Focus on Metal Detecting: Unfocussed Fossicking

This candid and poorly-edited video is well worth a look for the insight it gives into what would be a typical day's detecting for many. This is RelicHuntingScotland randomly hoiking artefacts out of a stratified site under grassland. It just so happens that this is a World War Two military site, so one of those borderline areas of artefact hunnting, is it a site or isn't it? What we see happening here would more or less be what would be happening on a 15th century village croft or an Early medieval farmstead site. So let us take a look at what he's doing.

The Artillery Battery was a Heavy QF 3.7 inch Battery with Gun-laying Radar No:3 Mk 7, the 4 positions are due to there being four Guns in a Battery. Some sight that must have been to see all four firing at the German planes.

Unless you were in a German plane of course.



Note first of all that this is the targeting of a known site, he's not just searching an area hoping to find a previously unknown site. This is a typical occurrence, tekkies first "research the area" to locate potential productive sites. The site has upstanding remains and earthworks.

At 1:41 he "names and shames" a "troll" who has had all their comments deleted "he has a problem with me digging in Scotland, and thinks I'm plundering treasures... idiot". According to the detectorist, "people like this need to be kicked off You Tube" - kicked off for making comments critical of artefact hunting? "Dave" goes on to say "If I met him, I'd absolutely hammer him". So much for "being an ambassador to the hobby"...

From about three minutes in we see this guy pulling out random object after object, there does not seem to be any real search pattern, there does not seem to be any note-taking going on. The guy digs a hole, hoiks out something ("this one came from nine inches down") holds it up to capture it in jumpy camerawork, says he does not know what the majority of them are (despite several being recognizable) then appears to chuck the majority down on the grass. "I'll keep that one" he says of one of the few objects he can understand, a tool. When later he shows a plastic carrier bag with his finds, most of the objects we saw him earlier hoiking out of the deposits in which they lay are not there. It would seem he's not taking them back for his collection. So in archaeological terms he is randomly hoiking objects out of stratified deposits on an apparently otherwise undisturbed site, he is keeping no records of their mutual arrangements and associations, throwing many of the (mostly iron) artefacts away. He talks blithely of "bashing the corrosion off" one artefact, badly damages a thistle-mount fresh out of the ground before our eyes. He leaves the site riddled with holes.

In the end, it would seem the "history hunter" has (and so, by extension, we) have  learnt very little about the creation of this site, the several phases, maybe, of its use, and its demolition/demise by this random, but at the same time selective hoiking. There obviously was no overall methodical search plan, there is apparently no curated archive of notes of observations related to individual objects (carted off the site in bulk in a plastic carrier bag).  But as a result of this activity the stratified deposits and assemblages have had some diagnostic artefacts randomly removed with no record, others seem to have been redeposited in a place removed from that where they were dug up.

This quite clerly is nothing like anything that could be considered "best practice'. In short this video shows well the sort of unmethodical, unfocussed and selective fossicking done by artefact hunters, seeking only to enhance their personal collection of byegone geegaws, which damages sites and assemblages. This is not the "study of the past", it has nothing in common with archaeology, and the hoiked-out objects cannot be used even to do ersatz archaeology to reveal anything much about the site they came from without far more information than we see being gathered here. I'll leave it up to you, gentle reader to determine if he'd have acted any differently on a medieval archaeological site.

As for whether the person who criticised him being right or wrong (and therefore an "idiot" and getting his comments deleted), I leave it up to you to judge. In my opinion, this kind of searching of known sites is profoundly damaging (and also pointless), though I doubt I'd be interested in spending time trying to persuade the author of this film (and many more of the same type) of that and just get dismissively called names by a You Tube airhead for my troubles.  That is all you are likely to get from people like this, who simply will not make the effort to understand the wider context of what they are doing.

But then that brings us to a broader point. this is happening in Scotland which has no Portable Antiquities Scheme doing "outreach" to detectorists and attempting to instil best practice among them.  A question however arises, whether if this video had been made south of the border between Scotland and England, the PAS would in any way get involved with having a quiet word with the finder here about how he could maximise public benefit by modifying his search strategy. Unlikely isn't it? That really is not what the PAS gets involved in, though that raises the question of just what it is they do which they call "outreach" (non-scary euphemism for education). So, the erosion of sites and the information they hold goes on in the name of a "partnership", but what kind of a partnership is it really? In what?

vignette: fossicking with a metal detector