the seller not tell the potential purchaser whether they were found within or outside the boundary of the WHS and scheduled area? Does he know, did he ask, does he care? Are these finds all "surplus" to a metal detecting collector's needs, and he's flogged them off to this dealer? If so, what does this tell us about the activity? That the metal detectorist is researching the "history" of his region/country and the material he is taking from the archaeological record is a necessary adjunct to that "research"? In which case a properly labelled collection of artefacts and accompanying notes should be delivered to a museum or other repository, rather than dozens of artefacts offloaded onto eBay. "Not in it fer the munny!" they all exclaim, but its amazing how many of these altruistic gentlemen "partners" end up selling "their" stuff to people like Mr decorativehandpainted2010.

Now the BM and its Portable Antiquities Scheme labels enquiries like this by Heritage Action and its members and this blogger "trolling". I fully expect them to totally ignore this post and this activity going on right under their noses. But there's more, but I'll put that in a post under this one....

[to be continued]