The Portable Antiquities society has, or is starting a new national database for information about human migration through the centuries in Gloucestershire, as announced on their website: "Our interests are to map out the history of Gloucestershire, and record human migration throughout the centuries, and publish the information on a national database". Anyone who thought this would include DNA sampling and census records will be disappointed to learn from deeper in the webpage that this is not the kind of data sought, they are searching the plough soil for 'our lost past' and for this they are using 'sophisticated electronic aids in locating small metallic objects'. This team has 'many years of experience' of such locating and mapping and will generously undertake this task for the reader 'in our spare time at no cost to you', and I guess the landowner gets to keep the finds too. Win-win (as they say in PAS circles), the PAs gets the information they need, the landowner the bits of 'lost history'. All the PAs want is:
We hope to illust[r]ate and record finds from Gloucestershire on our national data base which can be shared by all, for future generations.The website is still in development, so it is understandable perhaps that the public are not given any information about this new national database, how it is related to the existing one already run by the PAS and how this national database will be linked to the work of the HERs on a national scale (which are also mapping heritage). Otherwise there might be worries that we are seeing the advent of yet another private pirate database like the UKDFD run from a leaky shed in Milton Keynes.
Of course the UKDFD cannot be this database because there is no user on there called "Portable Antiquities Society" (or Steve Taylor) recording the finds from those 110 farms in Gloucestershire Mr Taylor claims to have written permissions to search on, neither is he a prolific reporter on the Portable Antiquities Scheme. There is however an account on UKDFD under the name "chainmail" in which somebody has posted 3 (three) items, including a so-called "celtic sword pommel" found near Cirencester by Mr Taylor (NOT recorded on the PAS database). Hardly really counts as mapping human migrations and recording them on a "national database" does it?
In any case surely there is no real need to set up a new 'society' to get metal detecting finds on a national database where everybody can see them and profit from the information. The PAS FLO visits societies of responsible metal detectorists in the Cheltenham area to achieve this, and Mr Taylor can show his finds to the FLO at club meetings, can't he?