Metal Detecting

[woodstock]

Hi all I have just got into detecting and was wondering with most of spending time outdoors are any of you got detectors? I've just bought a C Scope cs 3mxi simplicity its self. unfortunately Fi knocked me of my bike Sunday and damaged my right shoulder,at the moment im in a sling and start physiotherapy a week mon.

 

[boatman]

Contact a local archaeological group to see if you can help uncover and preserve our past.

 

[woodstock]

I joined the Celtic searchers Llanelli we are on the lookout for another Jinky Johnstone.

 

[boatman]

I see that Celtic Searchers do not assist archaeologists but hold regular rallies. Do they declare everything to the farmer and anything of antiquity to PAS?

 

[woodstock]

I see that Celtic Searchers do not assist archaeologists but hold regular rallies. Do they declare everything to the farmer and anything of antiquity to PAS?

Everything found of archaeological importance is declared as far as I know, all monies raised by the rallies goes to charities.

 

[boatman]

Think about it, value and archaeological importance judged by the finders especially in the excitement of a rally, possibly with dealers in attendance. Not exactly conducive to the careful analysis of finds is it?

 

[Janne]

Detectorists have done untold damage to our historical sites. Might be ok on a field that is being plowed every year, but not anywhere else.

 

[Mesquite]

Detectorists have done untold damage to our historical sites. Might be ok on a field that is being plowed every year, but not anywhere else.

SOME detectorists have done untold damage to SOME OF our historical sites.

Not every detectorist is an irresponsible nighthawk out to raid sites. The greater majority actually care about where they detect and make sure they abide by the rules and laws regarding the reporting of portable antiquities.

Think about it, value and archaeological importance judged by the finders especially in the excitement of a rally, possibly with dealers in attendance. Not exactly conducive to the careful analysis of finds is it?

Excitement of a rally? Really????

You obviously have never been to a metal detecting rally if you think there's such excitement that it would turn a persons head who is normally an honest law abiding person when it comes to declaring their finds.

As for dealers in attendance, the only ones I saw were ones selling metal detecting equipment.

Anyone who travels to a rally is just glad to be able to detect in an area that they wouldn't normally be able to and to meet like minded folk who share their hobby.

End of the day it comes across in any thread about metal detecting that you have a personal hatred of anyone who metal detects Boatman and you make it very clear that they should be banned.

 

[boatman]

Banned from indiscriminate pillaging the historical record still present in the country, yes. Used with proper investigations yes.

This is a long extract from the Heritage Journal about a rally where Weyhill Sheep Fair used to be held. Weyhill is a place that still has the sites of 14th century trading booths still existing. Booths linked to the fair. But it was seen fit to have a rally on the site of the fair, a place that in another countries that would be preserved and properly investigated at some time.

[h=1]Now Weyhill Fair. Oh dear.[/h]27/09/2014 in Metal detecting

by Nigel SwiftJust announced: “For reasons that we need not concern ourselves with, the location of our charity rally on September 28th has changed. The new location isright on the site of the famous WEYHILL FAIR….. We have been given two fields totalling 60 acres, which I am assured by the farmer to be “undetected” they are split by one of the 8 drove roads…. Sites really don’t come better than this!“If true that it’s right on the Fair site it’s surely unacceptable? I used to pass there daily and thought of it as history personified: 750 years of almost continuous gatherings including the country’s largest sheep fairs (100,000 sheep sold a day at the peak), mentioned in “The Vision of Piers Plowman” (1326) and held on land partly owned by Chaucer (it being quite possible he heard some of his tales from characters at the Fair). Thousands turned up for all sorts of other reasons including hiring workers and all manner of entertainments – probably jousting, sword fighting, dog-baiting, bear-baiting, cockfighting and strolling minstrels. There were also Mystery Plays and mummers. By the sixteenth century it was so large it had an on-site court to settle disputes and deal with lawlessness and thereafter it expanded further to include a horse fair, cheese fair and hop fair. There were even said to be cases of wife-selling there as immortalised by Thomas Hardy in the Mayor of Casterbridge.So the announcement is spot-on if you’re one of the lucky 90 artefact hunters: “Sites really don’t come better than this!” But what if you are one of the other 65 million stakeholders? Everything dropped on those 60 acres forms an almost unique whole, a continuous record of social and commercial interaction in one small place over seven and a half centuries and crucially, “undetected”! So it’s just crying out for a comprehensive archaeological field survey one day – including, by all means, the use of metal detectors, but conducted entirely in accordance with EH’s “Our Portable Past” standards for professional investigations so as to maximise the intellectual yield for us all. How can that not be a better option?Yet instead tomorrow (Sunday) it will be dug over by who knows whom from who know where with a propensity to report amounting to who knows what, using no survey methodology but instead a totally random approach followed by irrational selectivity. So by Monday the site’s uniqueness will be gone forever as multiple holes will have been punched in the record and an unknown number of material and abstract components of history will have been respectively quietly pocketed or destroyed and hence put beyond the reach of science. No doubt many will bring finds to PAS if they are there but of course that “mitigation” can only ever be limited at best and then only to the unknown degree that 90 randomly selected individuals allow.So it’s a fact, isn’t it, that tomorrow Britain will suffer major damage to a research opportunity to die for. And not moan publicly. On Britarch for instance! It’s a bloody shame really. I’m no archaeologist, just a no-account amateur, but I know when something irreplaceable is being needlessly destroyed. Weyhill Fair was more than three times as old as the United States of America and is the last place for this crass British spectacle. It’s scandalous. I’m left with two angry thoughts:1. How much more would we know about the past if someone had stood up to the barrow-digging vicars?2. If PAS’s alleged millionth find had come from Weyhill would it have been trumpeted? I think not..

 

[boatman]

Remind me of the location of a hoard that was found at a rally and gouged out of the earth that day with no care for the evidence surrounding it. PAS were partially responsible for this on the grounds it might be looted (by other detectorists?). Surely a responsible body of people would have called hold and taken turns, proud of the privilege of safeguarding an important historical find. No difficulty anywhere in finding such volunteers whether it is to refloat a dolphin, protect a crime sscene or traffic accident until the police arrive, a rare birds nest. So why are those who use metal detectors for their own profit different? Can profit be the problem.

 

[Tengu]

Because detecting is not profit; its gambling and so attracts gambling mentalities?

 

[woodstock]

Im not quite sure where you people are coming from the people who attend rallies on land they have permission to be detecting on if anything of value or of historic interest it is recorded and the appropriate authorities informed as for gambling I have never placed a bet in my entire life, and the people I have spoken with said it's not about value of find, it's about having a day out in the fresh air with some like minded people, and here is a list of the historic sites in the Cayman Islands not sure I would want to detect them for gods sake keep it real.
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attractions-g147364-Activities-c47-t17-Cayman_Islands.html

 

[Toddy]

I admit to a loathing of metal detectorists. I know they can be incredibly helpful and useful, but I have worked sites where I needed permission from the Govt. before I could even put an origin marker into the ground so that I could grid off for survey and geophys, did preliminary grids and came back the next day to fields pitted with holes and no trace of what was found, no record of what was taken, let alone what context, what layer, and anything organic had been trashed as worthless. Ripped out of secure context it is like the recent finds of caves that used to hold the Dead Sea Scrolls….where they were torn from their wrappings and broken up to be sold in pieces. Debris and dust.

I try to be even handed and calm about it; it's all of our heritage, not just the archaeologists and historians trying to make sense of, interpret and research the past, but the indiscriminate abuse of that heritage, that tells us damn all except a monetary value of robbed out metals, is theft from every one of us and worse, it's theft of our children's history and heritage for ever. We can't restore it, it can't be gotten back. It's trashed, it's obliterated.

Used with care, forethought and recorded, the details could tell us so much more than just yet another mangled AS belt buckle or Roman denarii.

There are good metal detectorists out there, responsible folks who care as much about the context and secure recording as any archaeologist does.
Unfortunately they are swamped by the fundamental orifices just out for a sneaky beaky with a handy spade.

Away take your kit down to a public beach and see what you find there. You'll not do any harm and apparantly it's amazing how much money folks lose there, jewellery too. Anywhere that there are holiday crowds, or festival crowds, earlier in the year. Still a good day out in the fresh air.

M

 

[Janne]

There is a reason why archeologists use throwels, bruches and dental instruments, recording layers and so on.
Detectorists seem to use the detector and a spade.

And what we do not know is how much of the finds ends up unreported? I am sure most are serious, but even a small number of cowboy detectoristd can cause a lot of damage.
The Archeology we have is of a finite amount.

 

[woodstock]

As we live less than a 15 min. walk to our nearest beach thats where I will mostly be detecting.

 

[Toddy]

Sorry Woodstock you must have felt that I was getting at you, and I really wasn't. I know you're sound and you'd think about it (witness this thread as an example of that) carefully.

Here's an example of the kind of thing I mean though. Imagine that instead of archaeologists excavating the Sutton Hoo burial, that it had been the kind of metal detectorists that we all know abound.
The jewels from the site would have been all that we ever knew, the careful mapping of rivets, etc., would never have been recorded (ship size, length, profile, etc., ) or the black organic fragments, that 75 years later we now know to be bitumen all the way from Syria, indicative of long distance trade links http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-38171657
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo

or, maybe we'd have gotten lucky, and they'd be the kind of detectorist who thought, "Wait a minute, this is important, and somebody who knows how to do this thoroughly ought to be informed".

A quick search on ebay shows the debris finds selling for a few pounds….not a lot for all the history some of it might have told us, is it?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_f...+dete.TRS0&_nkw=metal+detector+finds&_sacat=0

The dealers really just want pristine pieces or the metal for sale as gold and silver. There's very little that's financially of any value. Buttons and buckles sometimes from a grave, thimbles and spindle whorls and coins.
In this country most graves are Christian and those were laid in shrouds without grave goods for the most part. But if the coffins were wooden and nailed then they trigger the magic beeps and the graves are disturbed for nothing.
Earlier graves, with grave goods, sometimes bring the detectorists money from the 'dealers', but those same graves could tell us so very much more about our ancestors, if we chose to disturb them…and remember that in the UK there is a, "Presumption of preservation in situ", and in the normal run of things graves are only disturbed if erosion or construction impinges on them.
Time team is not normal archaeology, it really isn't. It's archaeology as entertainment and explanation of a puzzle. It can be very good, but in reality we do not routinely disturb graves. Not saying it doesn't happen because it does, but we don't do it only looking for the 'bling'.

Anyway, rant over. I'm going to go and put the kettle on. I've been playing with birch bark and thinking it's beautiful stuff and I wish it grew in thick clean sheets in this country. There's masses of fallen stuff, and it's useable, but nothing like the Canadian, Russian and Scandinavian bark.

M

 

[boatman]

The grave note was interesting Toddy. I was on an excavation of a cursus near Bangor, North Wales and we discovered a series of graves. Very little remains left because of the soil type but one feature was fascinating. The graves were not rectangular but shroud wrapped body shaped with a distinct head area. There were the little patches of charcoal around each head. Not a continuous line of charcoal but small distinct patches as though small torches had been placed around the head of each burial. Quite a scene to imagine when the burial was done. Totally invisible to and possibly destroyed by a treasure hunter if they had ever come across the site.

 

[boatman]

Another occasion, the excavator of the vila at Littlecote Manor, Berkshire, showed a small plasterer's tool. If metal detected and dug out just a corroded bit of metal. But as it was properly excavated its context was shown. It had been embedded in the wall plaster, not normal practice of a plasterer but maybe he was distracted and the tool sunk into the plaster to vanish., Many possibilities of what happened next on that building site but none if the metal had just been wrenched out of the ground.

 

[TeeDee]

I've no experience of metal detecting but I've wondered when one intends to go over an area with a specific intent of finding something of historical value does one look at Map Topography and try and read the ground and focus the area of inspection there?
I mean would you say look at a Roman Road and then look at specifically troughs or gulleys off to one side where things may have fallen? or with regards to older buildings look at specific choke points rather than just a haphazard search of an area?

Just interested in if there is a logical deductive reasoning to search pattern and areas.

 

[boatman]

A clue that some detectorists use is an Ancient Monument sign!