Why UK Metal Detectorists Want People to Stop Looking Over their Shoulders

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Readers will know that the people in the UK who go out with metal detectors to take collectable archaeological artefacts from the archaeological record would like nothing better than for everyone to just leave them alone and get on with it. They'd like to shut up once and for all the people who raise awkward questions about  what they are doing, the long term effects of that, and whether the current policies we have are adequate to deal with the problem. They cannot resolve the problem by open and frank discussion of the issues, because they simply have no arguments. In lieu of that they choose to try and shout down the polemists, disrupt any discussion they start, engage in ad hominem attacks, name calling and threatening behaviour. Anything but face up to the issues.

 I imagine therefore that Heritage Action are in for a week or so of another batch of the oikish attacks (including by the gaggle of gender-bender detectorising sock puppets they've been having recently) in connection with their latest post (Nigel Swift, 'A picture to be viewed with contempt', 10/03/2013). They discuss a January 2013 comment by Steve Ashby (in an article about the PAS) who glibly claims that  "the vast majority of finds [made by artefact collectors with metal detectors] are recorded with the PAS on a voluntary basis”. Where he gets that idea from is not stated, but as Heritage Action point out, the Heritage Action Artefact Erosion Counter which has been ticking away in the background for a number of years now suggests quite the opposite. Heritage Action have now published a coloured histogram to illustrate the point for those who big numbers confuse.

The first column is a conservative estimate of the number of recordable finds dug up and removed from the archaeological record by artefact hunters and collectors with metal detectors (alone). A massive 11 and a half million. But England and (for the moment) Wales have been "dealing with the problem" through a Portable Antiquities Scheme - so the orange column shows the number of these items dug up since the PAS formed. A bit more manageable at 4.71 million - the information about most of the rest having disappeared long ago irretrievably. So how well has the PAS been doing? The grey column tells us. Now, Nigel has been very generous to the PAS using their " 844,783 - number of objects" fluff-statistic here, when archaeologically what counts is (not number of sherds and pieces of tile picked up and put in a bag, but) number of records (today the PAS says this is a mere 546,270 records, so I'd have drawn the grey column considerably shorter). He nicely did a special version for me, the fourth blue column here is the number of objects recorded by the pirate private database run "by detectorists for detectorists", the UKDFD. They are rather proud of their effort, but it really pales into insignificance against the other columns.

Nigel goes on to discuss the reactions to the Counter:

The Counter is a harmless little concept that brings us loads of grief. If only PAS would show it is wrong! But no, it’s only rubbished. It “lacks credibility” [Head of PAS], it’s “based on nothing but presumptions and inaccuracies” [Detector retailer on Britarch] it “should be viewed with contempt” [Head of NCMD]. (I wholeheartedly concur with that last one, but not in the way he means!). So it’s up to you, [...]  readers. We say the orange column is far larger (and growing faster) than the grey one, PAS and detectorists say the reverse and the Government says it believes them. David Lammy said detectorists were heroes – was he shown the red column? Ed Vaizey has just said “the vast majority of metal detectorists make sure their finds are recorded“. Really Ed? Were you shown actual written estimates supporting that? I think not – in fact I know you weren’t because the figures underlying and supporting our Erosion Counter are the best in the business – i.e. CBA/EH’s survey of what is found and PAS’s stats on what is brought to them! There’s no question there should be proper controls to stem these grievous losses and PAS no doubt agrees. But they don’t say so in public. 

Nigel suggests that any plain speaking from the PAS will precipitate an unfavourable reaction from a certain fraction of the naysaying metal detectorists:

But here’s the sad, awful thing: it’s not the “best practice” detectorists that make such threats. It’s not they who oppose regulation; they don’t fear rules requiring them to do what they already do. No, it’s the others, the ones who don’t report what they find, who have threatened sixteen times that they won’t report what they find. Those are the ones causing PAS to say the grey column is vastly taller than the orange one and what is going on is “beneficial”. How mad is that?

I'd like to draw attention to the first sentence of the first quote: "The Counter is a harmless little concept". It is, isn't it? It says, "let us try and count the effect of current policies on artefact collecting the archaeological record (a finite and fragile resource) of England and Wales". A wholly worthwhile question if it concerned insecticides and rare butterfly populations, fish quotas and herring populations. Why is it any the more dangerous or reprehensible to ask the same sort of questions about the historical environment? We see nobody tripping over themselves to double check these figures, and try to evolve a plan for dealing with the problem should they turn out to be right. On the contrary we see the people who should be (are paid millions of quid to) do precisely that simply dismissing this as the fantasies and delusions of people they dismissively label "trolls". Yet are the figures so preposterous? It works out at an average of just over thirty recordable archaeological objects removed a year by each of the c. 8700 detectorists that were active in England and Wales when the counter was created.* I have shown on this blog that there are those who show on forums that they can remove that number of objects from a 'productive' site in just a couple of days' detecting. These are not 'proposterous' figures. In any case, if the counter is so VERY wrong, then let the powers that be have a go at producing their own. But looking at the picture, by how much would the Heritage Action algorithm have to be out, to make what is happening acceptable?

Perhaps those whose fifteen million quid are going into the pockets of the PAS might like to contact their local FLO (whose job it is to liaise with the public on such issues - provide a "gateway to archaeological knowledge") and ask them what the official PAS estimate is. They surely must have one.

* I am pretty convinced that the number of active detectorists in the UK (and thus England and Wales) has gone up worryingly sharply since the counter was set up, no attempt has been made to alter the original algorithm to take this into account - these are very conservative figures.