17th December 2007, 02:29 PM
from todays Guardian by Lord Renfrew
One of the unsung successes of this government is the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which records archaeological objects found by members of the public and makes that information available for all on its online database. The scheme recently recorded its 300,000th find. But all that is now under threat, an unintended consequence of this year's comprehensive spending review by which the government fixes its funding for the next three years.
Although the spending review proved to be much better for museums and the heritage than was feared - a tribute to the negotiating ability of James Purnell, the new secretary of state - the Portable Antiquities Scheme comes under the aegis of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the one organisation that was singled out for cuts in the spending review, as its grant is being reduced by 25% in real terms over the next three years.
Since it was created by Chris Smith seven years ago, MLA has had a chequered history. It has been through three changes of name and is now on its fourth chief executive, hardly a sign of a stable organisation. It has yet to convince the museums, libraries and archives, for which it was supposed to devise overarching policies, that it has a useful role. Its biggest programme is Renaissance in the Regions, which channels government money (£45m this year) into a network of 42 hub museums. The Renaissance programme was protected in this spending review.
However, the Portable Antiquities Scheme is left facing an uncertain future. The scheme, which is receiving £1.3m from MLA this year, is a unique operation. It is masterminded by a small headquarters team of five at the British Museum and then has six specialist finds advisers and a regional staff of 39 based in a mix of museums and county council archaeological departments all round the country, with even the odd university thrown in. Each of the 34 organisations that host these posts makes its own local contribution to the scheme. Not only is it extremely cost-effective - how many other national schemes are run for such a small amount of money? - but it works. The staff are young archaeologists who work all sorts of hours going out and making contact with the people - mainly metal detector users - who make the finds.
Metal detecting first became popular in the 1970s and, although many archaeologists are still uneasy about it, they have not succeeding in banning it and most now believe it is better to work with the detector users than ignore them. Certainly everyone can agree that the failure to record detectorists' finds on a systematic basis represents a huge
loss of information about our past. In Norfolk and Suffolk, where there has been a concerted effort to record detector-users' finds for over 30 years the addition to our knowledge has been vast. Over 30,000 finds a year are recorded from those two counties alone and this year the scheme will be recording over 70,000 finds in all.
Norfolk and Suffolk provided the model for the national Portable Antiquities Scheme, which started as a series of pilot schemes in 1997, at the same time as the Treasure Act passed through parliament. Thanks to the lottery the scheme achieved national coverage in 2003 and, three years later, when the lottery funding ended, the government agreed to pick up the bill.
The scheme is now starting to transform our understanding of many aspects of the past: for example our knowledge of iron age coins or of Viking age artefacts has been enormously enriched through the systematic recording of metal-detected finds over the last 30 years. A recent survey found that 17 PhDs and 30 other dissertations are using PAS data. The scheme has led to some very important archaeological discoveries, such as a very rare Viking age cemetery at Cumwhitton in Cumbria which came to light when a detector user reported two rare brooches to his local finds liaison officer, or a unique copper-alloy Roman bowl which bear the names of four forts on Hadrian's Wall and has now been jointly acquired by the British Museum, the Potteries Museum and Tullie House Museum in Carlisle.
The scheme has also taken the initiative in policing the internet for objects that should be reported under the Treasure Act and has promoted a code of practice (pdf) on responsible metal detecting which, for the first time, provides a clear set of guidelines on the responsible use of metal detectors which has been endorsed by all the relevant bodies, both metal detecting and archaeological. Such a thing could never have happened 10 years ago.
Those who supported the scheme were delighted by the decision of the government to fund the scheme in full in 2006 and they thought that its long-term future was assured. However, although it has continued to go from strength to strength, it seems that the scheme was forgotten by the government when it decided to slash MLA's budget, as
it failed to ring-fence the scheme's funding. Two weeks ago the culture minister Margaret Hodge launched the scheme's latest annual report at the British Museum, and at the same time the chief executive of MLA, Roy Clare, announced that MLA had agreed to continue funding the scheme for a further year at its current level, while reviewing its activities for the two years beyond that.
Now, though, it emerges that this announcement was rather less than it seemed, as Roy Clare told the scheme's advisory group last Wednesday that its grant would be frozen next year and this means that it will have to lose five of its 50 posts. Roy Clare has also stated that he thinks the scheme's long-term future lies in the Renaissance programme, where its supporters fear it will get swallowed up and lose its national focus, as the local officers will inevitably be drawn into Renaissance's various regional priorities.
It is now time for the culture department to step into this unhappy situation - its ministers have been more than happy to sing the praises of the scheme, which fits so well into its priorities of broadening public access to our heritage and these warm words were repeated by Margaret Hodge on her online blog this week. If MLA is unable to continue to protect and sustain the scheme then the department should ask an organisation that could provide the scheme with a safe home - and the obvious candidate is the British Museum, where its headquarters team is based and whose director, Neil MacGregor, has been one of its most eloquent supporters.
At the moment its 50 dedicated staff do not know whether they will still have a job after next March. If ever there was a frontline service such as this spending review was supposed to protect, this is it. It is ironic that this threat to its future should come just when the scheme is beginning to produce dividends in terms of research and has built up the trust of over 6,000 finders. All this could so easily be lost without adequate funding.
One of the unsung successes of this government is the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which records archaeological objects found by members of the public and makes that information available for all on its online database. The scheme recently recorded its 300,000th find. But all that is now under threat, an unintended consequence of this year's comprehensive spending review by which the government fixes its funding for the next three years.
Although the spending review proved to be much better for museums and the heritage than was feared - a tribute to the negotiating ability of James Purnell, the new secretary of state - the Portable Antiquities Scheme comes under the aegis of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the one organisation that was singled out for cuts in the spending review, as its grant is being reduced by 25% in real terms over the next three years.
Since it was created by Chris Smith seven years ago, MLA has had a chequered history. It has been through three changes of name and is now on its fourth chief executive, hardly a sign of a stable organisation. It has yet to convince the museums, libraries and archives, for which it was supposed to devise overarching policies, that it has a useful role. Its biggest programme is Renaissance in the Regions, which channels government money (£45m this year) into a network of 42 hub museums. The Renaissance programme was protected in this spending review.
However, the Portable Antiquities Scheme is left facing an uncertain future. The scheme, which is receiving £1.3m from MLA this year, is a unique operation. It is masterminded by a small headquarters team of five at the British Museum and then has six specialist finds advisers and a regional staff of 39 based in a mix of museums and county council archaeological departments all round the country, with even the odd university thrown in. Each of the 34 organisations that host these posts makes its own local contribution to the scheme. Not only is it extremely cost-effective - how many other national schemes are run for such a small amount of money? - but it works. The staff are young archaeologists who work all sorts of hours going out and making contact with the people - mainly metal detector users - who make the finds.
Metal detecting first became popular in the 1970s and, although many archaeologists are still uneasy about it, they have not succeeding in banning it and most now believe it is better to work with the detector users than ignore them. Certainly everyone can agree that the failure to record detectorists' finds on a systematic basis represents a huge
loss of information about our past. In Norfolk and Suffolk, where there has been a concerted effort to record detector-users' finds for over 30 years the addition to our knowledge has been vast. Over 30,000 finds a year are recorded from those two counties alone and this year the scheme will be recording over 70,000 finds in all.
Norfolk and Suffolk provided the model for the national Portable Antiquities Scheme, which started as a series of pilot schemes in 1997, at the same time as the Treasure Act passed through parliament. Thanks to the lottery the scheme achieved national coverage in 2003 and, three years later, when the lottery funding ended, the government agreed to pick up the bill.
The scheme is now starting to transform our understanding of many aspects of the past: for example our knowledge of iron age coins or of Viking age artefacts has been enormously enriched through the systematic recording of metal-detected finds over the last 30 years. A recent survey found that 17 PhDs and 30 other dissertations are using PAS data. The scheme has led to some very important archaeological discoveries, such as a very rare Viking age cemetery at Cumwhitton in Cumbria which came to light when a detector user reported two rare brooches to his local finds liaison officer, or a unique copper-alloy Roman bowl which bear the names of four forts on Hadrian's Wall and has now been jointly acquired by the British Museum, the Potteries Museum and Tullie House Museum in Carlisle.
The scheme has also taken the initiative in policing the internet for objects that should be reported under the Treasure Act and has promoted a code of practice (pdf) on responsible metal detecting which, for the first time, provides a clear set of guidelines on the responsible use of metal detectors which has been endorsed by all the relevant bodies, both metal detecting and archaeological. Such a thing could never have happened 10 years ago.
Those who supported the scheme were delighted by the decision of the government to fund the scheme in full in 2006 and they thought that its long-term future was assured. However, although it has continued to go from strength to strength, it seems that the scheme was forgotten by the government when it decided to slash MLA's budget, as
it failed to ring-fence the scheme's funding. Two weeks ago the culture minister Margaret Hodge launched the scheme's latest annual report at the British Museum, and at the same time the chief executive of MLA, Roy Clare, announced that MLA had agreed to continue funding the scheme for a further year at its current level, while reviewing its activities for the two years beyond that.
Now, though, it emerges that this announcement was rather less than it seemed, as Roy Clare told the scheme's advisory group last Wednesday that its grant would be frozen next year and this means that it will have to lose five of its 50 posts. Roy Clare has also stated that he thinks the scheme's long-term future lies in the Renaissance programme, where its supporters fear it will get swallowed up and lose its national focus, as the local officers will inevitably be drawn into Renaissance's various regional priorities.
It is now time for the culture department to step into this unhappy situation - its ministers have been more than happy to sing the praises of the scheme, which fits so well into its priorities of broadening public access to our heritage and these warm words were repeated by Margaret Hodge on her online blog this week. If MLA is unable to continue to protect and sustain the scheme then the department should ask an organisation that could provide the scheme with a safe home - and the obvious candidate is the British Museum, where its headquarters team is based and whose director, Neil MacGregor, has been one of its most eloquent supporters.
At the moment its 50 dedicated staff do not know whether they will still have a job after next March. If ever there was a frontline service such as this spending review was supposed to protect, this is it. It is ironic that this threat to its future should come just when the scheme is beginning to produce dividends in terms of research and has built up the trust of over 6,000 finders. All this could so easily be lost without adequate funding.