Professor Gill urges the Ixelles Six to 'Revise their Confrontational Response'

Professor David Gill weighs in on the reaction by certain academics from the universities of Helsinki, Brussels, Aarhus,  and Amsterdam to Dr Sam Hardy's findings in his text 'Quantitative analysis of open-source data on metal detecting for cultural property: Estimation of the scale and intensity of metal detecting and the quantity of metal-detected cultural goods'. He writes ('Metal-detecting in context and open-source analysis' Looting Matters July 26, 2018) rather scathingly of the response of Pieterjan Deckers, Andres Dobat, Natasha Ferguson, Stijn Heeren, Michael Lewis, and Suzie Thomas that has aroused such enthusiasm in metal detecting circles:

Their unconvincing paper made an attempt to dismiss Hardy's careful research. Sam Hardy has now written an extended response, 'a response to a response on metal-detecting and open-source analysis', Conflict Archaeology (26 July 2018). Deckers et al. will need to revise their confrontational response.