9th January 2014, 01:04 PM
P Prentice Wrote:possibly the singlemost ill conceived and useless comment i have seen in years.
I hope this will highlight what lots of us already have observed;
that the vast majority of so-called proffesional excavtions DO NOT use any metaldectors (despite what pie-in-sky WSIs maight have said)
&
>>> when metal detecors (esp. volunteer detectorists) are used, the number of (signifcant) finds increases dramaticaly.......often from the spoil heaps, and frequently from unexcavted portions of features.
>>> Conclusion?
it is very hard to recover coins (for example) etc through digging alone (unless everything is sieved...) > large numbers of coins(etc) are routinley missed on commercial excavtions because metal dectors and skilled detectorists have not been used.
(i would appreciate numbers on this problem > a difficult statistical problem4sure, but a disgraceful situation on-the-less > How come a site in -oh i dont know, lets say central Roman/Medieval Winchester(no detectorist)-, can produce <1/10th the metal smallfinds of an excavtion on the edge of the Medieval town(keen detectorist present)? How come (for example) a major site in central Iron-Age/Roman/Medieval Abbindon produced less than a dozen metal artefacts ? Why, despite all kinds of paper work and claims to the contrary, was a Very Early Roman cementry excavted without on-site proffesional conservation support or equipment (let alone metal dectors?) )
I would suggest looking at the data as clusters > eg SMR find spots > coded by originator (ie a 'proffesional archaeological company' vs a metal dectorist),> it will be hard work to determine when a proffisonal company has made use of a metal detectorits or not......also some calim to have thier own equipment>often it has not been used for years, is poor, and nobody even knows how to switch it on.
It might also be hard to get real data on precisley how metal dectorist were used (eg just allowed to scan spiol heaps?) > for example, i have used 2 or three dectorists at once to scan large areas as 'overburden' was removed by machine in thin spits (with considerable succses)...metal dectorist being able to locate finds to features is clearly of higher value.
Part of the problem is that little attention is now paid to feet-on ground pre-ex survey... fieldwalking is now rare...and metal detecing falls into a simialr catagory >>> a similar 'survey' is also needed to highlight the desperate situation 'plough zone' archaeology is in - particulary lithics. >>> assemblages in the plough soil are NOT simply a sub-set of finds in truncated bases of features......