2.5: Some Differences Between Archaeology and Relic Collecting

A collection of Ozark arrowheads

In archaeological research, the evidence has to be gathered systematically, according to a research design. It cannot be gathered in a random manner based on subjective decisions on what will be rejected and what will be taken under consideration.

This is in contrast to collecting (of any kind) where objects are selected from a bigger group on selective grounds, when often other items of the same type are rejected.

The issue of the difference between archaeological approach to what constitutes archaeological evidence and what is the type of thing collectors seek and collect is one that is often ignored in calling artefact collecting 'citizen archaeology'.

Ancient Resources antiquities dealer

Antiquities collectors tend to be interested only in acquiring only a small range of item types to build up their collection illustrative of the past. The world's cultures of course involved the everyday use of a vast range of object types of a variety of materials. Yet examining the online sales portals of antiquities dealers show that right across the global antiquities market, they all look very similar. They tend to carry a narrow range of items from a restricted range of the planet's ancient cultures. Often items appear on the market because they are selected for aesthetic reasons (as 'ancient art') or due to collecting fashions (which tend to be quite conservative). Other items dug out from the source sites are left behind as deemed not collectable. It is the same with artefact hunters in northwestern Europe.

In the photo below is a representation of what part of the excavated assemblage from an archaeological site looks like. How much of this material would the average artefact hunter and collector add to their collection? There's a nice brooch, some rings, some indeterminate lumps of something, a few pieces of decorated pot. What about the knife? The iron strip fragment? Would the collector be interested in taking those lumps of slag?  All those little potsherds? 

Photomontage (author)

This array of typical artefacts is quite unlike the material that artefact hunters submit from their collections to be recorded. This is visible when one examines any collectors' (for example metal detecting) forum or Facebook page and look through the photos of today's /yesterday's / last weekend's finds. They generally do not look like the photo above, but show that during the searching, artefact hunters make a very specific selection of object types.

To take the PAS record as an example. At a time that it boasted "1,428,744 objects within 918,768 records" right on the front page, the search engine showed that overall 705,402 of those objects (in 442,405 records) are just coins. As many as half of the objects recorded are coins. That is not representative of the proportions between total artefacts deposited/ coin losses on any site most archaeologists have worked on. Pottery however is present in enormous quantities on most of them, but the PAS database has only 161,955 sherds reported and recorded. Tile is not really collectable, so just 18,878 fragments are recorded there from the whole of England and Wales. Yet some of the sites exploited to produce the coins and other collectable metal 'partifacts' will have had zones that had been strewn with copious fragments of both. Likewise, when it comes to metal artefacts, every single timber structure, and the roofing (doors, shutters, fittings) of the masonry ones on those same sites will have needed nails to hold them together. Yet the PAS database contains  18,733 complete and fragmentary examples of them, yet many single properly excavated sites have produced something like half that number. The PAS database at present is hardly 'representative' of anything, except what artefact hunters, finders and collectors pick up. 

The same applies to the assemblage of material selected by metal detectorists and "recorded by detectorists for detectorists" in the UK Detector Finds Database. As can be seen, collectors are very selective in what they take home and put in their mahogany cabinets.

The importance of all the finds in my composite picture above is that they are all real archaeological finds from real archaeological sites right in the middle of Europe. Some of them have come straight off the Ministry of Culture website. This is what archaeologists study. The indeterminate pieces of brown material on the left are in fact of great archaeological interest if the viewer knows what they are and what their context is, but most UK artefact hunters have their metal detectors set up to discriminate out iron.