Hyperbolic and sycophantic about detecting but the Journal’s still going strong!

Quite a week. A PAS official accuses us of hyperbole and a detectorist accuses us of sycophancy. Oh well, PAS has dismissed us and detectorists have insulted us for 20 years. for voicing a simple truth: 24,000 detectorists find about 720,000 recordable artefact a year but PAS only records about 90,000.

You’ll know that every PAS Annual Report says its performance is spiffing while never clarifying the spiffingness only relates to the one eighth of recordable artefacts found. To show the shame of it we’ve coloured a detectorist’s “finds pouch” green to represent what’s recorded and red for what’s lost to science:

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It’s high time PAS told APPAG (the All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group) that after 20 years the knowledge of seven out of eight recordable finds is still being lost. (They could also mention we’re not know-nowt sycophants, “ignorant of the constraints of realpolitik”, and we’ve been right all along.)
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More Heritage Journal views on artefact collecting
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