From the BBC's 'metal detectorists damage Hadrian's Wall' article of 20 June 2018 a quote from Mark Harrison, head of heritage crime and policing advice for Historic England:
"We may never see or fully understand the objects taken or damaged because they have been removed from their original sites with no care or record as to their history or context."If we see them, can we 'fully understand' them? How can PAS recording 'magically restore' the information missing because it was not observed and recorded during the extraction of a collectable archaeological artefact (part of the evidence) from the context of deposition? Surely the answer is, it cannot. So, it makes no difference whether the object is removed by a trespassing artefact hunter or an artefact hunter given the nod by the owner of land on which archaeological sites lie, and whether the object ever surfaces in the PAS database, the information is still lost. No? No, PAS? Tell us more the public about it. Do some outreaching about this. It was one of your 2003 'aims' wasn't it? What you were funded to do. Yes.
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