UK Artefact Hunting Beyond The Turn of the Century

Heritage Action, 'Pay-to-dig metal detecting rally organiser squeezing every last penny out, despite the crisis!' 1st November 2020.

It appears that 51 people have turned up to today's Let's Go Digging commercial metal detecting rally at Corse, Gloucestershire, and only one has decided to stay away in view of the serious public health implications. So 98% of participants have decided that all that matters is that "it's legal innit", perhaps an indication of the sort of attendees random pay-to-dig events attract. Worse, because next week's event will no longer be allowed, the organiser has speedily arranged an alternative one on adjacent land (60 acres of pasture) on TUESDAY, so just before the lockdown that is intended "to prevent a medical and moral disaster" begins.

Site trashers just have to get their 'fix', and the organizers their money. Both are filling their pockets at the expense of the archaeological heritage. This highlights an important change that has taken place over the past decade. 

The turn of the Century
From the beginning of "metal detecting" in the 1970s, and still in the 1990s and early years of the 2000s, when the Portable Antiquities Scheme was set up and running under the good leadership of Roger Bland, metal detectorists were seeking their own "permissions", areas to search-and-take by building up relations with individual farmers. Rallies were held and were treated more as a social event, places for otherwise independednt artefact hunters to come together and meet fellows. It was also to several of these rallies that Suzie Thomas, Dave Connolly and a few other like-minded folk came to do fieldwork on the metal detecting community. As a result of activities like this, a whole load of pro-collecting archaeologists were insistent that artefact hunting was in some way a good thing, the argument went that this was all about people getting to know the history of their 'little homeland', the area around them. Some even wrote wordy texts on the "phenomenology" of the whole phenomenon (Winkley 2016).

The Fifth Decade
These same arguments are being churned out by the Helsinki Gang - despite the fact that the whole landscape of metal detecting in the UK has changed. Since about 2015 we have seen the increase in the number, and especially size, of variously-structured pay-to-dug commercial oganisations that obtain money from customers, then pay landowners a one-off fee (possibly sometimes cash-in-hand, so non-taxable) to allow assorted people onto the land for a day or several days and they can hoover all the finds they want and take them away. The fact that farmers hear that detectorists are offering big cash sums for access to land incites them to expect every artefact hunter to pay for access, something that the forums indicate many individual detectorists take as an affront. These groups can be very large, Paul Howard's "Let's Go Digging" for example has 13,400 followers - that's probably half the metal detectorists in England and Wales. The FLOs in general now stay away from such events, and it seems that only minimum quantities of what is removed gets seen by the landowner, or the PAS. This totally changes the basis on which the pro-collecting arguments of the Helsinki gang, the PAS supporters and all the rest are based. Any chance that any of these archaeologists will take notice? Not while there is academic grant money in pretending collaboration in Collection-Driven Exploitation of the archaeological record brings more dividends than it does harm. Scandalous.