Revolutionary Thoughts from UK Metal Detectorist

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In a comment to a conservation group's concerns, a metal detectorist "Kopparberg" (13/02/2013 at 18:58) expresses his views with PAS-punctuation:

this is a free world and i am entitled to an opinion as you and certainly don’t think you are right . i had an opinion of so called archaeologists before this and all that went out the window as i now think you are a self opinionated bunch of baffoons . who gave you the right to try to degrade a part of the english public. roll on the revolution

Of course Heritage Action is not an organization of archaeologists, they themselves are members of the public.

"Koppaberg" misses the point of what Heritage Action are saying completely. After asking how many members of the group "have a criminal record" (because he does not), he goes on to quote his partner, the PAS:

ok quote 2011 83% of pas finds and 92% of treasure finds where (sic) recorded by metal detectorists this from the pas itself out of 810,000 finds recorded on the pas data base and we dont record

It is dodgy thinking like that which is getting the PAS a bad name. Apparently Koppaberg has not actually understood what the Heritage Action Artefact Erosion Counter signifies. In that case it would be pointless to expect him to understand that 83% of X has no relation to Z. The point about the HAAEC is of course that the vast majority of the recordable finds taken from the archaeological record by collectors with metal detectors goes unrecorded. In general, it does indeed say that all the evidence points to the conclusions that as far as artefact hunting goes, there is massive unrecorded erosion of the archaeological record going on.

 Since the start of the Portable Antiquities Scheme: 4,695,882

while today's PAS stats are  "840,277 objects within 542,199 records". That is there are already about four million artefacts missing and not constituting records in trhe PAS database. Fifteeen million quid to miss four million artefacts.

It is worth noting that Mr Kopparberg expresses a totally different range of concepts when making a guest appearance as a disgruntled responsible detectorist on the HA blog and when appearing in his own right on metal detecting forums. Obviously the place to observe this species is in its natural habitat, among the other members of the ilk.  

Join a metal detecting forum and just see what it is these people talk about when amongst others. Take a good look, these are the people the PAS wants to grab another couple of million of quid from the public purse to make into their "partners".