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Metal detecting blog owner "Ringpullstiltskin" says he has been "Detecting around [the] Malvern Hills since 2010" and has a blog and website telling the world all about it (and much else). He therefore has a website showing his finds, hammered British coins (17), Roman and Celtic (13) and so on, and a goodly selection of artefacts, including a buckle he has shown the PAS. Two other of his finds are also mentioned on the website as having been seen by the PAS - so how many of his recordable finds have actually been reported?
Anyway in a blog post "Display cabinet" made 10/11/2012 we are shown photos of how this collector stores his finds. He bought a glass vitrine from IKEA ("perfect for the job") and placed it precariously at the top of his stairs and filled it with finds:
Anyway in a blog post "Display cabinet" made 10/11/2012 we are shown photos of how this collector stores his finds. He bought a glass vitrine from IKEA ("perfect for the job") and placed it precariously at the top of his stairs and filled it with finds:
There isn't space for every last item but it made me realise how much crap I've been keeping. I've consigned all the rubbish to one box but still not chucked it! I still need to find a good way to display the hundreds of copper pennies and halfpennies but no room for now!
So this is not all the metal items this fellow has been taking out of the ground on the sites he's searched, just a selection of them. In the case we see laid out then the effects of three years or so metal detecting. The photos are very fuzzy but it seems to me, tesserae not included there are over a hundred loose finds shown there. Interestingly, well above the finds rate predicted by the Heritage Action Artefact Erosion Counter (note some of his other blog posts suggest that in two hours he finds ten to twelve 'keeper' - though not necessarily archaeological ones, about one collectable find every ten minutes, including digging time). We also see that there are more fibulae (for example) in the case than he's posted on his own webpage.
So what (actually) is in this "box of rubbish"? Past experience has shown that very often something discarded by a "metal detectorist" as not suitable for collection, display or sale is in fact an archaeological find. So what actually has Ringpullstiltskin selected out?
More to the point. In the display case there is not a single label, saying which find is from which findspot. Are the items numbered and catalogued in some way that is invisible in these photos? Or are they just thrown in higgledy-piggley together as "my collection"? They seem to be arranged in chronological groups ("Roman" on the second-shelf-up) rather than findspot. So how, when the current curator of this material passes on, will it ever be possible to say what - among the pieces he 'curated' in such a fashion - came from where?
So what (actually) is in this "box of rubbish"? Past experience has shown that very often something discarded by a "metal detectorist" as not suitable for collection, display or sale is in fact an archaeological find. So what actually has Ringpullstiltskin selected out?
More to the point. In the display case there is not a single label, saying which find is from which findspot. Are the items numbered and catalogued in some way that is invisible in these photos? Or are they just thrown in higgledy-piggley together as "my collection"? They seem to be arranged in chronological groups ("Roman" on the second-shelf-up) rather than findspot. So how, when the current curator of this material passes on, will it ever be possible to say what - among the pieces he 'curated' in such a fashion - came from where?
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