Bangor Attack! Sam Hardy Gets it Again

"Give the people what they want"

Professor Raimund Karl has another nasty go at Sam Hardy. Nothing new there, the Welsh academic seems to be on a vendetta. This text is more of the same old thing he's been turning out for a while now (Raimund Karl 2019, "The,(sic) artefact erosion estimation'-fallacy. Another response to papers by Samuel A. Hardy', Archäologische Denkmalpflege 2, 2019, 73-143. [Note that "Archäologische Denkmalpflege" is just a self-published internet webpage, but he gives this text a doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29959.24484]).

The text is a turgid  71-pager, really unrewarding to plough through. To give a taster of its nature, the abstract starts like this:

In this article, I again discuss the attempts by Samuel A. Hardy to 'estimate' the 'cultural harm' caused by non-professional metal detecting. I [have] already discussed the serious methodological (and arithmetic) flaws in his original paper in an earlier contribution (Karl 2018a), highlighting why the results of his study were unreliable and thus anything but useful. In this contribution, I focus on the even more fundamental conceptual flaws underpinning his research, which lead to his fundamentally flawed methodology. Particularly crucial in this context is that not only do the assumptions he makes for conducting his study directly determine its outcomes, but that most of these assumptions are fundamentally flawed themselves [...].

and so on....  Pure Bolko von Richthofen... Is this primitivism what British "academic" writing has come to in the wake of Brexit? Karl (and his university) should be ashamed of such behaviour. Now, what is "non-professional metal detecting", please? Is that the same as collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological resource? What is "professional metal detecting"? Why use scare quotes for estimate and cultural harm?  How in the world of Bangor are the results of any research (astrophysics included) unaffected by the underlying assumptions made in the framing of the research question?

This includes his own, for Karl (along with his metal detecting pals) assumes that, since Karl himself clearly has a fixation on this, Hardy's only focus is on whether restrictive (permit-led) artefact hunting is a better protector of archaeological values than unrestricted collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record. Karl's been rather boringly going at Hardy from this angle now or a couple of years (see past posts in this PACHI blog). This is despite the fact that - as I have pointed out in earlier posts - is not what actually reading Hardy's texts as a whole (rather than selecting soundbites) say is their topic.

We get into Ixelles-Six land when Karl says what (a priori "fundamentally flawed") assumptions of Hardy he is challenging. He reckons that he thinks he knows better what Hardy should think, so - sticking to his abstract's summary of the points he so laboriously makes - Hardy should not be looking at "the number of artefacts extracted ex situ" because:



(a) he's not taken into account "how different regulatory systems affect reporting frequencies of finds made" (here Bangor sides with Peter Tompa).

But those who on the basis of estimates of rhinos killed in the wild for their horns say we must find a way to reduce this because the rhino is disappearing, are not criticised [by anyone reasonable] because proposing that prevents the WWF from putting better figures in their reports. That's as bonkers as what Karl and Tompa are saying. 

(b) "whether retaining the finds in situ will indeed preserve them until they might be recovered by professional excavation".

Well, the idea behind this is what we call "conservation". Again the rhinos, what Karl is writing is like saying that the rhinos in the wild may be in places where nobody ever gets to see them, and anyway they might not find mates and breed there, so we might as well let them get shot anyway. Bonkers also. Again the professional/non-professional dichotomy replacing the notion of resource conservation. 

The next "fundamentally flawed assumption"appears to be:
(c) "artefacts simply retained, entirely unknown, in situ, are not a cultural good whose extraction from there causes 'cultural harm', but rather only gain any cultural value they may be assigned when they are extracted and thus become beneficial to humanity".

Mr Oldbuck

Oh. Wow. Rhinos that cannot be seen by people are not a tourist asset, we might as well let them get shot. Yes? The problem is that Karl is focused on the "precious things", focused on the objects, rather than the archaeological context surrounding them and the taphonomy of their associations with that and each other. He's looking at artefacts, like a dealer or collector,  as "ancient art" with cultural value that derives from form and aesthetic appearance and not from the point of view of the archaeological evidence they would have formed part of before they were blindly hoiked out of the ground by an artefact hunter. Again the conservation ethic goes out of the window. Have they got a Department of Antiquaries at Bangor, and when will Karl be moving there?

So it transpires from this that the titular archäologische denkmals that his blog envisions pfleging are not sites at all, but the loose bits and bobs ripped from them, might as well not bother about archaeology then, just get them from eBay.de and the metal detectorists.

The next point goes off the topic of Hardy's text entirely, and concentrates on the laws

Perhaps most crucial however, for someone claiming to be interested in improving legal regulation, he shows astonishing disregard for the law, and a serious lack of understanding of what the law aims to achieve. Sadly, not entirely unlike quite a significant segment of other archaeologists, too, he appears to believe that the law, and especially heritage law, is there to allow us to achieve our goal, the (ideally total) protection of the archaeological heritage from anyone other than professional archaeologists. 

Publicly accusing someone of "disregard for the law" is not something Karl should be undertaking lightly (even if, or perhaps especially because, English is not his native language),  and I would challenge Karl to show us where Hardy's papers set out the programme for "improving legal regulation" of archaeology or anything else that Karl says they embody. By the way the reader can look back in this blog for where I write of Karl, PAS and the Austrian Denkmashutz Karl's attempt to divine the "legislators' intent" of the  Austrian Denkmalschutzgesetz and his infantile Father Christmas figure burial stunt. I am going to leave this topic for the moment, for the record, I think Karl is wrong both on historical grounds and his understanding of the nature of the national laws involved (I think he's really focused on those of Wales and a little central European country from which he came):

Then Professor Karl goes on to extol the cultural value of looting (as a creative act ?)

most such extraction activities, including entirely unprofessionally conducted ones aimed at generating private economic profits, must actually be considered to be culturally beneficial and in the public interest. 

Ixelles Six/Helsinki Gang said the same, which does not make it correct. Lots of dealers will make the same claim. But I do not think we want to get into bed with them either. This viewpoint is entirely object-centred, not paying any attention to the archaeological context from which the coveted artefacts are made "ex situ". Why is this happening in the archaeological community of the UK, and is this the real (negative) legacy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme?

The next thread of Karl's polemic is nothing at all to do with Hardy, or his "assumptions" real or assumed.

The crucial lesson to be learned, thus, is that it is not we professional archaeologists who get to define what cultural values and what private actions are in the public interest and serve the greater common good, and not our values which reign absolute. Rather, it is for all citizens alike, via their duly elected representatives in parliament, to define what the cultural values of a particular society are, and what actions are in the public interest and serve the greater common good.

Oh golly, Bangor discovers democracy. So basically what this guy is saying is that because palm oil is so convenient, "academics need to understand" they have no right to raise the alarm about habitat destruction, because "the people" and the big concerns of the food (and biofuel) industry need their palm oil. There Professor Karl and I will have to differ. One of the purposes of having academics at all is to find out things, and tell people what they have found out - and how they have determined what they have determined, so the people (who we've sent to school and had science classes there, so they know something of the scientific method and how to assess its products) can know what is what. Karl seems to join the tabloids and their "who needs experts" bandwagon, well, time will tell whether a nation that disregards the opinions of specialists is going somewhere good. In fact Britain is very close to finding that out on 31st October 2019 (current date of divorcing itself from the EU).