DETECTORISTS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS TOGETHER

Over the past 20 years, Treasure Trove has emerged in Europe as an example of collaboration between heritage authorities and the metal detecting community—two groups historically very much at odds. Responsible recreational searching, advocates argue, helps find objects and sites archaeologists don't have the budget or time to search for.

The relationship between archaeologists and metal detectorists like Stepien is usually fraught. In Scotland and neighboring England and Wales, there's an active community of hardcore hobbyists who share their finds in online chat rooms and meet for occasional metal detecting rallies that bring dozens of people together in farm fields to search, share stories, and show off their finds.

While the hobbyists like to think of themselves as treasure hunters or amateur archaeologists, many professionals prefer the term looters. Experts say metal detector finds often wind up damaged, disappear into dusty attics, or get sold on the black market for stolen antiquities. In countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain, where people have used metal detectors to locate and plunder intact graves or archaeological sites, police have special units devoted to tracking down illegal excavators.

Even well-meaning amateurs can do harm. Over-eager hobbyists sometimes dunk coins in vinegar to clean off their protective patinas or straighten bent pieces of metal, potentially erasing clues as to how they were once used or why they were discarded. Once they are removed from the find spot and that damage is done, the object's context, in archaeological terms, is lost forever.

There's a philosophical element, too. In many countries, ancient artifacts and ruins are considered public heritage. To us, archaeological items don't belong to the owner of the land, but to the state, to everyone, says Ignacio Rodriguez Temino, a curator at the Department of Heritage in Seville, Spain, who researches heritage laws. We think no one has the right to become the owner of what they find if it is an archaeological object. In Spain and most other European countries, using metal detectors to look for artifacts is against the law.

Until the 1990s, metal detecting occupied a sort of gray area in the UK, allowed on private land but frowned on by authorities and archaeologists. Instead of cracking down on hobbyists, in 1996 Scottish authorities decided to take an if you can't beat them, join them approach. Though the legal principles behind it have been around for centuries, creating an official Treasure Trove office and a transparent compensation system with publicly listed fees gave metal detectorists and others an incentive to report finds that might otherwise be lost.

England, Wales, and Northern Ireland initiated a similar effort, called the Portable Antiquities Scheme, in 1997. Over the last five years, a handful of other European countries—including Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark—have moved in the same direction. It's a pragmatic stance. Metal detecting is happening, and it's very hard to enforce a ban, says Pieterjan Deckers, an archaeologist at the Free University of Brussels who researches metal detecting and helped set up a reporting system in Belgium. As archaeologists, we might as well engage with these people. You get a lot more information if you gain their trust.

Ideally, metal detecting can be a way to enlist members of the public in data-gathering. Individual coins, for example, might not have much value on their own, especially when they're plucked from farm fields torn up by decades of intensive plowing. But with a database of coins discovered by detectorists, a canny researcher might be able to understand the political reach of a past kingdom, or map out the places people were most likely to settle at different periods. Metal detecting has revealed new insights about the Viking colonization of England, for example, by allowing researchers to map coins and metal finds.

To read the complete article, see:
How Scotland forged a rare alliance between amateur treasure hunters and archaeologists (https://www.popsci.com/science/scottish-treasure-found-metal-detector/)

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