11: Summary


Tamara Kroftova has contributed to this general conclusion:

To summarise the above is a depressing task. In Britain today both archaeologists and artefact hunters stress that there already is "responsible artefact hunting", that the outreach that has been done has already achieved "responsible collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record", done allegedly by a majority of artefact hunters (here the emphasis is on those that go out with metal detectors). There is a Code of Best Practice for responsible metal Detecting in England and Wales, updated in 2017 and agreed with all the major archaeological bodies. Allegedly it is only "a minority" that does not follow this code and does not "responsibly metal detect". This is what the British press does not fail to emphasise every time metal detecting is mentioned (and it gets a lot of press coverage).

Further examination of the way this is presented in Britain, however, brings us to the sad conclusion that we are talking about two different things. First of all, discussion on the forums and social media, within clubs and elsewhere shows very clearly that 'the Code' is not followed by more than a handful of Britain's (estimated) 27000 active detectorists (who, if they adhere to a code at all, follow that of the NCMD and the FID, which differ from the other in quite significant points).

Secondly, when metal detector users are referred to as "responsible" in British discourse, textual analysis reveals that what this means is they just don't break the law. Seeing as British antiquities legislation is among the most lax on the planet, that is neither a particularly onerous responsibility, nor anything much to crow about. That a husband does not beat his wife and kids senseless every Saturday night does not make him an exemplary, or even "responsible", father and husband.

If the threshold for "responsibility" is set appropriately low, then possible quite a few artefact hunters can step across it. Actually they do not, because the benchmark for "responsible behaviour" set by the disregarded 2017 'code' is, in addition to abiding by the law, reporting all recordable finds to the PAS (a practice, significantly, not insisted on by the other two). The fact that the most recent estimate that only one in eight artefacts ripped out of the archaeological record has resulted in a record being published in the PAS database suggests that even this pathetically limited definition of "responsibility" is not being reached in anything like "a majority" of cases. Any reports suggesting that "majority responsible behaviour has been achieved are just patently untrue.

One of the underlying principles of how to deal with the fragile and finite archaeological record a basic minimum should be, as is accepted as the fundamental principle accepted as implicit in conservation throughout the world, that we apply as a basic minimum the concept of non-maleficence (primum non nocere), namely to 'do good or to do no harm'. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good". Applying that to collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record results in the sort of discussion of the application of basic principles as seen in the pages above.

Best practice requires artefact hunters to be aware of the possible harm that might be done by any intervention by them in the archaeological record, and what they have to do to avoid that. The principle of non-malevolence is invoked when considering the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit. In the case of indiscriminate but selective removal of  loose artefacts from the archaeological record with a spade and (for example metal detector) the considerations set out above show that this damage can be considerable, both in terms of the single site and (due to its repetitive nature) the archaeological record as a whole.

Best practice, for responsible artefact hunting is to do nothing that will cause harm, to follow the procedures that will generate and preserve the information preserved in the archaeological record. It seems that no British archaeologist has actually sat down and tried to set out some guidelines and study aids to lead interested and dedicated individuals sincerely interested in responsibly following their passionate interest in the past to understand what those procedures might look like, were there to be a truly "responsible artefact hunting".

It is not clear to us why that should be the case.


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