Focus on Metal Detecting: Nighthawking Down, Except Where it's Not

In the UK they are told that illicit and irresponsible artefact hunting (so-called "nighthawking") is almost a thing of the past and that it's all thanks to the PAS and its fostering a jolly nice friendly "partnership" between jolly nice archaeologists and jolly nice artefact hunters. So what a shock it must be for the archaeologist to find out they are not all "jolly nice", eh? Does Rob Hedge ‏@robhedge in this tweet sound as if he's seeing this for the first time?

Hate arriving on site to find metal detecting holes everywhere. Particularly galling as this is a community dig. pic.twitter.com/UAXXkEbfow

Below are the pictures he took. I expect the stout "Defenders of the Basically Indefensible" will try to question the "assumption" that it was metal detectorists that did this and not gophers. Somehow though I think they are fighting a losing battle.

Nocturnal holes and bootprints (Rob Hedge
and Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service).

The site is a community dig in Kidderminster in Worcestershire. It has a twitter account: (DigMinster ‏@WorcsDigs) the latest tweet reads:

#DigMinster site was raided last night: metal detector holes all over. Daft culprits left nice clear boot prints. :( pic.twitter.com/4wj0QqbPi3

and a Flickr photostream. What is galling is that a community archaeology project has been set up for involving the public in archaeology - just what metal detectorists all claim to want to be part of. Yet when there is something like this set up, its those same people ("only interested in digging up things for the history") who then damage the site and wreck the project. I certainly hope that Rob Hedge manages to use this to do some public outreach about the differences between artefact hunting and archaeology and spread the message among the public of Kidderminster. Somehow I'm not too hopeful though, he notes the boots were "clean" and then goes on to witter aimlessly, mouthing the platitudes the PAS has taught brit-archaeologists to use in such circumstances:

"Don't want to tar all detectorists with the same brush, but this opportunistic looting of sites is damaging and very frustrating."

Sounds like he's not really going to paint any kind of picture at all then, but at least he called it "looting".