Today in the social media you can find an example of public-funded arkie-dumbdown par excellence done like nobody else does. The Portable Antiquities Scheme is celebrating the collectors' approach to historical artefacts, and apparently they've not a lot more to say than its "Button (sic) Day". Really, I'm serious, look. I really think that the archaeological community (and the general public that has footed the bill for this 'Scheme' for coming up soon to two-and-a-half decades) are entitled to expect more from this team. Let the haberdashers celebrate the foibles of those that collect buttons, let public-funded archaeologists enlighten the public about the the archaeological aspects of material culture. Archaeology is not just 'digging up old things'.There are some predictable reactions to this text from non-archaeologists also observing the Scheme on social media who seem perfectly happy with the seductive but expensive dumbdown that it fobs off its viewers with:
Stephen Marnick @StephenMarnick W odpowiedzi do @findsorguk
Superb collection shown. Great system @findsorguk that seems to work very well indeed. I use it often to assist me with my, often unusual finds, before I get them off to the LFO - I also find this site http://colchestertreasurehunting.co.uk very useful too.
The Colchester lot are a commercial setup organising "metal detecting hiolidays" for Americans. The sender of that ebullient endorsement was unable to say what the PAS as a "system" in fact "works very well indeed" doing. When asked if he thought it was doing very well "fully mitigating the damage caused by commercial collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record like that done by Colchester Treasure Hunting", he just said that the PAS "seems to work very well in keeping good records of finds in one comprehensive catalogue. The rest of your point is out of my depth sorry". I might have guessed. It's about "collections" for Stephen (17, merchant navy, Mold, got a metal detector).
richard wills @rickwills40 · 39 min
W odpowiedzi do @findsorguk
Love a good button, nice collection. With modern farming methods so much is being broken up an lost year on year, nice to see some being saved for future generations 👍
Same old themes: object and collection centred (quite the opposite of what PAS was set up and was being funded to promote); collection-as-rescue (as evidence show me just one percent of the millions of "broken buttons"). Is teh PAS going to respond to correct these erroneous viws being promoted in the social media in their own Twitter feed? Can they use social media as a tool in their institutional outreach, or do they just keep pushing out dumbdown soundbites as clickbait to make it look as if they are "doing something" (it'll be mentions as "social media activity" in the 2019 annual report).
Now here's some news, the Portable Antiquities Scheme represents itself now as merely: "a DCMS funded project to encourage the voluntary recording of archaeological objects found by members of the public". Now that is not actually what it was set up only to do. With that in mind I added something to that thread:
Paul Barford @PortantIssues · 38 min
W odpowiedzi do @findsorguk
It'd probably be helpful here to show how 23year public-funded "recording archaeological finds in their context" has revealed info about society and changing daily life 900-300 years ago - rather than just use loose objects as "illustrations" of history known from other sources and celebrating artefact #collecting. You know, archaeology, not antiquitism.
Let us see what response it generates from Bloomsbury's heritage heroes.
Here are the "Buttons" . Here they are chronologically: "EARLY MEDIEVAL (5)" [on what basis are they "dated"?]; MEDIEVAL (901); POST MEDIEVAL (5,877); MODERN (468) [eh?]; UNKNOWN (24) [35 apparently older ones omitted here]. "Funnily enough", they are almost all of metal (!) of the just 11 "other material [mostly mother of pearl]", five are search engine fails, they also are metal [the search engine is not recognizing pewter and tombak as a metal]. So that means that out of 7,316, only six recorded buttons are not metal (and one of them is tortoise shell [? plastic?] with a metal insert.
For Mr Wills, a search of Buttons with the word "broken" in the description: The answer is 666 [ignoring the earlier ones: no "early medieval" ones; MEDIEVAL (81); POST MEDIEVAL (459); MODERN (21)]. That is 9.1%. So 91% of the recorded buttons recovered from ploughsoil are not broken at all. The same goes for many of the bulk lots you can see on EBay - in total annually probably passing through EBay is the numerical equivalent of what PAS have handled in 23 years "recording". If however you skim through the 666 pictures of "broken" buttons on the PAS database, what you find is "broken" in the majority of cases is the loop at the back. In a page of 100 records the ratio of substantially complete to fairly badly damaged buttons is usually 91:9.
So in answer to that "collection as rescue" justification of collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record, the actual DATA from the PAS database accumulated from the material "rescued' by hundreds of detectorists, from soil and agricultural regimes all over the country, in a substantial (?) data set, that damage is 9% of 95% of the whole. Is that a "justification" for digging the whole lot up?
OK, anyone who wants to prove it is can, in the comments below add their answer to the question I posed. HOW has 23year public-funded "recording archaeological finds in their context" revealed info about society and changing daily life 900-300 years ago - rather than just producing loose decontextualised objects as "illustrations" of history known from other sources and celebrating artefact collecting. Archaeological comments only please.
Update 19th Nov 2019
"Let us see what response it generates from Bloomsbury's heritage heroes", well, so far we have no archaeological response about the archaeological values of the PAS database records apart from being a springboard for some trite commemorative guff about a "button day". But in true metal detectorist fashion, PAS have blocked me from seeing their (government supported) twitter account. I have no faith that in my absence that account will suddenly start doing any actual archaeological outreach or start providing a balanced picture of Collection-driven exploitation by members of the public of England and Wales of the archaeological record. PASthetic.
This 'Damaged by modern farming' seems to be a theme, a major justification amongst detectorists. They concentrate on metallic small finds but what of the bigger picture, monuments being damaged by modern farming methods(and detecting itself)? What of damage done to stratigraphy and loss of context when digging holes?
ReplyDeleteIt has its context in the so-called "Good Collector Model" in other areas of "ancient art" (sic) collecting, some rescue artefacts from "ignorant" brown-skinned people allegedly unable to look after their own heritage, or even some of them deliberately destroying objects ISIL, Taliban. Some UK detectorists have the same attitudes to the landowners, like the Leominster hoard where the tekkies took valuable items from the land and did not even show them to the landowner who they treated as too ignorant to care.
ReplyDeleteOf course a proportion of artefacts deteriorate in hostile soil conditions, but how does that justify metal detecting in the great majority of places where self-evidently no such danger exists?
ReplyDeleteWorse, how does that justify PAS mouthing that same false detecting justification in recent years, but not at all previously?