Never Mind the Losses, Wottabout The Hoards we Find?

Roy Goutté on the so-called "Heritage Trust" website does not really seem to have got his head around metal detecting. Talking about the Lenborough hoard hoik he says it is "pleasing" to hear that the ‘excavation’ of the coins was carried out in a much more professional way than was described in the RESCUE piece. He says critics should accept that

"the finding and recording of such hoards far outweighs the few items discovered and not reported and sold for profit by a very small minority of detectorists".

Really? On the one hand we have a carrier bag of loose coins from a deposit that could and should have (because we have a seventeen million pound PAS to make sure it is) been excavated to the standards of a modern investigation of a hoard like the Beau Street one. On the other he says this is worth more than x bags full of finds hoiked and disappeared which nobody sees (despite having a seventeen million pound PAS to make sure we do). I really do not know on what basis those two values are calculated. I also think Mr Goutté is another one of those that confuses the PAS with the Treasure Act, one is law, the other was set up to deal with non-Treasure finds made by the public (and not just metal detectorists).