2022 Treasure Figures and an Update on The Treasure Blip

As the estimated number of artefact hunters with metal detectors reaches 40000, official figures released this week by the British Museum show there were a record 1,378 items of treasure found by amateur searchers in England, Wales and N. Ireland in 2022. It’s is the highest amount ever recorded and shows the increasingly unsustainable scale of depletion of the archaeological record by artefact hunting as archaeologists look on with folded arms.

I have already discussed the implications of comparing the current view of the numbers of metal detectorists and the way they have grown with the Treasure case numbers (in the Treasure Blip posts). I present here a new version of the graph of this, using the government's current figures for the latter from 1996 to 2022 (for some inexplicable reason, they change a little from year to year). The divergence of the traces can be seen very clearly here, and my interpretation is that the intact Treasures are getting harder to find, ven though the number of people looking for them is going up.