Deutsche Welle about 'the English Disease'

There is an interesting article in Deutsche Welle about 'the English Disease': Jean Di Marino, 'UK treasure hunters make archeologists see red' Deutsche Welle, 4 Sept 2013. It attempts to produce both sides of the argument, but the soundbites lose any nuance of what the persons interviewed said. Deutsche Welle have been looking into this:

  It's estimated that there are now more than 10,000 metal detector users in England and Wales alone. They've been making an impact. In 2011, close to a million artifacts were found by hobbyists.

It is a shame though they did not look at the PAS database, in which (whatever the real number of objects found was, the PAS recorded just  92006 of them - total records: 55960). Hardly what one would call a brilliant success.* The article sets out in fairly simplistic terms what the basic problem is, sadly it looks like the author has been listening to those in the artefact hunting community that want to make out that the problem is one of "professional jalousy" ("With a metal detector and some luck, hobbyist treasure hunters in the UK can end up owning highly valuable artifacts"):

archeologists are speaking out against treasure hunting, saying it damages key historical traces. Hobbyists scavenging for ancient jewelry or a cache of Roman coins are an increasingly common sight in the UK's countryside. With some enthusiasts having unearthed thousands of pounds worth of treasure, the lure of heading out with a metal detector can be potent. Historical artifacts, including coins, old tools and weaponry, turn up with some regularity among the thousands of objects dug up each year. But hobbyists have been so successful that some archeologists are accusing them of looting Britain's heritage. 

 Have they now? Most of them, very very quietly. The author is wrong, those that are concerned are not worried about their "success" as such, but their erosive effect on the archaeological record. She is also wrong about what it is most UK artefact hunters seek and collect, much of it are very much more mundane disjecta of past everyday life, buckles, mounts, studs, fittings, often broken ("partifacts"). It is the process of the removal of such items from the archaeological record which is damaging to the integrity of that finite and fragile resource:

Archaeologist Christos Tsirogiannis is one of those concerned. He says the[se people] are damaging important sites. Non-specialists often disturb objects' archeological context "Every object has an amazing historical value, especially when it's found in its actual and original archeological context," Christos Tsirogiannis explains. "If something is extracted violently and by an uneducated, non-specialist person from its original context, this cannot be reconstructed."[...]  "I'm sure that there are several people who are operating metal detectors and they do it just for excitement," he says. "But even in a legal way, the destruction that they generate is really big, and it is an unfortunate phenomenon that it is still legal."

What the article does not say is where Dr Tsirogiannis comes into this story, it is a shame the opportunity was not used here to point out the link between artefact hunting and collecting in England (legal and accorded social acceptance) and in the rest of Europe, including those involved in our Cambridge colleague's research (where it is neither - and for good reason). Ignoring that basic fact is a fundamental paradox in the insular artefact-hunting debate.  The article then quotes known tekkie sympathecist Suzie Thomas' her function is to voice the opinion of the pro-collecting lobby. She has a go:

"Metal detector users are changing what we know," Thomas says, noting that users who record their finds are producing vast amounts of data.

Note the difference there, Tsirogiannis talks of the unseen destruction of knowledge, Thomas suggests that's in some way excusable because information is generated. But the problem blithely skipped-over here is that there is a huge imbalance between what gets taken out of the context of deposition without record, and what is recorded. In any case the article is unclear (for a non-specialist audience) what is actually involved in recording, just noting something down on the back of an envelope, or a "today I found three things on Green Gables Farm, saw the Bloke, it was raining" note in a notebook? Probably she said more, but the justification that made it into the article is nothing but a junk-argument. Suzie Thomas says there:

"The sub-discipline of battle archeology makes a lot of use of metal detected data because they're looking at objects like cannon balls and musket balls that are, of course, metal. Having the data of where on the field they've been found can help you reconstruct how the battle went, and that's incredibly useful information."

Chalk and cheese. You can only do that if the data are gathered by systematic metal-detecting-survey and not ad hoc metal-detecting-artefact-collecting. Ms Thomas here is fuzzing the issues, confusing artefact hunting (the problem) and metal detector survey for research purposes (not a problem). It's that deliberately vague cover-all term "metal detecting" which is the problem. I get "metal detected" when I pass through Chopin International Airport, the term is so vague as to be meaningless in any presentation of the issues. You cannot tell anything detailed "about a battle" if the best record we have is a six-figure NGR in the PAS database (or even a ten-figure one) of a few random objects. See the text below to see how little information the PAS database would actually contribute to any such study.

* I think the article's author has misread PAS self-propaganda here (an interesting insight on PAS' ability to communicate to the public). Heritage Action figures suggest the figures for 10000 searchers for 2011 would have been something like 303000 recordable objects.