The Entangled PAS: Neil Brodie on Metal Detecting Finds from England and Wales (III)

 

The section on "Unreported (dark) finds" is a bit of a mixed bag. Dr Brodie spends some time (p 91) making excuses why British artefact hunters may not be reporting finds. Nowhere does the word "irresponsible" appear, still less "self-centred bastards". Again, the failure explicitly to consider collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record as a collecting activity flattens the argument. On page 92, he makes several good points with which one can only agree:

a) "When considering the dark-figure problem of unreported finds, it is important not to confuse the issues of illegally-detected finds and legally-detected though unreported finds, nor to develop an analytical polarisation between legal and illegal detecting, which problematizes illegal detecting while accepting legal detecting and implicitly the non-reporting of legal finds".

It is odd how many times this needs to be said... This is exactly the sort of information that a quarter of a century of expensive PAS outreach should by now have got out to the British public. 

b) "The finds recorded on the PAS database are clearly only a sample of the total, but the PAS has not paid a lot of attention to the problem of unreported legal finds [...] Yet in archaeological terms the non-reporting of legal finds is as damaging as illegal detecting"

It is odd how many times this needs to be said. This is exactly the sort of information that a quarter of a century of expensive PAS outreach should by now have got out to the British public. 

c) "The argument that non-reporting ‘hoarding’ detectorists might record information about their finds which they might be willing to share with researchers and that such finds should not be considered lost is disingenuous (Deckers et al. 2018: 324)".

It is odd that such a thing should even need saying.

d) "The PAS was developed to encourage the reporting of legally-found objects, thereby diminishing archaeological damage, and its success in part must be judged by its success in achieving that aim. Thus the dark figure of unreported finds remains an important though presently inexact statistic, which was one of Hardy’s motivating contentions (Hardy 2017: 42).'

Deckers et al. for some reason (Brodie says why) did not seem to want to see it that way.

I have a bit of a problem with Brodie's attempts to say what he thinks those figures are, and have devotd a separate post to my thoughts on this in order not to detract from the overall positive aspects of Dr Brodie's paper, which all PAS staff should read and reflect on.