Minelab Owners Just do not Understand

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Last night I wrote a post here about excited discussion of a metal detector made by metal detector producer "Minelab" with "awesome punch" that could pentrate deeper and deeper below ploughsoil, and a video which seems to illustrate that this is not salesman's hype. It did not take long for the Minelab owners' forum to pick it up. C. Nyal de Kaye writes:

I'm a long way from the UK, but you would have to go a very long way to read something more foolish than the article by Paul Barford that John Winter linked us to. I do not understand why digging a hole, say two feet deep, poses any threat to anything, provided it is properly filled in as that hole was. I too get very annoyed with people who leave open holes. [...] In this case the hole was properly refilled. Have a look for yourself. Having watched archeologists "disfigure" (to use Barford's word) the landscape with back hoes, digging trenches of great depth and width, then Mr Barford, who is doing the most damage? The archeologist fill their trenches in a proper manner, just as we do, but we are "site hooligans" and they are not.[...] Sadly there will always be a fanatical element that oppose just about everything, and the writer of that article seems to be a good candidate.

Slow_n_Low (who I have never met) retorts

Thats Barford for ya.

Now that some unthinking metal detecting artefact hunter who thinks that I am the foolish one does not understand that digging a hole two feet deep into archaeological deposits poses a threat to them does not surprise me, nor that he thinks the whole thing can be simply "made good" by filling in the holes. That metal detector users like this do not accept the finite and fragile nature of the archaeological record and recognise the effect of their activities in taking objects from it for entertainment and profit surprises nobody who has had any prolonged contact with the milieu. For Nyal de Kaye, the only difference he sees between this type of artefact hunting and archaeological recording is that archaeologists "dig bigger holes". Yes, they do, you cannot interpret the stratigraphy of a site and the relationships between individual pieces of archaeological evidence through narrow holes no matter how "deep".

The Minelab owner does not see the issue I was discussing, merely deflects discussion from the aspect of destruction of what is below ground to the superficial issue of the appearance of the site on the surface. He insists that the turf of the site being searched is pristine, not at all damaged, and anyway if it was would soon "right itself". Well, have a look at what is behind the hole digger on the video 5:24 secs for example, or between the bloke with the mike's legs at 9:58, it seems to me detectorists have made a right mess of this grassland. And whether or not it will "right itself" in two, twenty or two hundred years is not the point. If you throw chocolate wrappers and coke bottles down they too will one day disappear from view, but that is no reason to say that littering of such places is acceptable.

Gary Brun says that my post was "just a little bit misleading" because:

Neil did fill in his holes.
We promote responcible detecting and care for the enviroment.
We record all significant finds and uphold the law.

(Note the word "significant" - are a pocketful of Roman coins from one small area of an upland site "significant" to Mr Brun? Also it is important with whom these finds are "recorded").

But anyway, that is not the point being made by my post. It is quite clear that there is archaeological material on top of that hill and whatever chance there is of understanding it is lost because of this activity which is being filmed. Where do we see Mr "Slow and Low" using a GPS to plot the pocket full of coins he has pinched? They have no measuring equipment up there, estimating the depth dug against their "twelve inch spade". What record of those coins and their mutual relationships in the ground exists in the PAS database? How much detail is there? How possible will it be to link the detailed position of these finds to those reported a yyear, two, five years ago and with what degree of accuracy?

Just "filling in the holes" is NOT full mitigation of the damage we see being done to that site in the video using this type of equipment. The fact that the detectorists discussing this on their forum show absolutely no sign of understanding that after THIRTEEN YEARS of PAS "outreach" to them is really shocking. It is illustrative of the degree to which PAS is failing to fulfil the basic aim which is to instil best practice so that artefact hunters help protect and not trash sites. Has the PAS seen this video even? Does the PAS have any intention of making any kind of comment on it and what some of their detectorist "partners" are saying about it? Where are these "responsible detectorists" why are they keeping quiet about all this talk? Or are they really just a myth?
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