The Harrow-Jarrow Connundrum

Heritage Action  ("The Crosby Garrett helmet findspot, the PAS database and rumours about both", 2nd February 2014) pose an interesting question.

10,000 random people were asked “if you could double your money by saying you got something in Harrow when you got it in Jarrow would you do it?”  X% said yes.

Now, unless you can say how much X is, which you can’t, you’d have to accept that to a degree that can never be known,  a portion of PAS’s data is deliberately falsified. So, Professor Gill, never mind where the helmet came from, the pressing question for Britain is where did all the other finds come from?

Think about it. The PAS is keeping quiet. Their ability to verify findspot data is very limited. They are forced to include an object on their database with the findspot the reporter indicates.  The Glasgow Project has yet to include the category of "Fibbery" in its online encyclopedia:

Fibbery is less spoken of yet may be vastly more common. It’s where something is dug up perfectly legally but then a big fib is told about where. There are many motivations for doing it but the big one is where you have a 50-50 agreement with one landowner but not with another and so … “That’s very rare” detectorists would say without knowing if it was, “don’t insult the rest of us”. But actually it’s merely saying detectorists are no more saintly than anyone else.

Of course we have the same thing in the antiquities market. One suspects that "from an old English collection" in reality means nothing more than the dealer picked it up from a smuggler's brother outside a lock-up garage near Luton airport.