A Revised Artefact Erosion Counter

The Counter should be treated 

seriously. The depletion and information
loss due to legal artefact hunting appears to be
on a far greater scale than the public is being told.

Heritage Action 2006

The implications of Sam Hardy's published figures for the Heritage Action artefact Erosion Counter: using the finds rate determined on the base of our own 'netnographic' study over a decade ago (an average 30.5 recordable finds a year), multiplied by Hardy's total number of 'licit' artefact hunters in England and Wales, that comes to one recordable artefact pocketed every 30.01 seconds by 'licit' detecting alone since the beginning of the PAS (the number taken by illegal searchers is on top of that).

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And 'how many' of them did the PAS say they've recorded?  This is the elephant in the room ignored by the Ixelles Six /Helsinki Gang of academic apologists for artefact hunting and collecting.

Six academics distracted from what is important (Mark Bryan)

Now we have new and as yet unfalsified published figures available, let us see just how much of a deliberate underestimate the much-maligned (by artefact collectors and their supporters) Heritage Action Artefact Erosion Counter  actually represented. I started this counter at midnight of 15th July 2018. The 'since the start of the Portable Antiquities Scheme' starting figure then was 6,260,328.

free counter and adverts by POWr editor

UPDATE 6th Dec 2020

Just for the record, because this free counter mysteriously keeps vanishing and reappearing.... at the time of writing (15:00 Polish time, 6th December 2020), the number of counts is now 8, 687, 768.  There were 119.5 'ticks' per hour since then. 

UPDATE 31st December 2020

Just for the record, the Revised Artefact Erosion Counter  ticked over artefact  8,760,847 at midnight on 31st December 2020, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century and the opening of the third. PAS database records "971,530 records containing 1,516,359 objects".

UPDATE 31st December 2021

A year later, the Revised Artefact Erosion Counter  ticked over artefact  9,812,057 at midnight on 31st December 2021. At the same time the PAS database records "1,003,971 records concerning 1,565,539 objects". That means that at the end of 2021, the ratio between responsibly reported and irresponsibly hoiked and trashed pieces of archaeological evidence ripped out of the archaeological record was "one million in 8.8 million" (so roughly "one in nine").
  [note to author: something odd going on here, 8760847 + (27000x 30 =)810000 is 9570847... check this out, why is it miscounting?]

UPDATE 31st December 2022 
A year later, the Revised Artefact Erosion Counter ticked over artefact 10,863,139 at midnight on 31st December 2022. .

[Today (28th August 2023, 1632). Its appearance is getting erratic, so just for safety, we are up to 11,553,432].