Wednesday 22 April 2020

The Scale of Destruction Visible in One eBay Sale


Another eBay Seller 1976alison (24478 ) from Chard, United Kingdom and who is registered as a Business Seller is doing great business selling job lots of loose metal detected finds - some sold by weight like potatoes such as this one: COLLECTION JOB LOT BRITISH METAL DETECTING FINDS COINS ARTIFACTS 7.5kg - LOT 1. In fact she's got 22 lots like this:
Description This week I have a collection (split in to lots) of uncleaned metal detecting finds. All you see in the gallery picture is what you will get. All ages. As seen in the pictures. This item unlike the other detector finds I have listed was not found by myself, but a now deceased detectorist so I have no provenance on it. Obviously excavated but where and age is unknown.
So, no PAS recording then? Alison - despite being a metal dectetorist it seems -  has no idea about the age of the objects on sale... Note not all of these artefacts are PAS-recordable, but a disturbing quantity are. Also we do not know how many items were taken out for individual sale, such as that expanded terminal armlet. This is the scale of 'metal-detectorist destruction' and knowledge theft rendered visible in one eBay sale. It seems that the bloke who'd dug all this stuff up just died and left a shedfull of unlabelled bits. How many of England and Wales' 27000 detectorists when they give up the hobby or peg it will leave a similar accumulation of totally uselessly dugup historical items and an equal number of holes in the archaeological record? That's not something you'll see being discussed on the forums. 
Only part of ONE detectorist's haul
Digging them up just to throw them loose in buckets without any labels is unacceptable damage and not "responsible metal detecting".

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