Heritage Seminar: "Troll" Speaks Live

Is East Anglia’s buried and unexplored heritage being pilfered in an unsustainable way?

That's what a heritage and historic environment management seminar at University Campus Suffolk (UCS) will hopefully be discussing on 10th April 2013, exactly one month after yet another attempt by UK metal detectorists to get this blog closed down. The speaker will be "Paul Barford (Warsaw)" and he sent this abstract, proudly noting it was exactly 100 words:

Over the past decade, discussions in the UK of the amateur collecting of archaeological artefacts have concentrated on two facets of this complex problem: the use of the objects themselves for museum display or as a source of information about the past, and dealing with criminal activity among searchers. An equally valid topic, the effect of these activities on the preservation of the archaeological record, has tended to be ignored in the current debate. At what rate is the archaeological record being avoidably damaged by artefact hunting, and to what degree is this damage being effectively mitigated by current policies?

Should be fun. This is the first time I've done this in the UK. I hope to steer discussion through my initial presentation away from the two topics that tend to have dominated the UK debate so far (the PAS "wotta-lotta-stuff-we-got" claptrap and the "we're-not-nighthawks-so-we-are-good-for-the heritage" fallacy) onto the issues that matter, the preservation of the archaeological record, sustainability and mitigating damage. We will see how it goes. Colleagues from the PAS are of course cordially invited, I'd love to hear their point of view. It starts at 16:30.