Another Year Gone By

Another Treasure report, another formerly-kept-in-secret hoard revealed.

Ed Vaisey presenting the Watlington Hoard of Viking silver jewellery, ingots, and Anglo-Saxon coins "from Watlington area, Oxfordshire" praised the finder James Mather for leaving it in situ and calling in archaeological suupport through the PAS allowing it to be lifted in a soil block (using clingfilm) for dissection in the laboratory, allowing interesting groups of coins to be isolated in its mass and recording by modern methods.

The Minister said it was a refreshing change for the last lot of junk he had to present a year earlier where the whole lot had been grabbed into a carrier bag and tipped onto the farmer's table. "We really fucked up last year" the Minister admitted, "waste of money this outreach in some counties".

Actually, though he obviously should have, the Minister said no such thing, and it is unknown whether he even noticed the difference between this hoard and last year's  Lenborough (still less was informed by the public body he was visiting). Oh, there's a Treasure Report too, but most of the stuff in it is duplicate-recorded in the PAS database too, in order to bulk out the numbers.

Another year gone by without the issue of knowledge theft and knowledge wastage by non-recording of non-Treasure artefact hunters' finds vanishing clandestinely into scattered ephemeral private collections remaining totally unaddressed by the policy-makers. "I challenge anyone in the UK to say they submit all of there finds [to the PAS]" says one of 'em. Nobody has answered his challenge.