http://ahotcupofjoe.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/stolen-and-looted-an-interesting-article/ Archaeology, anthropology, science, and skepticism Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:57:25 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://ahotcupofjoe.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/stolen-and-looted-an-interesting-article/#comment-307 Jonathan Jarrett Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:41:35 +0000 http://ahotcupofjoe.wordpress.com/?p=232#comment-307 I see a very particular version of this argument because of <a href="http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/coins/staff/jaj20.html" rel="nofollow">working in a numismatics department</a>. We get a great deal of our information from metal detectorists, and these metal detectorists are frank in telling us that they are in a small minority compared to the others who don't report their finds. These, if we see at all, we see context-less in sale catalogues or on eBay. For this reason, there are occasionally arguments that metal-detecting should be heavily restricted or even criminalised, as it is in many other countries, but the thing is that these countries have tiny assemblages of data compared to the UK. It seems to me that we know more for allowing collectors to find things than we would otherwise by relying solely on organised digging, even if this also means a vast amount of data loss. This probably works better for coins than anything else, though, since coins contain an awful lot of encoded information in their design, and even a context-less coin will tell us something about the coinage and issue it belonged to. Obviously we'd rather have a find-spot but they're not useless without. I guess an Anasazi arrow-head doesn't really work in those terms... I see a very particular version of this argument because of working in a numismatics department. We get a great deal of our information from metal detectorists, and these metal detectorists are frank in telling us that they are in a small minority compared to the others who don’t report their finds. These, if we see at all, we see context-less in sale catalogues or on eBay. For this reason, there are occasionally arguments that metal-detecting should be heavily restricted or even criminalised, as it is in many other countries, but the thing is that these countries have tiny assemblages of data compared to the UK. It seems to me that we know more for allowing collectors to find things than we would otherwise by relying solely on organised digging, even if this also means a vast amount of data loss. This probably works better for coins than anything else, though, since coins contain an awful lot of encoded information in their design, and even a context-less coin will tell us something about the coinage and issue it belonged to. Obviously we’d rather have a find-spot but they’re not useless without. I guess an Anasazi arrow-head doesn’t really work in those terms…

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