14th April 2012, 03:02 PM
Interesting that they're going to look at the behaviour/practices of the metal-detectorists/finders and the FLOs etc. On the Catterick Metal Detecting Project a few years back (published in YAJ, can't remember which year, ?2009ish?), apart from recording the objects and their locations, we also recorded who found what, what type of machine they'd been using at the time, ground conditions and also detectorist behaviour: whatever you did they were unable to stick to 'organised' searches, resulting in completely false 'hotspots' where areas were deemed to be 'rich' and hence stripped of every last microscopic scrap of metal using more and more sophisticated equipment at the expense of adjacent areas that probably contained just as many finds, and this was all just in one field. One would suspect that the PAS is to some extent recording similar behaviour at a rather more macro scale.