Taxpayer Comments on British Archaeologists' Dealing with a Question on Artefact Hunting

I'm going to put up here, slightly edited, a comment I received (on the post below about the reaction of a couple of West Midlands archaeologists to somebody asking them for their opinions on artefact hunting). Although we know Londoner Kyri very well as a collector of Greek antiquities concerned with doing it as responsibly as possible,  I am treating it as the voice of a member of the public. He writes:

It's amazing how these archaeologists are avoiding the real questions and are sidetracking you and the readers with drivel and successfully taking the conversation into another direction. Some of them, like the ostrich, just want to bury their heads in the sand and shout 'ignore!', but for me as a British taxpayer these are questions that should be answered. Isn't it time we looked at our heritage and Treasure laws and come down hard with prison sentences for anyone breaking the laws, instead of the customary slap on the wrist?

what is interesting is these same three tactics of, as Kyri says, 'avoiding the real questions' which we see in the archaeologists' reaction:

- trying to ignore the question or
- deflect the discussion away from the original question onto another topic, or
- trying to depict themselves to be the victim of some imagined attack,

are the ones used by artefact hunters  to avoid discussing the same issues. Mr Hedge and Mr Hanson all the time are stressing that the project in question was a "community project". I cannot possibly see how one can even contemplate running a community project without the ability to communicate archaeology, and proper archaeology, to the public  - which may well (even in these dumb-down days) involve answering difficult (Hedges for some reason called this one "emotive") questions objectively. He earlier announced that he'd reply to what I'd said on my blog about the matter but off-line in an email, I invited him to use the comments box on this blog to keep his answer in the same place as the comments he was addressing. Let us see if he will be able to find time and inclination to do that. As Kyri says, these are questions that archaeologists need to be addressing and re-addressing in the public domain.

Yes I think it is high time for us to look at British heritage legislation to address a number of problems, artefact hunting and its multiple effects on archaeological resources being just one of them.