Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues: Battlefield Looting and the Ethics of FLOing

Thursday, 27 June 2019

Battlefield Looting and the Ethics of FLOing

EBay seller durhamdigger22 is at it again, now he's flogging off: >CIVIL WAR MUSKET SHOT FROM A YORKSHIRE BATTLE SITE METAL DETECTING FINDS FROM A RALLY ON SITE WITH FLO. That's it, that's provenance "a Yorkshire battle site", but not to worry "a commercial rally on Yorkshire battle site with a FLO present" ah, so that's OK then? The FLO might have been "present", drinking tea in a tent and chatting with tekkies about Roman denarii - or last night's match results, but it is what kind of record was made of the context of discovery of each of those individual artefacts that is what differentiates battlefield archaeology from mere hoiking. Can the FLO "present" come forward and show us those records? Because personally, I feel that NO FLO should take part on a rally willfully targeting such a sensitive site as a battlefield unless they were sure the recording taking place was of the highest quality. Was it? Show us please.

2 comments:

Hougenai said...: Sadly they are not the only ones 'At it again' on E-bay. If you and I can repeatedly identify dodgy adverts/antiquities sales that compromise any sort of legal or ethical approach, from flogging poor forgeries, mis identified items, undeclared treasure, etc then why aren't those with responsibility for the protection of our heritage taking a similar amount of interest?

The next question being 'Why aren't they doing something about it?'; 28 June 2019 at 02:57
Paul Barford said...: TFL = too bloody lazy, I'd say.

As you point out, they are the ones taking (often) public money for being responsible for a particular task in the public interest and totally shirking that responsibility. Then you get clowns like the "Ixelles Six' going through all sorts of shameful pseudo-academic contortions to even deny there is a problem.; 28 June 2019 at 03:02