"Ethics (being purely subjective) have nothing to do with the situation"

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On his blog, Wayne Sayles presents his views on Ethics, Law and Globalization. He writes “One view in archaeology today is that private citizens of any given country have an ethical responsibility to preserve the cultural heritage of all countries.” I would question whether this is a view just “in archaeology” or whether conservation-conscious people in general do not see the conservation of all finite and fragile resources as the ethical responsibility of us all. Like the products of the taking or slaughter of endangered species, the non-sustainable felling of tropical hardwoods, the pollution of the environment with chemical effluents and other waste, greenhouse gas emissions and so on. Sayles tries simplistically to present his "war" as one between collectors (in the white hats) and "archaeologists (the guys in the black hats), when it is the minority of self-centred collectors who want to gobble up selected bits obtained destructively from the global archaeological resource for their own entertainment and profit who are pitted against the whole resource conservation ideology to which increasing numbers of people continue to accept. That is the primary ethical concern, that which affects us all in our interaction with our environment, that collectors are expected to heed. That they persist in their self-delusive argumentation and posing in order to avoid that inconvenient truth, only reflects badly on them.

I find it pretty odd that thirty eight years on, the actual purpose of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property is so persistently misconstrued (or misrepresented) in pro-collecting circles.
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Photo: Conservationists remind us we have only one earth to bequeath to our grandchildren, but despite that some still want to use up as much its resources as they can get their hands on now.

Mr Buck, “taking a resource without landowner consent”

"Some law-abiding hunters are worried that people will unfairly lump them into this illegal activity", said Harris County assistant district attorney Eric Bily, who will prosecute the case. "This guy is not a hunter," Bily said of the arrested man. "This is very different from what hunters do."

We seem to have heard that one before.

Is it? Some animal lovers might say it is irrelevant whether or not the culprit was where and when he was allowed to be by law when engaged in the case of the brutal slaying of an animal and dismemberment just because some guy “had a great admiration for the deer's antlers”. (Those other dead deer on the guy's patio signify a "passionate interest in nature" no doubt.) The motive for the killing and dismemberment was the same – the prize, the trophy. So, some might say, it is with so-called “nighthawks” in the UK. What kind of "passionate interest in history" is it that leads to the dismemberment of archaeological assemblages for a handful of trophy collectables? Of course, I expect gun-owners with bits of dead animal on their walls see it somewhat differently.

Background to the story:
Tame Deer Named 'Mr. Buck' Beheaded in Texas Wildlife Sanctuary
Mr Buck
Mr. Buck's severed head recovered from suspect's home
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Collection with attitude

David Knell is a well-known collector of ancient oil lamps based in Hampshire, he has an attractive and informative website displaying his collection. He has recently added an introduction which I found worthy of note:

Policy The core of the collection was formed many decades ago and added to since. In the early days it was easy to be certain that the lamps acquired had come from even older collections but over the years it has become far more difficult to distinguish between those and lamps that might have been excavated more recently. Due to that difficulty and a desire not to contribute, even unknowingly, to a destruction of the archaeological record caused by modern illicit excavations, the collection of material is now static. Attention is focused on research.Any further acquisition would have to comply with the relevant section and points in the revised Code of Ethics adopted by the Museums Association (UK) and published in 2008.

This is the sort of responsible attitude one would dearly like to see more of among collectors of and dealers in portable antiquities in future.

Over on her blog, Kimberly Alderman discusses the SAFE poll about whether museums should disclose their acquisitions policies and says that what she calls "private museums" should not be so constrained (as she sees it as some kind of infringement of "personal rights" or something like that here ). She seems to see this however only as something that could be imposed by "regulation" rather than social pressure. I think it would be a welcome development if a much tighter system of ethics was imposed on collecting from below, from among collectors themselves emulating the more responsible among their number and not allowing themselves to be in any way inferior to public institutions.
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Collectors as Scholars?

I found Nathan Elkins' recent blog post "
Ulterior Motives in Discussion of Looting Issues?" particularly interesting and well-argued. It is a riposte to points frequently made by the US collecting lobby which basically argue that curtailing a no-questions-asked market would in some way be deleterious to scholarship because portable antiquity collectors are independent scholars. They argue that calls for a more open and ethical trade are in some way aimed at stopping independent scholarship. I think Elkins efectively shows how nonsensical such claims are. In any case I think it far from demonstrated that all consumers of hundreds of thousands of looted and smuggled ancient coins from the Balkans or metal detected finds from France and England are engaged in any form of scholarship. They are dealers and collectors.

I was also interested in contrasting the arguments proffered by the US lobby with those of UK antiquity collectors. I cannot recall ever hearing a discussion of the unfairness of unaffiliated artefact collectors not being able to access the JSTOR academic library resources on a British metal detecting forum. Still, now they are partners, perhaps the Portable Antiquities Scheme can organize it for British metal detectorists?

The New PAS-Collecting Partnership

In most countries of the civilised world, the exploitation of the archaeological record as a source of collectables for entertainment and commerce is regarded as damaging to the longterm survival of the resource and historic environment.

In the topsy-turvy land of Britain, this is not so. There, it is almost as if the core beliefs of the ACCG had been enshrined in national policy. The nation’s biggest archaeological outreach organization, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, has long been dominated buy its close engagement with metal detector using artefact hunters and collectors. It has now been urged by the Clark Review to ditch the archaeological policy component of its advisory body (p. 30) which must now be seen as balancing the “interests of finders” with those of archaeology and curation. The objectives and aims of the NuPAS should reflect even more strongly that it is a “partnership with finders” (pp 6, 26-7, 28, 38) and PAS staff should maintain an “independence” from archaeological concerns about artefact hunting (p. 31). It seems the new way forward for the NuPAS is to enter into a “partnership with finders” and taking their “interests” into account. No sooner have the scandalous pro-metal detecting proposals of this review been made public, than we find the PAS is already busily pursuing these aims.

In his excited article “The Portable Antiquities Scheme Saved! Thanks to UK Detector Net”, in the 16th number of the detectorists’s newsletter “UKDN Word”, Roger Bland announces a number of moves intended to strengthen this partnership and deliver artefact hunters and collectors a better service (p. 22, sic). Among them is a bid for funding from English Heritage's National Capacity Building Programme in which his organization is in partnership with the metal detecting internet forum (sic) UK DETECTOR NET. They are seeking money to enable a feed from the PAS database to go to the UKDN website and also to help UKDN produce its newsletter (!). This is reputedly to “make the database more visible to UKDN users”. This cash handout to metal detectorists from English Heritage funds looks awfully like a thank you for the use to which that forum had been put in the recent public campaign. This is not the only metal detecting forum in Britain, it will be interesting to see whether PAS will be attempting to arrange cash handouts for them all. Here once again we see the same old emphasis on the “wottalotta finds” database rather than the archaeological outreach influencing attitudes to this type of exploitation of the archaeological resource this organization should be doing.

Another grant has been applied for “to pay for potential volunteers to attend residential summer schools to be trained in how to record finds on the PAS database”, this is in accordance with the recommendations of the Clark Review. We can no doubt expect another jump in “numbers of objects recorded on our database” as a result, though cutting out the FLO means that opportunities for archaeological outreach are thereby reduced. We recall that the Clark Review (p. 28 points out “outreach can be done by others”.

The PAS has reportedly also applied for outside money “to buy 200 hand-held GPS machines to give to every detecting club in the country and to community archaeology groups”. So the PAS is now giving the artefact hunters electronic equipment to help these artefact hunters to more quickly empty selected elements of archaeological sites into their personal collections without having to fumble with large scale maps. These handheld GPS are of course a double-bladed weapon. Meteorite hunters use them to find on the ground a point corresponding to the published co-ordinates of a fall or find, and they can then start exploiting them as a source of collectables. I am sure some club members will find this a useful aid in the wide-open fields of some areas of Britain to locating specific spots identified from old archaeological publications. Once again, this is clearly a PAS move to try and improve annual report statistics while cutting out the outreach and input by their own staff. Perhaps we will hear soon that in order to facilitate adding more and more appropriated collectables from archaeological assemblages added to this explosively growing "virtual collection", these new artefact hunting “partners” of British archaeology will be able to claim petrol money for going to commercial artefact hunting rallies – and maybe have the price of the entry ticket refunded from EH funds. Where will this all end?

Apparently the Council for British Archaeology is also a partner in this 'GPS for metal detecting clubs' bid. The CBA has recently appointed pro-collecting archaeologist Suzie Thomas as their 'Community Archaeology Support Officer', so it seems in what direction they are going on this issue too. When is portable antiquity collecting "archaeology for all” and when is it not? That’s the question to which I would like to hear a detailed and unassailable answer from both the CBA and the PAS. I am not holding my breath though.

We all know that a partnership means two entities working together towards a common aim. We know what the aim of the artefact hunter is, to locate and empty archaeological assemblages of selected pieces of archaeological evidence (ignoring and even discarding the rest) and add them to their scattered and ephemeral personal collections. British archaeology, and the PAS in particular, by calling its relationship with artefact hunting and collecting of portable antiquities, is therefore voluntarily party to this approach to the "management" (sic) of the British archaeological resource. The excuse given is that by gathering data about large number of ex-situ decontextualised artefacts they are in some way facilitating archaeological research. But if one looks at what the PAS produces as exemplars of that research we see narrow antiquitist (artefactological) studies of individual varieties or types of (metal) artefact, ethnic overinterpretation of emblemic artefact types and dot distribution maps. This is the type of research that would have been all too familiar to Gustav Kossinna and other investigators of the past with an intellectual foot in the scholarly world of the nineteenth century. Archaeology tried to leave Kossinnism behind decades ago, British archaeology is being dragged back to it by their current fascination with metal detected "data".

It seems to me that in entering a partnership with exploiters of the archaeological record for collectables will need some far-reaching rewrites of the codes of ethics of British archaeologists – fuzzy as they are on this issue at the moment. In fact, what kind of approach to archaeological ethics does this move represent? If to "create knowledge about the past" it is enough for any Tom Dick and Mohammed just to take a metal detector out into the countryside and hoik stuff up willy-nilly, then what on earth do archaeologists have codes of professional conduct and ethics for in the first place?
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"Nighthawking Down - Hooray for PAS"?

In an earlier post here, I drew attention to the general feeling among British "metal detectorists" that illegal metal detecting is still a major problem in the UK. "Not so" say the pro-collecting lobby. We are asked to believe that due to the shining light emanating from Bloomsbury and through the 37 Finds Liaison Officers of the PAS, these criminals with metal detectors have been won over, softened up and mended their ways. They go no more a-roving at night looking out for saleable and collectable things, they apparently go out at day and trot along to the PAS with them.

Bill Sykes has joined the ranks of the "responsible detectorists", become a heritage saver, a hero. That's what we are asked to believe now. First there was Kate Clark making this claim, now it is the official version.

Roger Bland has now joined the “leak the preliminary results of the Nighthawking Survey” bandwagon. In his thank you piece to his new partners, the metal detector using artefact hunters and portable antiquity collectors, he tells them:

A survey by Oxford Archaeology on Nighthawking (to be published in February 2009) has found that this problem appears to have declined on two counts compared with an earlier survey in 1995: (a) in 1995 188 scheduled monuments were reported as having been damaged, and in 2008 the number was 70 and (b) in 1995 74% of archaeological units reported that they had been attacked, whereas in 2008 the number is 28%. The report will attribute this, in part, to the educational work of PAS.

I am sure all those metal detectorists on the UKDN forum are comforted by this announcement of the decline in the numbers of these “black sheep that get the hobby a bad name” and all due to the PAS. They probably have a feeling of warm gratitude that yet another hurdle in the way of the British public wholeheartedly accepting the relentless exploitation of the archaeological heritage for collectables for entertainment and profit has been removed. No more nighthawks, and all due to their partnership with the PAS. Wonderful.

This claim however conceals a puzzle. The Portable Antiquities Scheme has taken a long time to make any headway with the "responsible detectorists" of England and Wales, the UKDFD recognises that there are still many of them who simply will not record finds with the PAS. So how has a voluntary recording scheme like the PAS been able to persuade the law breakers to change their ways so much more rapidly?

I find disturbing the leaking of what are only selected and preliminary results of a controversial joint project by only one of the partners for its own purposes. I have already discussed the use to which these leaked conclusions have been put by Kate Clark. Denison and Dobinson's survey was restricted to England and Wales (as is the PAS), while the Oxford Survey is nationwide. If nationwide numbers have dropped, not to put too fine a point on it, it cannot be due to the PAS, and I fail to see how, if they are doing the job properly, Oxford Archaeology could claim it was.

I suspect that when we see the full report, we will understand better what these figures show or do not show. I am convinced that we will discover that this is an artefact of the manner in which the data were gathered rather than being a reflection of anything that is actually happening in the fields of Britain. I am sure though that the conclusions are exactly what the government and pro-collecting archaeologists of that topsy-turvy land want to hear. So I do not expect we will see much proper criticism of the report from the interested parties.

It seems a rather dubious strategy of the PAS to argue that they are responsible for a decline in the numbers of illegal metal detector operators. After all every single findspot on the PAS database is hidden from profane eyes, because allegedly there are so many "nighthawks" who could use this information. If the number of these "nighthawks" is on the decline (after all seventy sites nationwide is the work of only one or two gangs of professional treasure seekers), then let’s have the PAS database opened up to the full view of those who pay for it.

Equally, the PAS reports that although in 2007 there were over 700 Treasure cases reported, their scrutiny of just one internet sales outlet (eBay UK) revealed as many as 183 cases of illegal sales of unreported Treasure, information on these cases was passed to the police (let us see what they do with it). There is more, after all to illegal metal detecting than Bill Sykes just going out at night with a metal detector and spade to the nearest scheduled site and looking for coins to sell to US dealers.

Photo: Newark metal detectorists Mark Longdon and Dean Wright after conviction for daylight illegal metal detecting on the scheduled Roman site of Margidunum in 2007 (Photo: Newark Advertiser)

PAS: How many artefacts Got away?

The former Minister of Culture in Britain once likened artefact hunting with metal detectors to "fishing on land". As we all know, fishermen like to tell tales of the "one that got away". We are told that the Portable Antiquities Collection is managing to record "40 to 80%" of the artefacts removed by these people to scattered ephemeral artefact collection (or eBay) each year. How many artefacts then does Roger Bland, head of the PAS say are getting away unrecorded after being removed from the ground?

We can use the 2007 figures (summarized by Clark, p. 22 and now by Bland). Bland asserts that the total number of finds reported by metal detector users in 2007 is 40 to 80 % of all finds made by metal detector users in England and Wales in that year. This would mean that annually "metal detectorists" in England and Wales are removing from the ground between 70 and 165 thousand archaeological objects a year. Of these they reported about 58 thousand (on average ten finds per reporter). This means the number of “finds that got away” was between 12 and 107 thousand artefacts. that is the equivalent of between one and nineteen unreported finds per “detectorist”. So is each metal detectorist in the country holding back a statistical one object a year from the PAS (why? What is this mysterious object and why is it kept hidden away?) or are they statistically showing ten but holding back nineteen? What actually is the real pattern of activity behind Bland's broad estimate? Why, after over a decade of outreach among these people do we not have firmer figures?

The results of the gathering of data on this problem by the British volunteer group Heritage Action discussed earlier on this blog indicate that the national figures are much higher, at a conservative estimate, approximately 300 000 objects a year. How accurate is this comforting picture painted by Dr Bland? On what secret PAS data is it based? How well is Britain really coping with the plague of artefact hunting and portable antiquity collecting and commerce?