"Britain: An Amateur Treasure-Seeker's Paradise": Metal Detecting Holiday Bookings Up.

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PAS has outshone itself. Google searching for the text "Britain: An Amateur Treasure-Seeker's Paradise" (with inverted commas) produces 179 links and texts hosted on sites like Yahoo, MSN, various Reuters offshoots, India Times, coiney newsfeeds, metal detecting webpages, and I even spotted a link apparently on an 'UK Erotica & Sex News' page.

Meanwhile searching for any text at all on the topic of "Britain: Archaeological preservation" (with inverted commas) produced eleven. So about the ratio you'd expect then. Shiny Stuff Sets the Agenda.

I expect metal detecting holiday bookings will be up this summer.

Disgraceful. This is supposed to be "archaeological outreach"? This is the kind of damaging "outreach" the discipline can well do without. What went wrong? What are these people thinking?

Four Years on, a Dallinghoo Decision (the "Wickham Market Hoard")

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Readers may (or may not) remember the story about the two metal detectorists who fell out over how to divide the reward money from a Treasure find dug out from two feet down in Dallinghoo near Woodbridge, Suffolk (aka "the Wickham Market Hoard"). The £300,000 reward (Daily Mail calls the money "spoils") will be split three ways. Half will go to the landowner, farmer Cliff Green, 69.

But metal-detecting enthusiast Mr Darke, 62, who found the treasure, is furious that he has been awarded £75,803, while Mr Lewis, 56, who was drafted in to help later, will receive £74,196.

Life's just not fair is it Mr Darke?

Mr Darke has already appealed the ruling, but the decision was upheld by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey. ‘I trusted him (Mr Lewis) as a friend,’ he said. ‘I was totally gutted. It should have been exciting and interesting, and something to look forward to.’

The coins will be bought by Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service, which has launched a fundraising drive, so its the good people of the area who want to see these items in their museum who will be forking out the money which Mr Darke is "looking forward to" and wants even more of. I'll ask my Mum and sisters over there not to give a penny.

[I am also a bit confused about the chronology and sequence of events connected with reporting this Treasure. It seems from the earlier reports cited in my previous text on this that it was not reported by one of the finders at all, but the landowner (when? Why?). But earlier four coins reportedly had been separated from the group and presented to Lewis. By what right did Darke do this before they had been declared? (Or was it Darke who gave them to him?). Only later (?) did the four separated coins reportedly get handed in, at the same time as Lewis laid claim to be an finder too. So was there an initial attempt to conceal some of the coins? How does what happened square with the Code of Practice of the Treasure Act? If it doers not, why are these two guys getting a full reward (again)?]

How many other artefacts has Mr Darke taken from the archaeological record in his 25 years of "metal detecting" and how many of them are reported (by him or the landowner) to anyone? And Mr Lewis?

Vignette: Suffolk "researcher" Michael Darke.

A "Researcher" Learns Something From A Dealer in the UK

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The Searcher December 2009:

When Essex researcher Stuart Silvey dropped into TimeLine Originals offices with some recent finds, we little expected to see, among the modern milled coins, a remarkable gold pendant he had found while detecting near Bursted, near Billericay.[...] we naturally congratulated Stuart on his sensational find and advised him about the legal procedure for reporting it to Essex FLO. Stuart is now waiting to hear back from the PAS.

(see also Coin News November 2009 ) So the first stop in London of this Essex "researcher" with such a find was not the Portable Antiquities Scheme, but the antiquity dealers' Timeline Originals. What a surprise eh? Why call him a "researcher" then, and not a treasure hunter? A plunderer looking only for saleable items? So do Timeline Originals often buy things from local "researchers" who do not know the law?

The Amateurish Destruction of World History by Britain at Crosby Garrett

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An intriguing text by arts journalist Souren Melikian about the Crosby Garret helmet ('The Destruction of History') has just come out in the April 2011 issue of Art+ Auction magazine, now accessible online. The basic thesis is that the object is of Sassanian workmanship (which I do not accept) and raises the question of how it got to where it was found. Oddly, in the context of the article's main thesis, it does not discuss whether it was actually found where it was reputed to have been found. Melikian does not have too good a word for British laws on artefact hunting...

The piece[...] was found by an amateur at a site that was disturbed in the rough digging process instead of being recorded in detail. [...] If ever there was an instance of inept legislation granting legitimacy to what is effectively the destruction of an archaeological context, this is it. The British media chorus [...] implicitly accepting the notion that digging for the purpose of treasure hunting is okay. Reports deplored the loss of the helmet to the region where it had been unearthed, but not a word was said about the far greater tragedy incurred by what may be called Britain’s underground records of history. [...] The surrounding terrain [...] should have been very carefully investigated. Apparently it was not.[...] Whatever the location, each properly recorded discovery yields invaluable information to world history.

The article discusses the place of manufacture of the Crosby Garrett helmet, invoking a series of parallels completely ignored by the ('Universalist') British Museum's PAS in their own write-up of the object and then finishes with a flourish:

A law that [...] ignores the proper preservation of buried archives cannot be right. The notion of discovering a "treasure trove" is suitable for Boy Scouts but is absurd for anyone concerned with culture and knowledge. The amateurish digging up of artifacts from the ancient past is as unconscionable as burning the Amazon rainforest. It is high time for international agreements to be hashed out about the archeological ecology of our world. As the saying goes, we are all in it together.

And we are all the losers as the result of Britain's boy scout heritage mismanagement laws.
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Gill on the Portable Antiquities Scheme as Preservation

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The Papers of the Institute of Archaeology volume 20 (available online) have a forum with the keynote paper by David Gill "The Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure Act: Protecting the Archaeology of England and Wales?". Apart from the editor's introduction, this comprises the following seven components:

Keynote text by David W. J. Gill: The Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure Act: Protecting the Archaeology of England and Wales?"

Trevor Austin: The Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure Act: Protecting the Archaeology of England and Wales? A Response.

Paul Barford: Archaeology, Collectors and Preservation: a Reply to David Gill

Gabriel Moshenska: Portable Antiquities, Pragmatism and the ‘Precious Things’

Colin Renfrew: Comment on the Paper by David Gill

Sally Worrell: The Crosby Garrett Helmet

David W. J. Gill: Reply to Austin, Barford, Moshenska, Renfrew and Worrell

I understand that Roger Bland, head of the PAS, was invited to comment, but did not avail himself of the opportunity (" Unfortunately due to the sensitivity of the subject, PAS itself was less willing to contribute"). The five comments are notable for their varied approach. Renfrew's was quite short, Worrell's concentrated on a single aspect, my own was typically long-winded. Austin's and Moshenska's were real eye-openers.

I'd like to comment on several of the responses in more detail below (Austin, Barford (!), Moshenska, Worrel/PAS).
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