Selungnorami and the Hidden Hobby

buckets of finds

Heritage Action, referring to my post about the tenth century 'York Area' hoard the finder "just had to" flog off, remarks "surely there’s a better way for a First World country to deal with heritage blackmail?" With reference to the attitudes revealed by this notable case, so far from the tenets that anyone would accept as reflecting a truly responsible, legitimate  and public spirited approach to the collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological heritage, a new term is proposed for a certain category of artefact hunter well illustrated by many of those commenting in the thread:  

Selungnorami
(Short for Selfish Undeserving Ignorami)

And, oh dear, follow the link ('Regnalds Hoard Update') in yesterday's article and you find ..."The requested topic does not exist"  and I guess Britain's Treasure Hunters want my readers all to come to the conclusion that the topic "never existed" and I made it all up.*

Wouldn't it be nice if that was true and that the archaeological heritage is not being treated like potatoes by greedy selungnorami with metal detectors? Wouldn't it be nice if the only way we could find anything to criticise in Britain's multi-million pound stopgap way to deal with artefact hunting and collecting was to make up scandalous stories? I invite my readers to register with a few 'closed door' forums and have a look at what they say and do there, and decide for yourself whether the bulk of the forum is inhabited by "citizen archaeologists" (as the PAS would have it) or Selungnorami. Go on, take a look. By censoring, hiding or moving threads that show the real face of detecting when attention is drawn to them, artefact hunters are trying to block you from seeing the full picture. They only want you to see the part they (and the PAS) want you to see. Now have a look at what they are hiding, and work out for yourselves why.

* Well, access to people who are good with computers I may have, but faking Google cache is not (as far as I know) one of their accomplishments. So here it is, proof I did not make it up.