Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues: Blundering Polish Parliamentarians and the Metal Detectorists [Updated]

Tuesday, 4 July 2023

Blundering Polish Parliamentarians and the Metal Detectorists [Updated]

Where are these artefacts from? (Allegro)

I tend not to use this blog to discuss artefact hunting etc. in Poland where I live. Over the past week however a particular matter has been absorbing me and I will share part of it here.

For many years, going back to the first legislation of 1918 and then 1928, the Polish heritage protection system has worked based on certain principles. These have consequences for artefact hunters and collectors. I'll be writing about that elsewhere in the near future. For a long time now metal detectorists have been trying to undermine this system... and archaeologists have been trying to defend it. Just a little while back a colleague sent me a link to a document and asked for a comment. It is the project of an "Act to change the Act on the Preservation and Care of Historical Sites and Monuments" that some parliamentarians had obviously scribbled on a notepad on their knees and are now going to vote in. I spent two days reading this crap, and wrote some comments.

This is a typical piece of law-making by the currently-ruling government, hastily-written, inconsistent, not taking into account the wider legislative context. I also is presented in a fragmentary way, "in art. 33, ust. 3, point 19, add a comma after the word "buildings" and add the following wording.....". It takes ages to get through it (it was 14 pages of this). I've put up my comments here, warning, the basic text is in English but with Polish bits - you'll need an online translator should you decide to tackle it. Not all the terms translate, which is why I did it this way. [UPDATE: there is now a slightly altered, Polish version that a Polish colleague created for a weekend discussion and helped with].

The Polish parliament will be voting on this, a little birdy says, on Thursday, and because we are governed by buffoons who only seek votes, despite its obvious flaws, it'll probably pass, to general jubilation among the X000 metal detectorists of Poland (and Helsinki will feel vindicated too). The crux of the matter is that the document claims that there are 100,000 metal detectorists that will support the ruling party if they pass this revision of the laws. That's totally at odds with what actually trying to get a number that is not guesswork (it's what we call "research"). Sam Hardy came up with a number half that. I think (for reasons I write about elsewhere) that Sam's figure may be too high. Anyway, to judge from what they write on forums, the bulk of Polish metal detectorists already subscribe to the sort of thing (and "values") the politicians involved here promote.

And the archaeologists? None of them have glued themselves to anything in protest, no paint smeared anywhere, no roads blocked, no topless protests in front of the Parliament buildings. Oh no. They are sitting back quietly, ignoring it. What the archaeologists are doing is organising a "scientific" meeting the day after [Polish titles given here in translation]:

Committee of Pre- and Protohistorical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences invites you to attend the open part of the plenary session, which will be held remotely on July 7, 2023

Agenda of the meeting:
Part I open (13:00 – 15:00)
1/ Dr. Piotr Kotowicz - Lights and shadows. About contacts between the archaeologist and the metal detectorist from the perspective of a local museum;

2/ dr Józef Bednarczyk - Archaeologists and metal detectorists - based on research experience in Kuyavia;

3/ Robert Wyrostkiewicz - An attempt to define the "soul of a detectorist" against the backdrop of 15 years observation of the explorer and the archaeologist. Suggested legal compromise resulting from profit and loss estimates.

Login data [...] We invite you to take part in the meeting.
Chairman of the Committee
Prof. dr hab. Sylwester Czopek

My doctor says I should keep away from such meetings. Kotowicz writes about hoards found and reported by telkkies (some of whom have permits before they started hoiking). Bednarczyk has been wandering around important Iron Age sites in Kuyavia with metal detectorists who find nice coins for him to look at, Wyrostkiewicz is a detectorist. So, how "full" a picture of the detecting community are the participants going to get? This is the same thing as British archaeologists do, they meet a few friendly tekkies who are asked to detect as part of an archaeological project, and then start to tell me that they are "all decent blokes". When you ask how much time they spend on metal detecting forums to see what tekkies talk about (and how) among themselves, the answer is almost always 'none". Here the Polish Academy of Sciences will listen to a tekkie giving a glowing (I have no doubt) picture of "the soul of a detectorist" rather than somebody summarising actual research in the sources provided by two huge open-access forums with an archive going back almost two decades. I think these give a better picture of what Polish tekkies do, what they think (including about "the law", "the establishment" and archaeologists/heritage professionals). I think you can also predict on its basis what is going to happen to the registration scheme the project postualates spending uncounted millions on.

What that scientific session does not cover is what will happen to the legislation if this new law ("compromise") gets passed. Because if truth were told, most academicians, most archaeologists in Poland (and not only) actually have a very foggy idea of, and nearly zero interest in, how the legislation governing historical sites, monuments and artefacts, actually works. This proposal dismantles part of it in a very damaging way, but they'll not talk about that, just witter away on "the soul of the detectorist" and how nice it would be to work together as one big happy cuddly family (but in a way that no longer has the bother of taking into account the conservation aspects).

To set the record straight, I've also been sent two rather poorly-worded "official statements" by archaeologists that are more self-important and unimaginative than persauasive and referring to real concerns. Where are archaeology's activists?

Meanwhile, just look a this, on the eve of Polish parliament voting in new concessions to site looters with metal detectors, how many of these denarii on sale on just one Polish online marketplace, apparently from Roman period sites in Poland were recovered (a) with a detecting permit, and (b) from hoards that weren't reported? There are eighty today (not counting the ones sold for inflated prices by one French dealer who gets his stuff elsewhere) last week there were over a hundred, next week, who knows? How many of them will there be when the proposed legislation introduces a self-registration scheme? My guess just as many, but do you know? The proposed new legislation "somehow" (now there is a coincidence/oversight, no?) removes almost all the existing sanctions on culprits (can'yt call them lawbreakers as the law will have been removed for them).

For the record, the names of the signatories of this disgraceful project, 29 parliamentarians of the PiS Party and two from the Kukiz Party, parliamentarian Grzegorz Braun (Confederation) seems to have dropped out.