"I Like the Plundering of Sites"

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Scottish Pro-Collecting Demagogue Archeolog David Connolly, referring to the terminology I used in my posts yesterday, remarks:

I do like the plundering archaeological sites. after all thats what you do innit? LOL well without doubt there are a small minority that do that, but the way he speaks it makes it sound like every one who wields a detector digs into sites and 'plunders'.

That is exactly what I am saying. Archaeological sites can be investigated according to a defined methodology to produce information, or they can be dismantled selectively and randomly to produce decontextualised collectables. The former process is archaeology, the second is mere plunder. Isn't it? That's what we call it when it happens in Iraq or anywhere else, so why should it raise archaeological eyebrows when we use the same verb for what happens in Britain? That is a question I will address to Mr Conolly (who admits Barford "is better when he sticks to real issues") - that seems to be a real issue, the correct use of the terminology.

But Connolly will never answer, he adds:

I don't look much at what he [Barford] says.. and most archaeologists in the UK don't either... or even know who he is... I was working with a team last two weeks in Wales. Never heard of him - they all said.

What a strange conversational gambit ("Ey, yuu, hav'y'ever come across that Paul Barfart then? Eh? Eh? What a nutter! Eh?" [spits on the ground]).

I suppose that comment is meant to assure Connolly's artefact hunting partners that not all archaeologists in Britain are at all concerned about portable antiquity collecting issues, so they are unlikely to have come across anything said by anyone writing on the topic. Well, we know that already don't we?
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