History-Destroying "Haul" Flogged off to Buy Drinks Down the Pub

                 UK Artefact hunter, happy to destroy                            
 history in the ground (BBC)           

A haul of Roman coins discovered in a field in Leicestershire has been sold at auction for £4,400 ( Dan Martin, 'Haul of unearthed Roman coins sold for £4,400' BBC News, 19th Feb 2025). The damage down to the site taking them out and selling the loose coins off has not been given by the British dumbdown media:

Metal detectorist David Dunn unearthed 50 coins, which date back to the 3rd Century, in a farmer's field near his home in Sapcote in July 2023. The coins were bought by a collector in the US on Tuesday. Mr Dunn said he had been excited to watch the coins go under the hammer. He said: "I am really happy with the result and as I said before the sale, I will give the majority of the money to the farmer. "What I like about metal detecting is that we are preserving history and I will continue to detect, but I will go to celebrate with a couple of drinks."

The money is not his to "give", the coins are the property of the landowner. Unfortunately it says that the tekkie dug the coins up, once again no archaeological team recovered it and any associated evidence. In such circumstances the evidence was erased and no "reward" should be paid for that. ARTEFACT HUNTING IS NOT "PRESERVING HISTORY" any more than stealing manhole covers is "protecting them from damage" from people walking over them. What an idiotic idea - but it is the same one.

The 42-year-old, who has been metal detecting as a hobby for two years, found two coins in a hole when he picked up a faint signal in a field he had visited "numerous times" before. He then dug down a further two feet (61cm) and found more of what were later identified as antoninianus coins.

Found unexpectedly "in a field he had visited "numerous times" before" is yet another indication that metal detecting is not archaeological survey. No matter how accurately we get "findspots" of loose items, taken together they DO NOT provide a reliable picture of the archaeology of that site. The information is patchy and there is no way of extrapolating from it to get a reliable picture. And it is stupid (British archaeologists) to think there is. Secondly 60cm down is BELOW PLOUGH LEVEL. This guy was digging blindly into stratified deposits, taking out one bit of the record, destroying what was around it and trashing the site's archaeology. Jobsworth British archaeologists will not tell you about that - in my view that'd be not doing their effing job at all to not strive to get that point in over and over again as "finds" (looting of the archaeological record for profit) in every single hooray-Henry article like this.

Also if chummy here's been over this field so many times, where is all the other stuff he's taken from its archaeological record? How much of that and the associated contextual information is "preserved" and in what form? Arkies won't say.

The selfish finder and couldn't-care-less landowner, having hoiked this bit of archaeology, can't be bothered to look after the material properly in the country. And having their heritage shipped off to that private "collection" (bet its a dealer) in MAGAmerica, how does that help the citizen of Sapcote in Leicestershire?

Bit of an 'aul fer flogging off, though I 'int in it fer th' munny - onest  (BBC)