In a comment to a post (What Happens to Old Metal Detecting Finds? PACHI Monday, 27 April 2020) about an artefact that turned up at a carboot sale in the UK, an anonymous "Unknown" ventures (31 January 2021 at 07:57), possibly without even reading the post, and not citing his sources...
Bro most of the metal detectors give their finds to museumsApart from coming here and calling me "Bro" (!) I am not surprised this person was too embarrassed to write under their real name while peddling trashy fob-off figures.
Storing and curating artefacts is expensive. Many museums will not just accept piles of loose metal objects with no documentation of provenance and legal origins, and experience shows that most metal detectorists (in the UK at least) do not maintain such records of their collections. So where does this person get this "most" from? If an estimated 8.8million recordable finds have been made in the UK since PAS began, what percentage of them have reached a museum collection? And if "most" artefact hunters are "giving" (sic) to museums, where are the tens of thousands of artefacts and coins on sale on eBay coming from?
When, actually, are those attempting to justify collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record going to abandon wishy-washy vague quantifiers and start quoting joined-up real numbers and facts from the real world?
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