Wednesday 8 April 2020

UK Metal Detectorist: Piles of Unlabelled Finds


On a metal detecting forum near you: 'Sorting out 9 months worth of finds and scrap' (Post by fred Sun Apr 05, 2020 7:32 pm)
One benefit of the current sorry situation is that I have got sod all to do other than get on with my somewhat extensive 'To Do' list. One of the outstanding tasks was to reclaim my garden shed from the buckets, bags and other containers full of detecting finds which have been heaped up to shoulder level inside the door since the previous clearout last June. I expected it to be hard work because the extreme storms in the first couple of months of this year were very productive. It took several stints of three or four hours to crack it but today saw the back of it all. The scrap metal came to about three hundredweight of lead, just under a hundredweight of brass and just under half a hundredweight of copper. The spending coins nearly filled the ammo box that I keep them in and there were more pound coins than usual so I am guessing that there will be close on a thousand quid. [...] It now only remains to clean the coins up, no small task in itself, but I am too mean to give £100 quid away to Coinstar for the sake of a fivers worth of lemon juice, some electricity and my time. [emoticon]
Not all of this material will be archaeological material, but it would seem that objects from different sources and of different nature is mixed up, apparently unlabelled, in those "buckets, bags and other containers full of detecting finds up to shoulder level". So, if in going through them, he finds something that the PAS would be keen to record, how is the precise findspot determined? Is this PAS-recommended "best practice"? (There is nothing about any of this in their crappy "Code of best Practice", so it must be)


1 comment:

Hougenai said...

It's hard not to swear out loud.
Unless targeting scrap yards as opposed to archaeological sites,250kg of 'Grot' in 8 months? Seems incredible and as they've run a mile, we can't see whether this was accepted by the rest of them as usual rates of recovery.
It appears 'Sorry this topic has been removed' is not his pseudonym, only a dead end when hoping to find evidence of the same person, on the same forum, boasting of all the 'finds' reported to PAS or coroner from the area with denuded and degraded archaeology represented by 250kg of mixed metals

 
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