Focus on Metal Detecting: More Trite Nonsense about a Glittery Geegaw Hoard (Viking)

The news

"Lancashire county museum service has raised the £110,000 that it needed to acquire the third-largest Viking hoard found in the UK, with the help of a £45,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £33,000 from the Art Fund charity, plus other grants and local donations". 

Translation, the public has been forced to buy back what in all other countries in the world is regarded as their property, as their heritage. And another treasure hunter gets a tax-free award for ... well, what? To stop him and his pal the farmer flogging it off on the black market?

 The Targeting

"The field, on the outskirts of the village of Silverdale" 

What a funny name, I wonder what one might make of that if you were a Treasure Hunter, eh?


The Obligatory Human Interest Story

It was found in 2011 by Darren Webster, a stonemason who was out with the metal detector his wife had given him for Christmas [...] in a break between dropping his son to school and returning to work, he had no time to go any further.

Ah, innat sweet? Just think, if he'd stopped a few minutes earlier to be on time, the hoard would still be lying there, undisturbed in its archaeological context. And the public purse would be 11k quid the richer.

The Trite Narrativisation

"Dozens of coins dated the hoard to about AD900, and also demonstrated the breadth of the Viking world"

ay-yay-yay! Super, eh? As if we really had no idea, like from all the other hoards exactly like this one spread over a huge area of Europe. No, come on, tell us what we have learnt about Viking society through archaeoplogical means from the context of this find. Not the glittery ooo-ah of the antiquitist, what is the archaeological significance?

More Parochialism

"The Silverdale hoard offers a unique window into the lives and craftsmanship of the Vikings who inhabited Lancashire over 1,000 years ago".[....] "displayed in the county where it was found"

and....? What "window" is this precisely?

The Awkward Silence
And not a mention anywhere that this was hoiked out from below plough level and no proper investigation of the place has subsequently taken place to identify the circumstances of the deposit. Just loose glittery geegaws. Not a mention of problems with precisely this sort of Treasure Hunting and the treatment of the hoard (who pays for the conservation and documentation and full publication - you know, of that "unique window"?) and controversial "policies" of Britain towards artefact hunting and collecting and the need for Treasure Act reform.

Maev Kennedy, 'Silverdale Viking treasure to go on display in Lancashire' The Sucking-up-to-the-establishment Guardian, Friday 11 October 2013