Lerning Abowt Th' Past: Metal Detector Style

Another one on EBay with
a clearly-recognizable portrait
of HRH Prince Albert (1819-1861)

People who cannot read books often pick up a metal detector to help them envisage a past, but its often their own personal version of history which they imagine while holding a 'piece of the past" in their grabby hands. Take an artefact from its context and you can basically tell any story you like about it. Those that wish to treat information from artefact hunters as archaeological data need to take into account that the collector is not concerned to use the information from the context of deposition and discovery as a source of information, but what Polish theoretician of historical sources Jerzy Topolski termed 'extra source information' as the basis for their imaginative narrativiation. As just one example of the underlying issues involved, let us take a recent blog post by John Winter for example. He's been 'learning about the past' through his hobby for a long time. Here he is narrativising in Searcher magazine (the one the PAS use) a decontextualised Victorian embossed tin a fellow tekkie found:

Some of you may know that Prince Albert was one of the most famous suspects in the Jack the Ripper case. Some commentators have said that he had problems with mental stability. When the mutilated body of prostitute Elizabeth Stride was found, she was holding a tin of Prince Albert cachous in her left hand. Flimsy evidence you may think.

Not half as flimsy as the detector user's grasp on history, as anybody who can use a book to check facts can soon discover, the Whitechapel murders took place in the 1880s, by which time the Prince Albert portrayed on the tin had been dead two decades.* Mr Winter's response to that being pointed out? Predictably vacant and unconcerned about letting facts get in the way of a good story:

Lighten up Paul. Happy Christmas. Now, show me that you have a sense of humour. You’re a bloody laugh a minute.

The point is however that if we are to use information coming from collectors as some form or ersatz archaeological information, one has to have confidence that the 'observed facts' have been properly observed and conveyed to the secondary source (the PAS) in a form which bears some relationship to the actual facts in the ground. The inability of many UK artefact hunters to make head or tail of simple facts or to convey the conclusions they have reached about them in an articulate manner means that we have to treat information from them with some considerable reserve. In fact, how much of it is at all reliable? And if some of it is unreliable, and we have no means of verifying what is and what is not, then the whole body of 'data' has to be disqualified. Artefact hunting is not archaeology and artefact hunters cannot produce from it anything that can be regarded as 'archaeological data', no matter what the blokes in Bloomsbury say.

TAKE A GOOD LOOK at this behaviour, for these are precisely the sort of people the PAS wants to grab more and more millions of public quid to make into the "partners" of the British Museum, archaeological heritage professionals and to whom they want us all to entrust the exploitation of the archaeological record. Take a good look and decide what you think about that as a "policy". 

Albert Victor (1864 - 1892)
of the conspiracy theory

* Mr Winter is of course fluff-headedly confusing the Prince Consort (HRH Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) with his grandson, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, who in any case cannot have been the murderer.

UPDATE
Another metal detecting half-brain comes to Mr Winter's 'aid' with the usual post-truth nonsense and head-clutter that shows well how these people (fail to) think:

Hello John: You’ve got the right Albert. Spot on. [...] Some distinguished authors (not known to be detectorists) have […]

..have not identified the killer of Elizabeth Stride with the man shown on the box of lozenges which is the subject of Mr Winter's pseudo-historical text. But you try explaining that to a metal detectorist.

UPDATE UPDATE
... to a metal detectorist who is not only able to grasp a simple point but never even learnt to join up the linguistic dots at school enough to learn how to write grammatical English, and whether joking about the brutal demise of a woman at the hands of a throat-slashing maniac is at all appropriate:

joe tilt 7 December 2016 at 11:41 am

poor Albert ,he was in another place at the time of the murders and certainly is totally blameless, interesting read, they may of stopped the poor women’s bad breath but did her throat no good at all.

'May of', 'mr tilt'? Meanwhile on their social media the people concerned are expressing ad personam outrage that anyone could make any comments about their behaviour, yet not a single word about correcting the historical error committed in the original post. So the point I made about the ability of such people to be treated as a reliable and accountable source of accurately reported information still stands.  

TAKE A GOOD LOOK at this behaviour, for these are precisely the sort of pig ignorant barely literate people the PAS wants to grab more and more millions of public quid to make into the "partners" of the British Museum, archaeological heritage professionals and to whom they want us all to entrust the exploitation of the archaeological record. Take a good look and decide what you think about that as a "policy".