Thursday 7 March 2013

Focus on UK Metal Detecting: Blissfully Unaware


Blisstool forum member "Ysbytymike" (Moderator/ BLISSTOOLUK Supporter)  obviously does not believe in the Portable Antiquities Scheme. In a thread "Mysterious Objects (whooo)" he writes:
Have enclosed a few recent finds which quite frankly I have no idea's on. Any help would be appreciated. [...]  the fields around where they were found has a history that includes roman.
He does not get much help. "Sheddy" writes
If it were me I'd put it up for ID on UKDFD, I'm sure the boys on there will sort it out.
So, no PAS-partnering there, eh? 
The whole section is a bit of an eye-opener, these folk obviously have no idea about the identity of a lot they are finding. So much for the "studying local history" model of artefact hunting, if these people do not even recognize the nature of the source evidence, how can they make any sense of it? If they cannot recognize the nature of the evidence, how can they know what it is they are supposed to be observing as they recover it?  The level of the discussion is well illustrated by one member's comment:
thats old, nothing like it hear (sic) in Minnesota".
(Minnesota of course has evidence of human settlement going back tens of thousands of years)
 
TAKE A GOOD LOOK at their forum, for these are precisely the sort of people the PAS wants to grab more and more millions of public quid to make into the "partners" of the British Museum, archaeological heritage professionals and to whom they want us all to entrust the exploitation of the archaeological record. Take a good look and decide what you think about that as a "policy".


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