Tuesday 9 April 2013

Unsustainable digging around?

Questions at UCS. © David Gill
It was good to discuss Paul Barford's forthcoming UCS Heritage Seminar with him yesterday. [All welcome at the seminar tomorrow, but please book in the normal way.] One of the topics is going to be the unsustainable damage to largely unrecorded archaeological sites. What knowledge is being lost?

One of the more unexpected lines of thought was the way that finds of recently surfaced portable antiquities are merely showing up as a scatter on maps. How far is this a useful way to think about context?

We also reflected on "public archaeology" and the media. How far do programmes that present archaeology as a hunt for "Secret Treasures" do our discipline harm?

There will be time for discussion, questions and answers at the end of Paul's presentation. It would be good to see readers of LM present in the audience.

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2 comments:

Cultural Property Observer said...

Far less knowledge is being lost here than in places like Cyprus, Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria where confiscatory laws discourage metal detectorists from reporting what they find.

Also, what makes you think archaeologists would ever be looking in places metal detectorists look; there are simply too few and those that exist rightly focus on more significant sites not some farmer's field where the context has already been disturbed.

Is this about conservation or control?

Damien Huffer said...

If only I wasn't in Hawaii! Might it be podcast or recorded somehow? I'd love to hear it.

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