Saturday, 26 February 2022

"UnEarthed" Reveals Total Misunderstanding



In the comments to my text on reflective artefact collectors ("Credit Where Credit is Due: "Renate"), an anonymous commenter who wishes to be called "Unknown" writes:
There are some wonderful finds appearing on the "Unearthed" [organization's] digs in Cumbria. Things you and yours would never, ever have found. It must be a real kick in the testes for you, what a shame,
then inexplicably modifies it to:
Comment modification, Orwellian newspeak for Gobellsian censorship. You are such a coward.
I imagine the problem is that he cannot spell Goebbels. I really fail to see the connection with what I wrote about a collector specialising in brooches and what Graeme Rushton's "Unearthed" pay-to-dig company is engaged it. The fundamental problem here is with the message that seems to persist after 25+ years of outreach by the expensive Portable Antiquities Scheme that archaeology is just about digging up lots of loose "things". So metal detectorists are finding "things you and yours would never, ever have found" and they seem to think that an archaeologist would be jealous about being beaten at our own game. I rather think it is the same way as a rhino hunter berating ecologists that their headcount of the number of rhinos in a certain habitat is better than theirs because he is certain that the same animal is not being counted twice. I have asked the Lancashire and Cumbria FLO (Ian Bass, Preston) to comment. Let's see what the PAS position is on this. By the way, if you want to see some of these things you can see the videos here. Warning, they are made by somebody who has no idea about script=-writing or editing, they are rambling, slow and draedfully boring. Skip the beginning, dreadful. The one about the "mysterious" thing with the wings.. is not really a mystery at all, except why the finder does not get it conserved, the iron is already breaking up. You might want to skip their interpretation of their amateurish "research" here. And of course, if you look on the PAS database, they may be "finding fings" but that is a different thing from creating knowledge about Cumbria's past.

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