The Pilfered Archaeology of Hammered Hill "Somewhere in Shropshire"

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Posted on You tube by DrTones24k 3 May 2019

In the naff fancy dress intro, we hear this is "day two of our trip to England with the Hoover Boys and Metal Detecting Holidays dotcom", hoovering up the foreign heritage. They are "back on hammered hill, this is where the Shropshire Short Cross Hoard came out...." and they found another one, "that's why we came here, that makes forty silver hammered coins out of this hoard" - was this one handed to the Coroner? And the others ("forty three?" ). Where are those object now? What about the other items they found but did not fit the coin/treasure-hunting profile of the Hoover Boys' video?The documentation, is it still in the UK?

They made a thing of an eroded Roman brooch, but this raises the question of,  after these guys have been hoiking and taking stuff willy nilly, what we now know of the archaeological record of that site where there has clearly been activity in the past . What the finder 'learnt' about the past from finding the brooch is erroneous). That brooch is apparently not in the PAS database, maybe an export licence was issued, and probably now it is in a private collection in the States. The collection of some oik that has no table manners and does not even remove his hat when he goes to a restaurant with his equally oiky mates.

What archaeological gains do we have to compensate for the trashing of the archaeological record of this grassy site? This is how "metal detecting" looks in real life, how can it be sustainably practiced so that the net effect is not wholesale archaeological destruction wherever an artefact collector enters a field? That is a serious, not rhetorical, question. Maybe the supporters of the current laissez faire approach can give an answer to that which does not take as its starting point cuddly wishful thinking.