.
The PAS has a section of its database listing all (?) the rallies they attend and form this it is possible to access (all of?) the finds they record there. I've discussed this before. There is also an interactive map showing where they are. You can zoom down to the satellite image and find out from which FIELDS the illustrated objects came from - so much for findspot discretion. Another rather odd thing is the symbol the Portable Antiquities Scheme chooses to mark these spots, a spoked chariot wheel and Dressel 1 amphora - the symbol would be fine for marking Welwyn-type graves, but its relationship to an artefact grabfest (where to my knowledge not a single Welwyn type grave has been dug up). Anyway, the pattern is quite a notable one, and obviously is going to affect artefact density plots.
We see huge areas of the country where there are few rallies taking place which are attended by the PAS, and we see a considerable concentration of them in certain areas of the country. These rallies are concentrating on the soils formed on Jurassic oolites and the chalklands of central England (roughly in the Ouse and Avon watersheds). Yet they do not occur in the same density on the chalklands into East Anglia or the South Downs, so the pattern is being influenced by socio-geographic features rather than soil type. Obviously however if there is a bias in the search patterns, leading to an accumulation of information about settlement patterns and site characteristics on a restricted group of soil types and geomorphology, such biases have to be taken into account when interpreting the data gathered by the PAS as an archaeological resource.
The PAS has a section of its database listing all (?) the rallies they attend and form this it is possible to access (all of?) the finds they record there. I've discussed this before. There is also an interactive map showing where they are. You can zoom down to the satellite image and find out from which FIELDS the illustrated objects came from - so much for findspot discretion. Another rather odd thing is the symbol the Portable Antiquities Scheme chooses to mark these spots, a spoked chariot wheel and Dressel 1 amphora - the symbol would be fine for marking Welwyn-type graves, but its relationship to an artefact grabfest (where to my knowledge not a single Welwyn type grave has been dug up). Anyway, the pattern is quite a notable one, and obviously is going to affect artefact density plots.
We see huge areas of the country where there are few rallies taking place which are attended by the PAS, and we see a considerable concentration of them in certain areas of the country. These rallies are concentrating on the soils formed on Jurassic oolites and the chalklands of central England (roughly in the Ouse and Avon watersheds). Yet they do not occur in the same density on the chalklands into East Anglia or the South Downs, so the pattern is being influenced by socio-geographic features rather than soil type. Obviously however if there is a bias in the search patterns, leading to an accumulation of information about settlement patterns and site characteristics on a restricted group of soil types and geomorphology, such biases have to be taken into account when interpreting the data gathered by the PAS as an archaeological resource.
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