Focus on UK Metal Detecting: What the PAS is for...

Britain has now spent coming up to seventeen million pounds employing fifty archaeologists and heritage professionals for eighteen years to outreach to the public and attempt to "strengthen links between archaeology and artefact hunting". You'd think we'd be seeing some wide-ranging effects by now.  UK artefact hunters (metal detectorists) purport almost to a man to "support the PAS" (because it, and it alone, gives their exploitive hobby any legitimacy). Yet it becomes clear that many of them in fact have only a very foggy idea about what the Scheme is and what it does and why. Their main interest is in the "numbers", the numbers of finds in the database which serve as some kind of magic talisman, discouraging criticism of the hobby because it is "producing a lot of information". It is difficult to conceive how one can "support" something that you do not understand. 

As for relationships between archaeologists and artefact hunters, a typical approach can be found on one of the blogs to which I pointed readers the other day in order that they may judge for themselves whether detectorists are "ignorant, rough and bad-mannered louts" as one writer put it. The tone of that piece (entitled "welcome to my new readers") amply  supplies the answer to that question, telling those new readers if they don't like it they can "**k off". The effects of the multi-million pound outreach seem to be less visible here than they might, the author referring to UK archaeologists "as gutless shysters" and berating them:

hundreds of thousands of unrecorded and unclassified artefacts from so-called ‘proper’ archaeological excavations are languishing unloved in sheds and hangers across the British Isles. The scandal of the archaeological record is a shambles unlike the database of the Portable Antiquities Scheme now nearing to record its one millionth artefact on its infinitely valuable database, of which the overwhelming majority of its records are detector-found pieces. The current outrage is not of detectorists’ making but of archaeology’s own, prompting the serious question of whether the nation’s heritage ought to be left in, or indeed is safe in, the hands of archaeology. On present form, it’s unfit for purpose. Incredibly, archaeological finds are normally NOT RECORDED on the PAS database – though they [archaeologists] are encouraged to do so. The loss of vital archaeological data is incalculable. Vitally heritage data has gone down the drain; lost forever by the UK’s bumbling excavators who as the evidence shows, don’t know their arses from their elbows.

Perhaps the PAS might explain to their "supporters" what the PAS database is of, and what it is for, and what it is not for.