"The tone of the criticism of this paper has been highly unprofessional"

Sam Hardy's paper ('Quantitative Analysis of Open Source Data on Metal Detecting for Cultural Property', Cogent Social Sciences 3, 2017)) whether or not one agrees with everything he writes, raises some important issues connected with current policies on Collection-Driven Exploitation of the archaeological record. Instead of a discussion of those issues, its publication was accompanied by the rapid appearance of the criticisms of the Ixelles Six/Helsinki Gang (Deckers et al 2018), a separate paper by Raimund Karl (2018) and the reaction of treasure-hunter John Howland (2018). Yet it has been so far more or less ignored by 'mainstream scholarship' in the UK (and Europe generally). It is gratifying therefore to see a comment by Neil Brodie who wrote:

I personally think the tone of the criticism of this paper has been highly unprofessional. Makes me think it must be on to something.

As indeed it is. Though I rather think that an argument could also be made for the suggestion that in the case of Bangor and Bournemouth the overproduction of bile might be due to a medical condition, but in the case of some of the Ixelles/Helsinki Gang there is too much grant money reliant on supporting the 'PAS-Proposition' to allow it to be challenged. 

References

Deckers, PS, Dobat, A, Ferguson, N, Heeren, S, Lewis, M and Thomas, S 2018, 'The Complexities of Metal Detecting Policy and Practice.: A Response to Samuel Hardy, ‘Quantitative Analysis of Open-Source Data on Metal Detecting for Cultural Property’ (Cogent Social Sciences 3, 2017)' Open Archaeology, bind 2018, nr. 4.).

Raimund Karl, 'Estimating' numbers?A response to a paper by Samuel A. Hardy', Archäologische Denkmalpflege Mittwoch, 14. März 2018.

John Howland,  There are two ways of lying. One, by not telling the truth and the other, making up statistics, detecting and collecting blog 1st July 2018
 

Vignette: No use shutting your eyes, the issues will not go away.