Small Sample, Thought-Provoking Responses

              Waiting wife (1881)

An interesting thread on a metal detecting forum near you (12214 users) that is currently being added to discusses the question: Detecting - how many hours A week?. The figures are a small sample, and rather inconsistently noted, but (ignoring the guy from Nova Scotia) indicate that list members declare they are out in the fields taking material from the archaeological record between 4 and 20 hours a week. The median is nine hours and below it most are out there five to six hours a week, while there are a sizeable number that claim they do 10-16 hours a week. 

Eight years ago Robbins (2012, pp 86-8) was looking at this question and found that nearly 90% of artefact hunters in England and Wales go out metal detecting at least once a week and over 10% of her survey respondents stated that they detect more than three times a week. Another 10% only detect one weekend a month, amounting to 24 days per year. When out detecting, her survey results show that detectorists spend an average of 5 hours 30 minutes searching for artefacts while a survey of 84 magazine articles, which together detail 466 separate detecting events, gives an alternative figure of 6 hours 15 minutes per visit. 

It seems that the metal detecting forum results reflect the upper end of that 90%, probably those the feel they have something to boast about. Extrapolating from Robbins' figures and these, it would seem that 80% of detectorists go out artefact hunting between 2 and 7 hours a week, 10% less than 1.4 hours a week, and 10% much more than 7. 

Eighty percent of 27000 detectorists is 21,600 of them, if most of them average about 5 hours in the field a week over nine months that's a whopping 3,888,000 hours detecting a year (!). On top of that are the more-than-10-hours-a-week crowd (2700 @ 10 hrs x 36 = 922,000 hours a year). Even if the low end seekers find nothing, the total annual hourly figure for the other 90% is somewhere around 4,810,000. And yet the mere handing in of 80000 recordable finds a year from the whole lot is taken to mean "the majority are responsible". That's one find for every 60 hours detecting. So according to the average, a detectorist finds one recordable find every ten/twelve weeks. Yes? Or are they finding MUCH more, and simply not handing it in?