According to the Washington Post, more tigers now live in cages than in the wild. How much longer will it be that more Anglo-Saxon fibulae are in scattered ephemeral personal collections than left in the ground? Already, if we believe what all those dealers say, there are enormous numbers of artefacts in circulation on today's portable antiquities market that come from those fabled 'old collections', and with (perhaps as many as) 27000 new artefact hunters out there seeking their own personal treasures on those sites that are still 'productive' getting more and more of them out of the archaeological context and into their pockets, it is quite obvious that if nothing changes, and its already too late for the tigers, that time will come. And precious little the archaeologists of the UK are doing about it.Vignette: a diagnostic and datable item of early Medieval metalwork removed [reportedly] from an archaeological assemblage ["somewhere" in ] Sussex [though it is unknown whether legally or illegally] - totally destroying its information value, obviously at some time part of an unknown personal collection, passed on through an unknown dealer to the next buyer - no questions asked. This is the essence of the damage done to the archaeological record by Collection-Driven Exploitation of the archaeological record that British archaeologists pretend not to see.
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