When Are British Archaeologists Going to Start Taking This Seriously?

Way back when, on this PACHI blog on Sunday, 15 July 2018, I posed a question (not for the first time): < How Many 'Metal Detectorists' are there in England and Wales? I might not have bothered, it did not really attract the attention of anyone much (Dr Neil Brodie's google search did not find it for example)  he stated that a "broad consensus that the actual number [of active metal detectorists] is in the region of 10-15000" and then gives literature a decade old to support this. He ignores the fact that the numbers quite clearly have been growing and the 2018 figures really do make it look like there were twice that number at least. Nobody apart from myself and the late Nigel Swift (please correct me if I've missed any lively discussion of this and its implications somewhere) has seemed particularly bothered that the numbers shown in my little graph seemed to be suggesting a steady rate of growth. As far as I am aware, there were no other estimates published after that, so I did not bother to update my graph.

Until today.  One of the figures that was always missing was from the geriatric NCMD that consistently concealed its membership figures for the very reason I was so interested in them. The numbers of their members would be quite an accurate gauge of active tekkies as they were one of the main sources of the obligatory Third Party Insurance that tekkies needed to show the farmer. And comparison of that number with the volume of artefacts being "responsibly reported" to the PAS and other bodies (TTU in Scotland too) will be a good index of responsibility (all the time the public are told that the MAJORITY of artefact hunters take objects from the archaeological record "responsibly, in accordance with the Code of Best Practice - ie recording the lot with the PAS. I say that is a lie). 

But now, as I noted a while ago, the NCMD, in a bid to be "relevant" suddenely and probably absent mindedly let slip the true (?) figures [National Council for Metal Detecting Drops Its Guard, 38000 Membership: Implications}. Duh. 

I left it a while, wondering if somebody else was going to spot it and run with it... nah... So here is the new graph. What it shows is that, if it really does show what is happening, the numbers have almost DOUBLED in the last decade and a half. And the reporting of artefacts to the PAS? Is that keeping up and mitigating the additional damage? And the reporting of Treasure cases is up, yes... but NOT by the same order of magnitude. So either there are now a lot of Treasure cases going into people's pockets unreported OR the resource is being depleted now so seriously that artefact hunters are not coming across Treasures as frequently as they could have done fifteen years ago (my "Treasure blip" issue that only seem to be interested at all in). 

This will now need adjusting: https://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2018/07/a-revised-artefact-erosion-counter.html

If in 2023 there were just 50,550 records (of 74,506 archaeological finds) reported by just 4,375 finders of all kinds, that is really not a very good level of participation...