RAP 30: Pathetic Excuse from the Helsinki Gang

There is a revealing footnote to Neil Brodie's text about "metal detecting" in England and Wales. As as I mentioned elsewhere, he starts off by criticising the tone of the Deckers et al 2018 nonsense. And footnote 2 contains this:

An anonymous reviewer of this paper also asked it to be made clear that Deckers et al. (2018) were responding to a first version of Hardy’s (2017) paper, not the second, corrected version that subsequently appeared and is referenced here. The original version is available at .

The significance of the difference between the two is in no way any explanation of the tone and approach adopted by PieterJan Deckers, Andres Dobat, Natasha Ferguson, Stijn Heeren, Professor Michael Lewis, and Suzie Thomas. Whether it was one version or the other, all six authors totally avoided discussing the main underlying point that the text(s) raised andmerely set out to trash the author. Shame on them, and shame on the attempts of this anonymous reviewer to deflect attention from that matter and by that means attempt to preserve the silence over the other side of collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record. Pathetic.