The Heritage Action Erosion Counter

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Heritage Action is a grassroots organization seeking a better deal for Britain's archaeological mouments and landscapes, a group of volunteers passionately interested in the historic heritage and trying to take action against those, especially goverment bodies and institutions, that seem to be neglecting the duty to look after them. One of the topics of their recent concern is government policy towards artefact hunting and collecting, damaging archaeological sites in Britain on a worrying scale with very little being done by the authorities to prevent it. In his comments to my post ("making it sustainable ...") on this blog Roger Bland, Head of the UK's Portable Antiquities Scheme asks:

Equally, how can anyone put any credence into Heritage Action's Artefact Erosion Counter when the basis on which it is calculated is not stated? 316,000 finds a year? How impressive to be so certain on so little evidence. For you simply to say that you believe it to be accurate is hardly adequate.

[The Erosion Counter under discussion can be found here at the moment it stands at some 3,478,000 'recordable' objects that have been collectively removed from the archaeological record since the start of the Portable Antiquities Scheme].

Well, I would like to hear Roger Bland's own best estimate on the number of 'recordable' artefacts that are being taken by artefact hunters (let us say just those using metal detectors) in England and Wales year by year and on what basis he arrives at his estimate. Is it possible to learn that after a decade or more and eight million quid's worth of liaison by the PAS? After not one but three separate 'independent reviews' of the Scheme's operation? It seems a pretty fundamental question to me. Too important to say "we have no idea, but one day we might".

I believe the Heritage Action Erosion counter figures are far more useful as a basis for discussion of current policies than the government's eight million pound "we don't know yet".

As Roger Bland knows only too well (!), I have been concerned about the scale of the erosion of the UK archaeological record due to artefact hunting and collecting for some years. Since no real figures seemed to exist in the context of which to examine the 'propaganda of success' that the pro-collecting lobby was putting out (concerning number of items recorded through the PAS for example), and nobody seemed keen to try and determine this, I took an interest in this problem and have been trying to determine this myself. A few years ago, after constant frustration of attempts to obtain such figures from the PAS and pro-collecting lobby in archaeology, I formed a small informal working group (now no longer active) called EAHAR (Effects of Artefact Hunting on the Archaeological Record) where we discussed this. The erosion counter grew out of these discussions.

I should perhaps admit that to some extent I was involved in the creation of the Heritage Action counter (though it is not by any means my own work or based solely on information I gathered) and I know how much thought and work of a number of dedicated volunteers passionately interested in conserving Britain's historic record actually went into it. I need not add that it did not cost the taxpayer a penny, but addresses questions that bodies that do should have been answering about the common archaeological heritage and how it is being "managed" (which in this case seems a loose use of the term).

A second point that needs to be made with regard Roger Bland's disparaging remarks is that the HA website is one doing “outreach” and not in itself an academic publication. The basis on which the erosion counter is calculated and the underlying definitions are all laid out in the book which Nigel Swift and I have written and will hopefully be out soon. I am sure they will then be well and truly scrutinised. My hope is that they will then be replaced by an even more firm estimate. I should add that in the course of work on the book after Heritage Action had set the Erosion Counter ticking away, we were led to the realisation that there were other factors not initially taken into account which should have led to the rate being set even higher. But as it says on the webpage, it is deliberately a conservative estimate of the erosion caused by the removal of artefacts from the archaeological record by metal detector using artefact hunters.*

I really do not see why Roger Bland scoffs at "316000 objects" a year. It is not a great amount if he himself accepts that there could be up to ten thousand detectorists in England and Wales alone. That’s just 31 objects a year each, a handful of Roman “grots”, a buckle or two, a hammered coin and some other bits. That’s not actually very much at all. There are artefact hunters on PAS who have (they say) recorded a thousand items in the last three years - 300 a year (Pete Twinn the Bristol detectorist who Kate Clark spent a lot of time talking to asserts that is the case with his finds). There are 'highlights' from metal detectorists' collections on UKDFD which show that individual detectorists have many more found in the course of a year. There’s the profoundly disturbing Mike Pegg video referred to on this blog a few months back with his “shedfull” of artefacts. There were the four guys (the video pulled from You Tube immediately after I drew attention to it here) who went on a metal detecting weekend in Suffolk and despite it being wet and horrible each proudly displayed a haul greater than thirty recordable items from just one weekend. There are many cases of personal artefact collections which contain more than thirty new recordable items added annually, especially if the searcher has found a "productive" site, like a Roman settlement or Early Medieval cemetery.

Of course at the other end of the scale are the dozens of sad individuals that plug away at the hobby and despite going out in all weathers for hours on end manage to find one or two things a year. There are a lot of them in the hobby, many of them probably only go out to meet other people they can talk to in a field at rallies and so on. Then there are many who fall between these extremes. What we need is a much greater amount of precision about artefact hunting and collecting patterns. I believe the Heritage Action counter takes these factors fully into consideration.

As things stand at the moment I believe the Heritage Action Erosion Counter is a relatively accurate reflection of the loss to the British archaeological record due to artefact hunting and collecting.

Supporters of the PAS scoff at the figures, but (as did Roger Bland just now) omit to address the second part of the question I ask about it. Even if the supporters of a "partnership" with artefacts and hunters think these figures are "wrong" (as they must in order to save face), then by how much must these figures be "wrong" to make the situation an acceptable one? Twenty percent, thirty, fifty? This is a question to which I would like to hear the answer.

Informative metal detecting video

Metal detecting Down to Earth with Mike Pegg

I bought this DVD a while back for 'research purposes', but bits of it are currently available on You Tube.

The first is one of my favourite scenes (actually not included in the copy I bought), which just about sums up the whole ethos. Take a look at what "Metal Mickey" has to say. For those not familiar with the accent, here is a transcript of the first part:

“Metal detecting’s got to be, in my eyes, one of the most relaxing hobbies anybody can get into. You are out in the sticks, [you] don’t see anybody, just me and Dad [?] normally, just waiting for that signal, the signal could be anything, and that’s what makes the hobby… waiting for that signal, because when you dig down, you just don’t know what its going to be… now, when you were a kid, um, even older kids, there was this sweet, right, called a “lucky dip” where you’d go in the shop and get something like a Jamboree Bag and you would not know what was in it until you opened it. And that’s exactly the same with metal detecting. This is why, um, living in England, well, in Britain, we are so lucky, this is the biggest candy shop you are going to find. This is so steeped with history, we go back so far…. and people have lost so many things over the years, and its all there, waiting for us. Um, even on the… whether its on the beach, on the farm, it [does] not matter, its everywhere, paths, back gardens… Absolutely strew[n], the whole island, the whole of the British Isles is one big candy box waiting to be explored. We can all do it, and I’ll tell you what, once you get out into it, once you start getting that bug, you’ll never want to get is back. It’s a really, really worthwhile thing. It should be taught in schools. We could get the kids out, away from that computer screen, and it teaches them the sense of history and who they are and where they are from, and it puts back all this trouble we read in the newspaper and what you see on the news, you leave it behind, when you go on a field, you leave it all behind; it’s just you in the field with your metal detector. In fact, personally I call it “treasureology”, because you are after treasure, so why not tresureology?”

Then on the rest of the YouTube video, we are treated to a demonstration of “how its done” with an irritating soundtrack. Best not to watch.

Rather more interesting is another YouTube fragment: Down To Earth -- metal detecting tips. This is a show-and-tell sequence which gives quite an interesting insight into how a British collector of portable antiquities made by metal detecting is likely to be treating the artefacts they remove from an archaeological site (they claim they are "rescuing" them, but that's another story). Note that these finds are just thrown in a heap on the table in a breeze-block built shed, some of them in plastic tubs on the floor. None of them is individually bagged with a label giving details of provenance. “See the patina?” – yes, but we see no catalogue numbers. We note that bronze disease is left untreated and at one stage the camera sweeps across crumbs of an object that has disintegrated while being 'curated' by Mr Pegg and his Dad. Some pretty cringeworthy presentations of the artefacts shown; so much for the 'homegrown conoisseur' model of the pro-collecting advocacy. "Krotrel bells"? Crotal I think he means… So what is likely to happen to this collection of artefacts when Mr Pegg passes on to the great metal detecting fields in the sky? Will anyone actually be able to correlate more than a handful of them with their original findspot? This collector says nothing about the cataloguing system he uses, or the need to catalogue such finds at all.

Mike Pegg tells us he’s been detecting 25 years. “Although this is nothing really, what I’ve got in my collection, I could not get it in the shed […] I think, you name it, I think I’ve had it from every single period”. What is on this table top is a selection of what he has “detected” and dug up, probably from a number of different places in his home are and beyond, all mixed up together. What happened to the rest then? Note that he admits that if the beginner collector does not understand what he is looking at, he’ll probably throw away significant finds in making a selection. In fact a lot of evidence emerges that suggest that large numbers of finds which would be collected and studied in an archaeological survey are routinely discarded by metal detectorists exploiting a site for collectables and what (if anything) reaches the Portable Antiquities Scheme is already a highly selective and largely meaningless sample of what was originally in the soil. “Lead, I’ve got no idea where it comes from sometimes, it seems to follow us around, […] It’s a bit of a bugger really, because you get lots and lots of little pieces, you’re forever digging lead up”. He is keepingt it in a scrap bucket, no doubt ready to be sold off as scrap metal. The lead of course did not fall from the sky, this is evidence of past activity, the “scrap metal” of this detector user is of course disregarded archaeological material. In an archaeological field survey its distribution across a site would be plotted in detail.

The You Tube video fragment "Metal Detecting Down to Earth with Mike Pegg part 2" is excruciatingly boring. Then there is one called Treasures ("Finds made by my Dad and me over the years"). Mr Pegg asserts “the finds in this sequence have mostly been excavated in Dorset” – Hmm, the (fake) Athenian “owl” coin too?

Videos like this raise a number of questions about the hobby called by its practitioners in Britain "metal detecting". It is useful to have resources like this, actually made and distributed by "the detectorists" themselves as a basis for discussion and to allow us to create an impression for ourselves of who goes "metal detecting" and why. There is plenty more like this in the internet to choose from, but Mike Pegg is one of my personal favourites.