Heritage Action to Roger Bland

Who does it better, Heritage Action or the BM PAS?

- credible, accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
- encourage constructive criticism and deliberation.
- cordial, honest and professional
- responsive
- integrated
- an ambassador for their organisation

Update by Nigel Swift to yesterday's post :

PS, Dr Bland: 
For the avoidance of doubt: if we’d based our Erosion Counter on what the English Heritage/CBA survey say is happening it would now be showing 16.25 million and that for each one of your records from last year about 290 artefacts have been dug up by artefact hunters, with the ratio worsening daily. But we didn’t base it on that. We assumed the right figure was lower. Hence the Counter is suggesting that for each one of your records from last year, a mere 205 artefacts have been dug up by artefact hunters, with the ratio worsening daily. So perhaps you could lay into English Heritage/CBA before you start demonising a group of concerned private citizens? You can praise PAS all you like and produce any number of Hidden Treasures programmes to that end but it won’t alter the fact that PAS is not providing adequate gain to balance out the massive knowledge loss and the longer it is represented as doing so the worse things get. If we weren’t dead right about that there would be PAS schemes all over the rest of the world by now instead of none.

So please just leave us alone to tell the public what we think as best we can and stop briefing against us and letting one of your staff use the coy phrase “vexatious blogging”.

Nigel says: "perhaps you could lay into English Heritage/CBA before you start demonising a group of concerned private citizens?" I say perhaps the fifteen million quid Portable Antiquities Scheme (who say they've done it anyway in fulfilling their 'fifth aim") could get up off their backsides in front of their rapidly-falling-behind database and actually start doing some actual outreach to the British public, informing them more fully about portable antiquity issues and how far behind they think their database is. There is no need to "lay into" or ignore anyone (still less call them names), simply produce the figures we are all waiting for, present them for public scrutiy and discussion. Where's the problem?

- credible, accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
- encourage constructive criticism and deliberation.
- cordial, honest and professional
- responsive
- integrated
- an ambassador for their organisation

Portable Antiquities Scheme? Don't make me laugh, unless you are a metal detectorist, television producer, or Searcher metal detecting magazine, from my (long) experience, I'd say you'll get none of that from this group of public servants.

Vignette: and time is rapidly running out for Britain's archaeology while the jobsworths ignore the problem.