"because I promote good practise within the detecting hobby"

Mr Brun, I'll tell you exactly how to do that.

Adhere to, and tell all your "for whatever reason we can't" heritage hero mates to adhere to the Code of Responsible Detecting laid out and signed last year by the major UK archaeological bodies plus both the detecting organisations, including its key provision to report all finds to PAS.

The idea that a small group within a small hobby can react within days to the publication of the stated wishes of the rest of society by unilaterally writing their OWN "alternative" code of responsibility for how THEY think the resource should be treated, in direct contravention of all professional archaeological opinion is risible and transparently self-serving.

IT AIN'T ROCKET SCIENCE. Behave as all archaeological opinion has laid out. "Responsibility" is whatever wider society says it is, not what YOU choose to say it is. That's the basis of civilisation and what distinguishes it from anarchy. Egg collecting is wrong. The Federation of UK Egg-Stealers' opinion is of zero significance since their stake in the resource is miniscule compared to the rest of us and their interest is clearly a self-interested and minority one. YOUR opinion isn't worth a bean. Society's IS.

Finally, for the leader of a group that is defying absolutely everyone else's view of conservation, both intellectually and practically, to come onto a conservation-minded forum and announce "I promote good practice" beggars belief. There is only ONE version of good practice. It is to do what everyone else has very clearly said is required. Just do it. Like some detectorists already do without the least inconvenience or complaint.

I really DON'T think you have done anything like proven a case for your "rescuing from heavy farm practices, chemical disintegration" model by publishing a picture of a 2p piece from a urinal and four battered hammies. The fact is that thousands of objects annually go througfh eBay and the PAS database, so we KNOW what the vast majority of detector-made finds looks like, and most of them are in very good shape. The same goes for those in the UKDFD. How many hammies in the UKDFD archive look like the four in your sad contrived 'apology' for metal detecting"? What percentage? How do we know they owe their state to farming practices and not being hit by the "detectorists'" spade or crowbar (see another of your YouTube videos)?

The author of this piece is quite mistaken (or deliberately misleading) about what the critics of artefact hunting and collecting actually do say about the hobby. Funnily enough, they dont even address the last question, of collection. How is it "rescue" to whip them out of the ground and store them unlabelled in buckets and heaps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh0U8kS_X-0 (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftlqLukcbcU ).

You ask "The figures put out by Heritage Action show increasing amount of eroding artifacts. How do you see archaeologists studying and learning from this data and how would you go about collecting any data that it may offer?". ..... (sic)

..... You seem to be unaware that the "erosion" referred to is the COLLECTING AWAY of objects from archaeological assemblages preserved in the landscape. If they were not being removed to personal collections and eBay, there would be no need now to record what was being taken! The fact is though that the counter shows how many recordable objects ARE being taken and we can see how many of these data actually get into any kind of record, so really the question is a moot one. By not reporting anything like the number of recordable finds they are taking away to enrich their collections, ten thousand UK artefact hunters are destroying archaeological evidence as surely as the crowd of artefact hunters busy carrying off what they can of Iraq's archaeological heritage are doing.

Paul Barford