Saturday 24 January 2015

Hollingbourne Anglo-Saxon Brooches Broken on "Retrieval"?


"Bleeps has been metal 
detecting for over five years

now. He is a supporter of the PAS".

I see metal detectorists involved in the Hollingbourne Anglo-Saxon site trashing are still trying to justify what happened. In a text which is mainly a personal attack on me for discussing the conservation aspects of artefact hunting, metal detectorist Kris Rodgers ('Addicted to bleeps') writes that there is no fresh break on the Hollingbourne disc-on-bow brooches. Please take a look at the video I was discussing and put that with the photographic evidence of conditions on site when Greg Sweetman hoiked them out from deep below a mounded area in pasture and see what you think.  A metal detectorist may kid himself there is no fresh break here, I suggest the rest of us can see he is wrong, and if the PAS was being honest with the rest of us about this debacle, they'd comment on that.     

Screen shot from video of the finds posted on You Tube by Addictedtobleeps
19 lut 2014 immediately after excavation (I use the term loosely),
compared with an intact one not found in the days before hoiking became fashionable

Should the full Treasure ransom be paid to a finder who not only failed to secure the site so it could be investigated properly before he dug a big hole in it, but also seems to have recklessly damaged the artefacts in the process? When will the inquest be so we can find out? Even the Coroner is being coy on that one.

I am not going to link here to Mr Rodger's scurrilous text about me for legal reasons, he makes a number of false accusations and insinuations there. He seems convinced that there is no significance in my pointing out that many artefact hunters in the UK are not cognitively equipped to understand the heritage issues in what they are doing (see my 'Focus on UK Metal Detecting: It's not just snobbism' PACHI Thursday, 27 February 2014). He unwittingly undermines his own case by what he himself writes - as somebody has remarked: "So he reckons you threatened his life, he has a crack legal team looking for you and he'd like to chat on Skype. These are CHILDREN digging up our common inheritance". A diagnosis I think that would be borne out if anyone could actually make it all the way through his video in which he could not help beginning with a mention of me followed by frenetic and puerile babbling commentary.  And of course I was in no way involved in making any (alleged) "death threats" against him as he seems to be childishly implying in his blog. Let his "legal team" produce the evidence.  


Maybe it is the clunky search engine, but although they were dug up a year ago and taken to the FLO almost immediately afterwards, it seems that even today, the information about the Hollingbourne finds is not yet available to the public from the PAS database. What is keeping the FLO from creating a record of these much talked-about finds?



 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"These are CHILDREN digging up our common inheritance"

In his case that's an insult to children. Wasn't he the detectorist who was involved in the famous "digging up WW1 soldiers' bones and waving them about" video that all archaeologists and most detectorists condemned?

How many children wouldn't know that was dreadful behaviour?

Paul Barford said...

Probably about as many who were not taught to take their hats off when going into somebody's house.

And wearing two at once in somebody's bedroom, how many children wouldn't know that was dreadful behaviour?

 
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