Friday 20 March 2020

PAS Recording Artefacts from Home


In the thread on a metal detecting forum near you: 'Important advice from the Portable Antiquities Scheme on arrangements to reduce CV19 risk (Thu Mar 19, 2020), we read the tekkies' concerns
BAMBAM » Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:26 pm
What about finds we have left for recording ... when do we expect to get them back? Regards. Brian
and got the reply that 'returns may take a few months till things return to normal' (Wuntbedruv: "I wouldn't expect until all this is over, which could be 12 weeks").
Spearhead » Fri Mar 20, 2020 8:07 am
It's understandable and on the positive side I am hoping my FLO will now be able to catch up their back-log whi[l]st working from home with no new finds to record. Previously standard finds recording have been taking 4 to 6 months and I have been limited to recording less than 30 items a year.
This (a) means that they've been finding more than 30 recordable items a year (significance: this is close to the figure that lies at the basis of the HA Artefact Erosion Counter that everybody denies represented what tekkies can find in a year) and (b) we have gone from "tekkies show us all but we can't record all", to "artefact hunters are judging what's important". That probably explains why the PAS database is in general skewed towards coins and pretty pieces. The "data" are not of archaeological characteristics, but of what a collector judges significant...
hat tip: Nigel Swift

1 comment:

Brian Mattick said...

Hang on, so knowledge of archaeology found by targeted digging in perceived heritage hotspots by 27,000 treasure hunters is being choked by an unknown percentage by being forced through a fine-meshed judgement sieve held by totally unqualified people?

I wonder if PAS has explained that to APPAG? What are we paying for, thin whitewash?

 
Creative Commons License
Ten utwór jest dostępny na licencji Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Bez utworów zależnych 3.0 Unported.