Saturday 9 June 2018

'Citizen archaeology in action' a Thousand pocketed pieces of Archaeological Evidence


And the 'archaeological discovery' of the week is.... a two is upside down. !
Tom Redmayne‏ @TomRedmayne1
Just recorded my 1,000th record of my own metal-detected finds onto the @findsorguk database. Can't thank the PAS enough, especially @ajdaubney for all the help and support over the years. Elizabeth I silver sixpence dated 1572 with unusual error of the 2 being upside down! [emoticon], [emoticon]
I bet archaeologist Daubney is not going to come on here to chat about why he's being so helpful and supportive (sic) of Collection Driven Exploitation of the archaeological record... I can see why, taken in its wider context, there really is no justification at all for that. I guess it's more comfy just to ignore that context and carry on the professional head-patting and collecting the salary.

I'd al;so like to hear from any of those muffin-heads who insist the numbers of artefacts ascribed to individual finders in the Heritage Action Artefact Erosion Counter cannot be in any way realistic. If 24 000 finders each have even a half of Mr Redmayne's thousand (declared) artefacts in their personal collections,  that's an awful lot of holes in the archaeological record deliberately caused by artefact hunters with the help and support of archaeologists like Adam Daubney. Mr Redmayne started metal detecting in 2005, by the beginning of February 2014, PAS records show he'd taken 500 objects from the archaeological record. That's more than 62 finds a year. Since then he's accumulated at least another 500 - that's 111 finds a year. Imagine all of them filling their pockets at that rate - recording or no recording.

Vignette: Dairy interesting

1 comment:

Brian Curtiss said...

This is impossible to know. But how much is still left to be learned in say, England, that this squanders? Could these removals without scientific analysis prevent all future generations from the insights they could provide? New discoveries, large and small In terms of relative significance continue to happen, and isnt even one single artifact removed from context and not adequately interpreted as to what it means a disservice to everyone (and it will be to everyone but US, we’ll be gone someday) that comes in the future after us? How do people not understand that? Full disclosure I am a reformed collector and not afraid to say that. I wish there was a way I could take my misguided “purchases” and somehow make them contribute to our understanding of human history. Would my dumb things that I look at sometimes have contributed something important to our collective knowledge? Maybe, mabye not, but we will never know will we? Now it’s just an object in a glass display. An online inventory of stuff found isn’t a living growing evolving body of knowledge unless specific, accurate, educated observation, structured and consistently decribed information is captured so that the metadata can be analyzed effectively? Does the PAS do that? Is it leading to new discoveries? Have there been any examples of the data in PAS leading to new and significant understandings? If so, is it legit or just marketing by parties that want to perpetuate this clearly inadequate system because it legitimizes what they do? Could, with proper funding and with more collaboration with the scienctific community, it be made into a functioning research tool?

 
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