Mike Heyworth of the Council for British Archaeology ( Farming Today, Radio 4, 6.00 minutes in) is beginning to take a less ambivalent approach to artefact hunting than he was a while ago. Here he is on commercial artefact hunting rallies:“you can get hundreds if not thousands of metal detectorists converging on very sensitive archaeological sites and that can cause a huge amount of damage to that archaeology and that information is completely lost …. I’d like to see much more of a clampdown on those sort of rallies because I don’t think they’re in the public benefit"I think the question is broader, whether in the long run current British policies on artefact hunting and collecting are "in the public benefit". In fact they only benefit a selfish exploitive minority many of whom basically could not care less about the long-term and overall effects of what they are all doing.
See Heritage Action: "At last! Paul Barford and Mike Heyworth in total agreement!" 28/07/2013.
Let this go on record, in the first half of the previous decade, when I took part in forum discussions on UK heritage policy and metal detecting in particular, I was fairly frequently getting emails from Mike Heyworth asking me to tone down my criticism of artefact hunters who were (he argued) just a different way of manifesting an interest in the past, and as such had a place in the general picture of British archaeology. I have no idea to what degree he himself sincerely believed what was, after all, the official [post Denison and Dobinson report] CBA position on artefact hunting a decade ago. I am glad to see that a decade on, he is coming out and from time to time can be heard more frequently expressing mild exasperation with the situation - which is as it should be. Things were probably not helped much by the fact that, despite the detector-tolerant policies of the CBA throughout the first decade of the 21st century, there were frequent attacks on the CBA by the metal detecting community. Clashes over the "Code of Practice for Responsible Metal Detecting in England and Wales" in particular became rather nasty (the Code is today almost universally ignored). Perhaps the CBA realised that they were getting British archaeology nowhere trying to pander to these people, and their "partner' the PAS. The latter put the CBA in a really stupid position with the non-collaboration over the issue of best practice in "Britain's Secret Treasures" (it seems from the preliminary announcements that the CBA will not be in the projected second series).
