Nederland is gek geworden

Where the CDE has been recorded, where the
conservation services need to get more active

A website of 'Portable Antiquities' in the Netherlands just launched. Maybe our Dutch archaeological friends might care to explain what they mean in the English subtitle by the use of the word 'antiquities', instead of archaeological finds? Antiquities are what collectors collect, looters look for and dealers flog off. The use of the word implies a certain approach to the artefacts and I would like to know why the British disease has spread to the Continent. Can we get a sensible answer here?  The Dutch bit 'Kijk mee met verzamelaars van Nederlandse bodemvondsten' apparently means 'check out the collectors of Dutch soil discoveries'. You cant get more explicit than that. 

There's 89 'prehistoric finds' ('De oudste (metaal)vondsten uit Nederland'), 385 from targeting Roman sites, and 274 from hoovering Medieval ones. Of the latter as many as 116 buckles and 158 disc fibulae - hardly a very accurate reflection of the material culture of the region between AD450 and AD1500 one would have thought. The Roman period fares no better, artefact hunters and collectors have selected from the assemblages they searched 367 assorted fibulae and eighteen slingshot... There are just three miserable coins, the one artefact type which dominates the English PAS database,.

I am not really all that clear what the Dutch think they are doing with this database.  There is not much in the way of an introductory text setting out its aims and objectives. The findspots of the loose artefacts from private collections are not given, The collections containing the objects are not named, zero information about a load of loose artefacts.