Despite tactical/cowardly/unprofessional silence by PAS, I am not wrong, am I?Portable Antiquities @findsorguk 18 godzin temu
Obviously we believe responsible metal-detecting makes a useful contribution to archaeology, highlighting sites previously known.
Paul Barford @PortantIssues 42 minuty temu
@findsorguk Not if finds are removed from them willy-nilly and not properly documented http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2015/11/mitigating-context-loss-in-metal.html … why no PAS "Guidelines"?
Paul Barford Whatever the Portable Antiquities Scheme may try to pretend, these are indeed "Portant Issues" about current policy towards artefact hunting and collecting and jolly well should be being discussed by a multi-million pound publicly funded scheme run by one of the country's top museums. Why are the Schemers so quiet?@PortantIssues 41 minut temu
@findsorguk targeting known sites w/o proper method is erosion of archaeological record, surely
UPDATE
See the important comment by Heritage Action below asking the question quite what the Portable Antiquities Scheme understands by "highlighting". There will be no answer to that from them either- you can bet.
Well, well, well. Finding NEW sites has been what PAS has long claimed is one of the virtues of artefact hunting. Now that has been expanded to "highlighting KNOWN sites"!
ReplyDeleteHighlighting sounds almost OK, (although one might ask "why do they need highlighting?") but honesty would require them to add
"although in 70% of cases, as we have recently acknowledged, no highlighting takes place for no reporting is done, the upshot of which is that known sites get highlighted to the detectorists only, and then exploited and depleted, often unto oblivion ("my fields are hammered, the finds rate has dropped, I need to find somewhere else")"
Every time PAS spokespersons try to defend detecting they trip themselves up. The new regime should send an email out asking for it to cease.