Focus on Metal Detecting: Stomping Around in Pasture in Baggy Camo Gear

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more about UK 'metal detecting'.

The cover of the latest Searcher magazine advertises a story on the uses of camouflage pseudo-battlefield dress in artefact hunting. Apart from its obvious uses in avoiding detection, the picture used to illustrate it brings to the forefront the typically large pockets and the virtues of the costume for the blurring of figure faults intended to foster the image of Treasure Hunting as a wholesome outdoor pursuit. Note the idiotic pose with the machine intended to make it look like a weapon, attempting to belie the fundamentally silly nerdish look of a metal detector held flaccidly in the normal manner. Note also the strategic position of the subject in a flora-packed pasture (headline story: "field techniques, tips to increase your finds' (sic) rate on pasture"*). The person portrayed could be stomping around on some Neotinea ustulata for all we know, many of her coil-waving colleagues might not even know it, trampling around in their camo gear in the dark. 

* Cf the National Council of Metal Detectingists' so-called Code of Practice which says owt about pasture and digging looter's holes holes in untouched stratigraphy.  But it would, wouldn't it?

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UPDATE 4.8.13: On a metal detecting blog near you, a metal detectorist is jubilating 'I am Officially Scandalous!' because I express an opinion on this magazine cover. Others have stronger words about my reaction prompted by the fact that the photo shows a lady detectorist and not a fat balding guy in camo dress.

This is rather puzzling. Let me put it this way, several of the detecting codes make the point (at the end usually) that when you are out with your detecting stuff, you are (and should behave as if you are) an ambassador for the hobby. In that case, I really do not see why one cannot treat the cover photos of a major (or is that now THE major) UK hobby magazine as portraying an image of the hobby that the hobbyists themselves would approve (otherwise they'd probably stop buying the magazine). Furthermore, this is no so-called "lads' mag", so it goes on UK supermarket shelves uncovered. The picture here is what people see, what people will judge the hobby by. What everybody who sees "The Searcher" in the local newsagents or WH Smith will judge the hobby by. Some will see one thing, others will be sensitive to other aspects. I see what I wrote about above, and who is to say my opinion is any less valid than Baz Thugwit's?

Imagine that on the cover of Current Archaeology, for some reason, the editors put a picture of Paul Barford in a baggy stripy jumper, a blue nylon anorak with a 'Mr Angry' patch on it, torn trousers, standing on the top of Silbury Hill* and looking like an utter nerd poking a heavily-worn WHS pointing trowel insistently into the camera. Let's say it advertises two articles in the number (the mind boggles). I'm pretty sure such a photo might attract comments from certain quarters not only about Mr Barford, but "archaeologists" generally. I doubt that many of them will be saying what a great impression it makes of the discipline and its values. So why, when it's a metal detectorist portrayed in what some might consider a rather silly manner and advertising a story about detecting on pasture, it is suddenly something reprehensible to even talk about it? ("Shh, don't mention it, she's a detectorist"?). Has detecting become one of the few things that, even in these days of greater liberalism, "one does not discuss" in polite company?

 

* You are now not allowed at all to climb Silbury Hill. Nobody should be up there, the same as, according to the Code of Responsibility, metal detectorists should not be detecting in wild-flower grassland or on permanent pasture.