Focus on UK Metal Detecting: Number of UK Detectorists Increasing - PAS.

According to an article by Katriona Ormiston ('The wandering tribe of treasure hunters ', Friday 13th September 2013) treasure hunters have been scouring Oxfordshire’s fields in greater numbers since high-profile hoards were found.

More than 500 people gathered near Wantage for one of the UK’s biggest metal-detecting rallies last week. They uncovered about 250 historic artefacts at the Weekend Wanderers Big Summer Rally over 1,000 acres of fields around Lockinge Farm. [...] Among those taking part was Oxfordshire’s roaming archaeologist Anni Byard, who works as the county’s finds officer for the government-funded Portable Antiquities Scheme. [...] She said: [...]  “In the last few years metal detecting has increased in popularity. That could be a result of things like the discovery of the Staffordshire hoard.” [...]  Ms Byard added: “On average in Oxfordshire I record about 1,500 finds a year and about 50 per cent of them are Roman. [...] Over the past five years, from 2008 until 2012, the number of historic finds [recorded by the PAS - PMB] has jumped up and up, apart from an anomaly in 2011 – which Miss Byard said could be put down to bad weather or the lack of a large metal-detecting rally. 

 Thus indicating the importance of commercial artefact hunting rallies for boosting those database figures. At the time of writing this article, Ms Byard had recorded 1,326 finds from the county - so one fifth of them came from this one rally alone. There is other evidence that the figure for the total number of artefact hunters in the region needs to be revised sharply upwards:

Another group that has noticed the growing popularity of metal detecting is Littlemore-based Oxford Blues Metal Detecting Club. The club has had to cap its membership since last year because arranging car parking and space for its 200 members became too difficult. In 2009 the club had about 70 members, which had risen to 200 by last year and was scaled back to 152 this year. David Connor, from Kidlington, who has belonged to the club for 14 years, said: “We get a lot of enquiries and we have a waiting list now of about 15 to 20 people. “A lot of people see something found on the TV or in the paper and say, ‘They got how much money for it?’ and they go out and buy a metal detector.

But none of the people with metal detectors hoiking stuff out of archaeological assemblages is "in it for the money", no. Of course not.

Note also the emphasis on "wandering". In the official view, these artefact hunters are "researching the history"  of their own "little homelands" - the region where they live, by accumulating information from artefact searching and combining it with documentary knowledge (old maps of the region, etc), they are said to be building up a picture of the past of the region they are "researching". Not if they are simply wandering from one commercial rally to another scattered all of the country they are not.


But if the numbers all over the country have been rising since 2009 to the same degree, the Heritage Action Artefact Erosion Counter (the algorithm of which utilises the estimated number of detectorists in England and Wales at the time it was set up) is ticking away far too slowly. this is something that needs looking into.