Surrey Searchers Metal Detecting Club

The Surrey Searchers Metal Detecting Club is an FID-affiliated group based in Wallington (which is actually on the edges of Greater London rather than Surrey), and claims to be "one of the largest, most active and successful Metal Detecting Clubs in the Southeast".

Every month we are gaining thousands of acres of new land to search and we travel all over the uk detecting in most other counties as well as Surrey. We meet twice every month and sometimes hold as many as three outings per week.

 There are galleries of their searches in Sussex (418 photos mostly of finds), Surrey (62 photos mostly of finds), Hampshire (166 photos mostly of finds), Worcestershire (225) Bedfordshire (19), Suffolk (186), Oxfordshire (166), Nottinghamshire (33), Essex (91), Kent (171) and Warwickshire (16).

In total, they've hoiked hundreds of finds from the archaeological record in a random and unsystematic manner from all over the country. And how many of them are recorded so this information is available for use? When the FLO goes to their club meetings, does he carry large scale maps of Warwickshire or Kent with him, to check the NGR of the findspot of the coins,  such as the siliquae they found on a 'club dig' last year? Or does the Surrey FLO travel with them and attend all the club's digs and record the finds as they come up? Note the distance this group is capable of travelling to find land to search, and the far-flung regions of the country which therefore contribute decontextualised artefactsto the club's members' personal artefact collections.

How many of the many, many loose finds taken away by members week after week are PAS-recorded?

 On their website there is no link to any Code of Practice, not even the FID one. To what degree, and in what ways is this activity contributing to our (everyone's) "knowledge of history" as is so often claimed artefact hunting does?