Friday, 14 July 2023

Polish Parliament and the Heritage-Trashing Vote

 


I'm not very good at this yet. This one is unbalanced, I wanted to get the earthworks in the foreground in. The bottom one is too cluttered.

Any suggestions for some slogans? They need to hit back at the heritage-negligent and wrong-headed and heritage negligent that passed this law without (a) wider consultation in the heritage community and (b) no detailed costings - they are in for a surprise. Total lack of professionalism and responsibility, they just want the metal detectorists' vote. They are in for a surprise there too, they've been misled into thinking that there are several hundred thousand in Poland. My work suggests it is less than 30 000, and as you can see on the forums they are all already from the (often nastier bits of the) right side of the political spectrum. Who goes out metal detecting for Nazi memorabilia? 


You can't get archaeological information out of a site with a metal detector and a blind-dug narrow hoik-hole. All you can do is get some collectable or gawpworthy item, a lot of other little bits you don't understand, and make a hole in the contexts and patterns from which they came. In other words, by taking out a few portable antiquities, you damage the archaeological site as a source of knowledge about the past and that place. This is knowledge theft, it destroys the archaeological record. Until this new amendment, Poland had laws that aimed to reduce this destruction and knowledge loss. Take that away and Poland just creates a looters' paradise. And since most of the artefact hunters search in remote forest areas, they already know, from 30+ years of getting away with it, that their chances of being caught doing something wrong is next to zero. 

 

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