"Alan's" Legacy - A Collection and Some Drawings of "Antiquities", and a Lot of Gaps in the Archaeological Record

 

On social media, Dr Jenny Durrant (Hampshire FLO) writes: 

A privilege to sort the legacy collection of detectorist Alan. Many potential museum acquisitions here, lots beautifully recorded in notebooks. Legacies will become a common situation, but it's impossible for many museums to acquire them. [...] The notebooks are essential for matching objects to find spots - many of which are the other side of the country. So there's some repatriation to happen.

We learn from another FLO that "Alan was such an accomplished artist and illustrator. Sad that he's no longer with us, but a privilege to work with him in Hampshire". The photo shows a page of a notebook with a very accomplished pencil drawing of an early medieval mount, but carefully aligned so you can't see what is written by it. One assumes that here is the information being used that is "essential" to "match the objects with their findspots" but cannot tell how detailed that information might be. Of course if the finds had all been PAS-recorded beforehand, there'd be no findspot-hunting to be done at public expense and the cost of Dr Durant's time now.

The photo shows basically a heap of objects on a table, some are grouped (by the collector or the FLO?) loose in plastic containers like used ice-cream tubs and the suchlike, some in small groups on opened polybags. Virtually none of the ones seen in this photo seem to have been stored in individual, labelled, polybags. None seem to be associated with any kind of label, though it is difficult to be sure, the ones nearer the camera seem not to bear any catalogue number in ink that would link each individual find to an external paper or digital record.

Part of "Alan's Legacy"

It is to be hoped that there will be some kind of publication summarising this collection and making available information of the numbers of artefacts of the broad categories there are, and how many items it is in total. So few of these old collections ever do end up being characterised in the archaeological literature. That's a shame, as this kind of collecting is a poorly documented phenomenon and I think (from what I see on the forums) there is a lot of misunderstanding that arises because of this. Since this kind of collecting is a major consumer of the archaeological record and (with 27000+ metal detectorists) it is a major area of contact between the public and the past, which is why (as a result of/ and factor affecting/ PAS liaison) it should be being better documented. 

Someone asked in the thread about the comment "[these 27000] legacies will become a common situation, but it's impossible for many museums to acquire them". they asked why this is. Victoria Barlow of Maidstone Museums says that currently, "We have a hold on acquisitions because of staff capacity. I couldn’t even think of taking on a collection like this. It would be unethical to accept items we couldn’t accession, catalogue or make available to the public in anything like a reasonable timescale".

Dr Durrant adds:

Also, finds in private collections may be disassociated from their findspots - not written down, or on laptops for which no-one knows the password. Museums collect geographical areas, so unprovenanced finds become homeless [...] Also worth remembering that even if a detectorist lived locally their finds may be from various counties.

I dealt with one where this was the case, but some items were even from other countries, gathered on his honeymoon.

Another aspect is that whatever the collector may have intended (intended to put in writing but did not), heirs may have different ideas about what they will do with the antiquities in a collection. The individual items often don't have a high market value, but aren't worthless, look at eBay or the finds valuation pages of metal detecting magazines. A collection like this is worth ££££s Somehow the landowners handing this stuff to collectors for free seem unaware of this. When a collector dies their heirs may also be unaware and just dump it all in a skip when cleaning out the house after a death, others may sell them as a job lot to somebody to resell, or some may take them to a museum to give them first pickings, or try to get the museum to buy. In the 1960s, members of the public finding artefacts who did not want to hang onto them simply donated items to museums. With the rise in metal detecting this all seems to have changed and man of them then expected the museum to buy the artefacts.

The point is though that the table-top full (and potentially plus the big plastic bin full) of loose unlabelled artefacts with some cutely-drawn and maybe listed in a notebook is no substitute for a proper record of the removal of these items from a site which (x-marks the spot findspot or not) is trashed by being dug over in the search for collectables. And that, too, is "Alan's Legacy".