Those (Very) Scattered Ephemeral Personal Artefact Collections

Roger Bland has written a nice thank you piece for the „metal detectorists” his newly-revived organization is now in partnership with as per acceptance of Kate Clark’s review of the Portable Antiquities Scheme by the MLA and British government. In it he announces that since September 2007 the Department has been an expert adviser on the export licensing of detector finds, and in 2007 approved 312 licences, of which more that 85 per cent are for export outside the European Union. Maybe the PAS keeps records of where all those portable antiquities are going?
How much of that is going for example to the resource-hungry United States? That would explain why a group like the ACCG is so strong in its support of British "metal detecting" and its legitimization by the PAS.

Eighty five percent, and that’s just the ones where the dealer or detectorist actually apply for the licence, and don’t just drop it in an unmarked padded envelope.

The Heritage Action Erosion Counter

,
Heritage Action is a grassroots organization seeking a better deal for Britain's archaeological mouments and landscapes, a group of volunteers passionately interested in the historic heritage and trying to take action against those, especially goverment bodies and institutions, that seem to be neglecting the duty to look after them. One of the topics of their recent concern is government policy towards artefact hunting and collecting, damaging archaeological sites in Britain on a worrying scale with very little being done by the authorities to prevent it. In his comments to my post ("making it sustainable ...") on this blog Roger Bland, Head of the UK's Portable Antiquities Scheme asks:

Equally, how can anyone put any credence into Heritage Action's Artefact Erosion Counter when the basis on which it is calculated is not stated? 316,000 finds a year? How impressive to be so certain on so little evidence. For you simply to say that you believe it to be accurate is hardly adequate.

[The Erosion Counter under discussion can be found here at the moment it stands at some 3,478,000 'recordable' objects that have been collectively removed from the archaeological record since the start of the Portable Antiquities Scheme].

Well, I would like to hear Roger Bland's own best estimate on the number of 'recordable' artefacts that are being taken by artefact hunters (let us say just those using metal detectors) in England and Wales year by year and on what basis he arrives at his estimate. Is it possible to learn that after a decade or more and eight million quid's worth of liaison by the PAS? After not one but three separate 'independent reviews' of the Scheme's operation? It seems a pretty fundamental question to me. Too important to say "we have no idea, but one day we might".

I believe the Heritage Action Erosion counter figures are far more useful as a basis for discussion of current policies than the government's eight million pound "we don't know yet".

As Roger Bland knows only too well (!), I have been concerned about the scale of the erosion of the UK archaeological record due to artefact hunting and collecting for some years. Since no real figures seemed to exist in the context of which to examine the 'propaganda of success' that the pro-collecting lobby was putting out (concerning number of items recorded through the PAS for example), and nobody seemed keen to try and determine this, I took an interest in this problem and have been trying to determine this myself. A few years ago, after constant frustration of attempts to obtain such figures from the PAS and pro-collecting lobby in archaeology, I formed a small informal working group (now no longer active) called EAHAR (Effects of Artefact Hunting on the Archaeological Record) where we discussed this. The erosion counter grew out of these discussions.

I should perhaps admit that to some extent I was involved in the creation of the Heritage Action counter (though it is not by any means my own work or based solely on information I gathered) and I know how much thought and work of a number of dedicated volunteers passionately interested in conserving Britain's historic record actually went into it. I need not add that it did not cost the taxpayer a penny, but addresses questions that bodies that do should have been answering about the common archaeological heritage and how it is being "managed" (which in this case seems a loose use of the term).

A second point that needs to be made with regard Roger Bland's disparaging remarks is that the HA website is one doing “outreach” and not in itself an academic publication. The basis on which the erosion counter is calculated and the underlying definitions are all laid out in the book which Nigel Swift and I have written and will hopefully be out soon. I am sure they will then be well and truly scrutinised. My hope is that they will then be replaced by an even more firm estimate. I should add that in the course of work on the book after Heritage Action had set the Erosion Counter ticking away, we were led to the realisation that there were other factors not initially taken into account which should have led to the rate being set even higher. But as it says on the webpage, it is deliberately a conservative estimate of the erosion caused by the removal of artefacts from the archaeological record by metal detector using artefact hunters.*

I really do not see why Roger Bland scoffs at "316000 objects" a year. It is not a great amount if he himself accepts that there could be up to ten thousand detectorists in England and Wales alone. That’s just 31 objects a year each, a handful of Roman “grots”, a buckle or two, a hammered coin and some other bits. That’s not actually very much at all. There are artefact hunters on PAS who have (they say) recorded a thousand items in the last three years - 300 a year (Pete Twinn the Bristol detectorist who Kate Clark spent a lot of time talking to asserts that is the case with his finds). There are 'highlights' from metal detectorists' collections on UKDFD which show that individual detectorists have many more found in the course of a year. There’s the profoundly disturbing Mike Pegg video referred to on this blog a few months back with his “shedfull” of artefacts. There were the four guys (the video pulled from You Tube immediately after I drew attention to it here) who went on a metal detecting weekend in Suffolk and despite it being wet and horrible each proudly displayed a haul greater than thirty recordable items from just one weekend. There are many cases of personal artefact collections which contain more than thirty new recordable items added annually, especially if the searcher has found a "productive" site, like a Roman settlement or Early Medieval cemetery.

Of course at the other end of the scale are the dozens of sad individuals that plug away at the hobby and despite going out in all weathers for hours on end manage to find one or two things a year. There are a lot of them in the hobby, many of them probably only go out to meet other people they can talk to in a field at rallies and so on. Then there are many who fall between these extremes. What we need is a much greater amount of precision about artefact hunting and collecting patterns. I believe the Heritage Action counter takes these factors fully into consideration.

As things stand at the moment I believe the Heritage Action Erosion Counter is a relatively accurate reflection of the loss to the British archaeological record due to artefact hunting and collecting.

Supporters of the PAS scoff at the figures, but (as did Roger Bland just now) omit to address the second part of the question I ask about it. Even if the supporters of a "partnership" with artefacts and hunters think these figures are "wrong" (as they must in order to save face), then by how much must these figures be "wrong" to make the situation an acceptable one? Twenty percent, thirty, fifty? This is a question to which I would like to hear the answer.

The PAS and its former Fifth Aim

In 2003 the aims and objectives of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (operating since 1997) were formalized. There were just five of them. The last was

To define the nature and scope of a scheme for recording portable antiquities in the longer term, to access the likely costs and to identify resources to enable it to be put into practice.

Just a few years later, on page 9 of the 2005/6 annual report it was announced bluntly “The final aim […] has been achieved”. This was indeed a surprising statement if one regards just one of the several purposes of the PAS is to record the many items being deliberately and with pre-meditation taken from the archaeological record weekly by several thousand artefact hunters year by year. The PAS has clearly not been achieving full mitigation of the erosion caused by this single cause of the significant long term depletion of the British archaeological record. It also seems to me that it has a very long way to go in doing so. Furthermore it is clear that meeting this need would be a very costly exercise, so the curious may have wondered where the resources to put this in practice were emvisaged. On the announcement of the news that these resources had been identified, we all looked forward to the release of the details.

They never came. Whatever the PAS had decided about these costs and how they were likely to be met was kept out of the public domain.

The PAS however had not achieved their fifth aim. They had not assessed the longer term costs of a scheme for recording the thousands of individual pieces of archaeological evidence removed annually to scattered ephemeral personal portable antiquity collections by British artefact hunters. They never did let on where it was they identified the source of the considerable amounts of money needed to do the job properly – in other words the PAS did they reveal on whom they wished to unload the costs of legitimizing and coping with the erosive hobby of a minority - or why they should foot the bill.

More recently a review was commissioned to look at the same problem. The publication of the results of the review process identified the source of the funding to keep the Scheme operating more or less at the same level. Basically in addition to central funds, it requires the local partners each to give to the financing of the Scheme twice as much money as before. A few limply-phrased words about ”partnership” and so on are intended to convince local authorities of the necessity of doing this (at the expense of other local needs of course).

The point is however that current policies concerning artefact hunting and collecting in England and Wales do not need a PAS that is standing still, one that is merely treading water to create the impression that one day the problem of the erosion of the British archaeological record due to artefact hunting, collecting and commerce can be fully resolved. We need a PAS which is going to reach all those thousands of finds that are annually being removed from the archaeological record by artefact collectors and get reliable archaeologically-usable information from them. That’s going to cost a lot more than adding another few percent on a local authority’s already slim culture budget. The big question though is why? Why should everybody be forking out to support the hobby of an erosive minority?

Meeting the Needs of Researchers in Museums

David Dawson draws attention to a report released online by the Research Information Network which addresses the problem of how museums can better support the needs of researchers including those interested in examining archaeological objects in the reserve collections.There are a number of recommendations which impinge on topics which have been raised by collectors of portable antiquities in their rhetoric extolling the academic advantages of the "in a heap on my table" model over the "locked away in reserve collections in museum basements".

Two of them are of particular interest in this context.
The first is that the report says that all museums and other collections should make the research data in their content management systems available online as soon as possible, without waiting until backlogs are cleared or records improved to levels of perceived 'perfection'.
The other is that museums and other collections should develop and publish (for example on their websites) a 'researchers' charter', including clear policies on the arrangements for visits by researchers and covering other areas such as the support and facilities available for browsing collections, handling objects, sampling and testing, and loans. As an example, Dawson draws attention to the webpage for researchers of the Wiltshire Heritage Museum.
The report also recommends putting information about the collections online. Dawson reports that the above-mentioned museum found this to be relatively straightforward and inexpensive and that jt paid for itself in terms of staff time saved in answering enquiries and has made the collections better known.

Does Scotland have a "metal detecting" problem?

Scotland is a huge and culturally advanced country lying to the north of England, it has a population of over 5 100 000. As we all know, under Scottish law all portable antiquities of archaeological, historical or cultural significance are subject to claim by the Crown through the Treasure Trove system and must be reported. It is interesting to look at Appendix 4 ("Finders who reported finds in this reporting year") listed in the latest Scottish Treasure Trove Report. How many people reported archaeological finds as the law demands? A massive 31 people, a total which includes "metal detectorists" and non-"metal detecting" members of the public. The reporting metal detectorists of Scotland are not enough to even fill a bus to Edinburgh.

Now there are some gentle-folk who suggest helpfully that if there was a Scottish PAS they'd become "educated" and encouraged to report.

The idea of extending the "community engagement" and "partnership" of the PAS to the metal detectorists of Scotland is not really a good idea. Outreaching to a group that appear to be guilty of law-breaking on a mass scale by offering them the opportunity to report finds voluntarily would rightly make Britain an international laughing stock.

Photo: Traprain Law treasure

Torah Story raises questions

.

A while ago I wrote on a Torah which news reports suggest was illegally exported from Iraq by US servicemen apparently at the instigation of Rabbi Youlos of the US-based Save a Torah Foundation. Enquiries sent at the time to the military unit allegedly involved (82nd Airborne) have failed to elicit a response. My interest however was piqued by another exploit of Youlos (dubbed by an admiring press “the Indiana Jones of Rabbis”), this time on my own patch in central Europe which raises more question about the activities of this Foundation.

In a recent article by James Baron “From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit” New York Times April 30, 2008 ) we read about how Youlos claims he dug up a Torah from among the remains of the historic Jewish cemetery in Oswiecim, the place infamous as the site of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz, a site with which I am very familiar.

Youlos claims he went to the Polish town in late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the Torah from the Auschwitz synagogue and had a hunch it was buried in a metal box in the cemetery, so he hunted the area with a metal detector. He found nothing but then did some archival research (after the fact!) and found (online) land records that showed that the boundary of the cemetery visible today was “far smaller than the original one”. So Rabbi Youlus says he went back in 2004 with his metal detector and it “beeped as he passed a house that had been built after World War II. He dug near the house and found the metal box”. The story continues that a Catholic priest who had been a prisoner in the camp had been keeping four fragments missing from the scroll and miraculously contacted Youlos to give them to him (the newspaper article reports that Youlos says the priest has since died). Youlos took the scroll and the four fragments to the States where they were restored and then sold to a businessman David M. Rubenstein who donated them to a New York synagogue. Rubenstein is a co-founder of the Carlyle Group and was No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion; readers may remember that in December last year he paid $21.3 million for a copy of the Magna Carta. So a good contact then for purveyors of historic scrolls with a story.

This story however seems to have a number of glaring holes in it. First of all, it is not clear which Oswiecim synagogue this scroll is purported to come from. The one from the main one I believe has been saved and is in use in it today. Secondly anyone using a metal detector in Poland to seek old things in the ground, whether Jewish or not, has to have a permit from the provincial curator of historical monuments. A friend of mine who works in this department checked this out for me and told me that no individual or group received any such permit in 2000, 2001 or 2004 to do any such work. Since he says he was digging in the cemetery in the winter (dumb time to come to frosty Poland to do fieldwork anyway), anyone seen grave robbing with a metal detector and digging in in an old cemetery on the outskirts of this quite sizeable town would in any case be spotted from the road and probably would have been reported, but no reports of such criminal activity on this historic site were noted in the past decade. So if these items were dug up in the place and manner the finder says they were, the act was an illegal one. The Rabbi would be guilty of looting and the purchaser who failed to ask to see the requisite permits is guilty of buying looted items. But is that the case? When looking into this I came across some comments on a Polish historians' discussion forum referring to articles in the US press on this and questioning the whole account, as nobody in Oswiecim today knows anything at all about this (sadly, I did not note it down at the time and I cannot now find the link, perhaps it was an ephemeral website).

Another question I would address to Mr Rubenstein is whether he actually saw the export licence that would be needed legally to export five fragments of pre-War Torah scrolls out of Poland. The law in Poland is perfectly clear about the need for such a docment for such items. Such a document not only would confirm the legality of the purchase involving tens of thousands of dollars, but would also be confirmation of the origin of the items concerned within Poland. Given the several doubts about this story, what proof was offered to the purchaser of the legitimacy of the claims of the finder and seller of these items?

Some Thoughts on the New Portable Antiquities Scheme (the 2008 PAS Review) : NuPAS 1

The Portable Antiquities Scheme was set up in 1997 to serve three main purposes.

The first was to ensure that accidental finds made by non-archaeologists, members of the public going about their everyday activities, were reported so that the information they reveal about previously undiscovered sites could be added to the Historic Environment Record (then called “Sites and Monuments Records”). This is what Art. 2iii of the Valetta Convention sees as an essential part of creating a legal system for the protection of the archaeological heritage.
The second as part of this process was to provide mitigation for the erosion of the archaeological record caused by “metal detecting” (the deliberate exploitation of the archaeological record as a source of collectables for entertainment and profit). As such therefore it was intended as a manner of managing the depletion of the record through this activity. Due to the strong opposition of the “metal detecting” lobby, Britain did not feel able to make the reporting of finds mandatory; it assumed persuasion would be enough.
A third and no less important function was to act as a medium for education the public about archaeology and the importance of the archaeological heritage and involving them in its management. The Scheme was set up as “British archaeology’s largest public outreach”, intended to promote archaeological awareness, and instill best practice in addition to its functions recording archaeological objects found by members of the public and passing the information on to the HERs to be used in planning, research and conservation programmes.

The Scheme has operated for over a decade and has been the subject of debate, not least on how to sustainably fund it to a level suitable to the tasks ahead of it. A review was commissioned to look at the ten years’ work and define future directions. The final text by Kate Clark Associates based at Wotton under Edge, Gloucestershire has now appeared.

To characterize this review merely as a disappointment would in my view be an understatement. The author basically has in fact not reviewed the past decade of operation of the Scheme in the various areas in any detail. Neither has she presented various options available and assessed each of them in any detail before reaching her recommendations. These largely coincide with what (as was leaked earlier to quell the mounting tide of criticism of the MLA and central government coming from the portable antiquity collecting lobby) was already being discussed in the MLA. The structure of the document suggests that its author to some extent tailored her arguments to lead to recommendations that this should be the case. I pointed out one of these here, I include what seems to be another clear example below (here).

The Review recommends making changes in the levels of activity and funding of the scheme aiming to facilitate its delivery in the future in the most cost-efficient manner, and render it sustainable. In doing so the author revises the underlying objectives of the scheme. The latter involve such substantial changes that if adopted the ensuing entity fully deserves the name “New PAS” (NuPAS) clearly distinguishing its activities and function from those of the previous decade. The new proposals dilute many of those features that made the old PAS (at least in theory) an ally of archaeological resource conservation.

Normally a policy review of this magnitude and its recommendations would be the subject of comment and discussion in the archaeological world. There is however nothing “normal” in the approach of British archaeologists to the issues surrounding artefact hunting. In fact on the whole the main comments have been coming from artefact hunters and collectors in Britain and beyond which treat its recommendations as a victory for their party. To a great extent they are right and I wonder just how many of my British colleagues have actually read the text carefully and reflected on its significance. I would like today present my thoughts on this review, rather than as one long post, I decided to divide the main arguments into several thematic posts here. I’m going to try to post them in reverse order so they read more logically from the top. They supplement the six earlier ones posted here just after the review appeared ( here, here, here, here, here, and here). I make no apology for discussing the review and the changes it proposes introducing into the ethos behind the PAS at length, given the iconic significance the Scheme has attained for all manner of people involved in portable antiquity collecting and trade, its implications go well beyond those connected with conserving the archaeological resources (record) of England and Wales or even the UK.

vignette symbolises "community engagement"