Julian Cope presents Head Heritage | The Modern Antiquarian Forum | local tv: metal detectorists vs archaeologists

Paul Barford

40 posts

Re: In the gloom

May 31, 2007, 05:42

Absolutely Littlestone. But surely what is the fundamental issue is this of collecting.

Is it really increasing human, my, your, the public's, knowledge about the past that Joe Boggins (made up name) has in his back bedroom a collection of (among other things) dozens, nay hundreds of brooches taken from a variety of Roman and Anglo Saxon sites within driving distance of his home, and also those he found on rallies in Yorkshires and Suffolk? He may even have a little notebook which records roughly where each one was found. Some may even be recorded with the PAS with six-figure NGRs. But what happens to that collection (and the notebook) when Boggins passes on to the "great detecting fields in the sky"? Nobody has attempted to answer the question where are those nine million objects and the information they once contained? What about the nine million little holes in the archaeology of countless archaeological assemblages all over the country? That information is lost forever. We hear glib assertions (including from Minister Lammy) that all these collections are to the "public good" but it seems to me that all the arguments about this are pretty spurious once you start to look at them more carefully. Especially in the context of the very real problems and very serious damage that worldwide collection of archaeological artefacts is causing to the archaeological resource. Of course that is precisely the context in which the "pro-artefact hunting (detecting)" lobby will NOT want you to invite people to look at it.

Apart from Joe Boggins' back bedroom, Roman brooches and coins metal detected unrecorded in many cases from archaeological sites in Britain can be bought on ebay to be collected by Japanese teens or by Connecticut hillbillies and Ohio rednecks. Fine, nice for them, but this raises the fundamental question whether the keeping of contextless objects as seried collectables scattered between thousands of ephemeral personal collections all over the world a good way to be curating the archaeological record?

In reply to:
In the gloom (Littlestone)

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Re: In the gloom (nigelswift)
Re: In the gloom (moss)

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