Wednesday 28 August 2019

Chew Valley Hoard: The Numbers Don't Add Up, Do They?


"The hoard consists of 2,528 silver coins, including 1,236 coins of Harold II and 1,310 coins of William I"
In the school I went to, they told us that 1236 + 1310 is not 2528, but 2546. Where is this discrepancy from?

There's a fresh Wikipedia article on the hoard, but the author (Rodw)  has got the whole thing round his neck, what a mess (partly caused by the newspaper articles he's based it on being crap journalism).

Vignette; Not in it for the money, but the knowledge we get is pretty dodgy too. 

2 comments:

Rod said...

Could you explain what you mean by the author (me) having "the whole thing around my neck"? If the article needs to be improved, then please edit it (as long as you have sources to back it up) - that's the joy of wikipedia. Rod

Paul Barford said...

The problem with Wikipedia is anyone can say anything, whether they have anything to actually say or not. Your text is a case in point.

I really am not at all inclined to play about with editing anything on there, I think we can see what would happen if we tried to turn the article on "metal detecting" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_detector into something more balanced and not skewed as it is towards one view, a lot of time would be wasted fixing the attempts of artefact hunters to keep it skewed. So, no, I am not particularly interested in having a go. Your text is also skewed in the same way, and also reflects that you are trying to write about early medieval numismatics (for example) not really having much of a grounding in it. I expect you'll have a collector come along soon and edit it for you.

I think one question that we need to ask about all this, is artefact hunting and collecting actually as beneficial archaeologically as its adherents and supporters say, or is something being lost in article like the one you are following? Is it not for example an erosive and destructive activity - like here hoiking the whole lot out blindly from under grass, in four to five hours in a rainstorm? This is NO way to treat (or gather) archaeological evidence, something your text omits.

 
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