PAS Without the Pockets

There are a lot of stratified archaeological sites preserved in the beaches and foreshores of Britain. They are threatened not only by 'everyday' marine erosion (and disturbance by people digging into them for collectables) , but by especially severe storms and flood tides and sea-level rise caused by various factors including global warming. As a result thousands of sites around the British coastline are threatened with destruction and need monitoring and recording.  While it is not possible to halt the erosion or destruction of some of these sites, means are needed to make sure the information about the remains is not lost. Several projects have been carried out by professional archaeologists around the coasts such as Essex Archaeology's Hullbridge Project (in which I was involved many years back) and the Thames Foreshore survey, the latter building on experience working with Thames 'mudlarks', now a new project is underway (Maev Kennedy, 'Volunteer army set up to examine archaeological sites uncovered by floods', The Guardian Tuesday 4 February 2014):

The Museum of London Archaeology is recruiting a volunteer army of dog walkers, bird watchers, amateur historians and geology enthusiasts to help record sites that have been uncovered by storms and flood tides over the winter. The project is being launched by the museum, with the help of a Heritage Lottery grant – an initial £1.4m, including a development grant of £75,000 – to help recruit the amateur archaeologists. [...] The volunteers will be trained to help record information and use a web-based system to co-ordinate information on finds. [...] Nathalie Cohen, an archaeologist who will be working on the project, after years with the Thames Foreshore survey which also used amateurs and volunteers side by side with professionals, said: "The grant couldn't be more timely. This winter has really been shocking. There has been so much erosion happening in so many places, and accelerating where we were already aware of a problem, that it is really terrifying."[...]  Cohen said reports from the public would be entered on a database which will gradually build, linking with older records and work by local history societies, to a record of thousands of sites, while professional archaeologists will be ready to intervene where there is a critical threat to a site of national importance. 

This project, by creating a standardised, web-based recording system and providing training and new skills, is seen by its initiators as "an extraordinary opportunity for people across the country to create a lasting record that will benefit us all for years to come". Real community archaeology, involving proper site documentation and preservation not the ersatz form propagated by that other London museum's "Portable Antiquities Scheme" concerned mainly - as the name implies - with what people can carry off from such sites.  Let's hope this new project brings an end to the pretence that free-for-all exploitive relic collecting is any kind of archaeology. The London Museums project is PAS without the pockets.