Rupert Soskin wrote:
I'm probably not going to win any friends here but I think there's a lot of unnecessary fuss. It's important that people have the landowner's permission and of course there should be some serious responsibility if anything unusual is found. But something like another hoard of Roman coins does little to increase our knowledge of ancient history and without the opportunist detector they would most likely remain buried for another thousand years or be bulldozered up by property developers.
Rupert, as you are always rational and relatively impartial to 'taking sides' I doubt if you will lose any friends either.
It is a little outside the parameters of this forum but in the context of the discussion about nighthawking and metal dectectoring I refer to an extract from Vanessa Collingridge’s book on Boudica.
After saying that archaeology had made 'history sharpen up its act', she goes on to talk about how metal detetorists had become the pariah of the archaeological world “archaeologists claimed they were ruthless profiteers who blundered and plundered their way through the British landscape with careless regard for the context of their finds and in so doing destroyed important information from the sites where their ‘treasure’ had been found”.
To mollify this she later says that the Norfolk Museums Service began to forge closer relationships between amateurs and the professionals with the museum staff sharing their knowledge in exchange for the detectorists showing their discoveries – thus ethical detectorists were actually adding to the picture being built up of ordinary Iron Age people by finding everyday items, whereas before, Iron Age history was only known through classical texts written from the invading Romans viewpoint and archaeological discoveries such as stone buildings and wealthy funerary rites.
The point of this is to say that if professional archaeologists were prepared to be a little more democratic and a little less elitist (and I know many of them are) whilst detectorists had to be licensed and agree to adhere to a clear code of conduct – then the pursuit of historical knowledge might be better served.
If licensing helps to prevent rogue activity such as nighthawking then I fully support it and who should I be lobbying to help bring this about?
