The Hidden Dark Underbelly of UK "Metal Detecting"

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So yet another metal detectorist attempts to distract attention away from the issues being raised by preservationists like myself; Steve Taylor announces (see the post above) the imminent arrival of a third anti-Barford blog. It seems I am onto something with my comments on British policies on artefact hunting. These people are really hoping if they shut me up, the problems that I identify will continue to be ignored. Probably they are right, these are all things the PAS should be saying, and they show zero interest in doing anything at all in that area. Thirteen million quid over as many years and we still have people like 52-year old Steve Taylor strutting around showing off their contempt for anyone who thinks about artefacts in any way different from himself, as he says on one of the few bits of the Portable Antiquities Society website still accessible to public view:

I cannot stand archaeologist or F.L.O's probably for good reason. I believe the objects in the ground belong to all of us, not just museums.

Or Candice Jarman:

I passionately believe that archaeology belongs to the people - to all of us - and not to archaeologists. [...] In todays straightened (sic) times, can we afford to support so many University Archaeology Departments and Archaeology Units from the public purse?

and John Howland:

Across the Shires, the arkies are squealing like stuck pigs with their holier-than-thou protestations. Like the bully-boys they are, they can dish it out but can’t take it back. I’ve waited for over thirty years for this wonderful day to arrive; ‘tis music to my ears..... Well done Alan Melton. [my hyperlink - PMB]

Together with all the fellow anti-archaeological shout-down-the-opposition crowd: Jeb, Sheddie, Deepseeker, Belzoni, Baz, Kevmar, Clive Hallam, Edward Thompson and the many dozen others, too many to remember individually, whose idea of engaging with archaeology is to simply disrupt anything that looks as if it might develop into a sensible discussion about important issues (like the ACCG coineys then). That there is such a groundswell of non-compliance and opposition in the UK should not be shielded from view by the tendency of the advocates of artefact hunting intent on producing the impression that "the majority of artefact hunters are responsible". But it is not them that is doing the damage to the archaeological record which is being done by laissez faire wishy-washy pseudo-policies on artefact hunting in the UK. What does Britain plan to do with the rest? Ignore them and hope they go away? Pretend they don't exist and maybe they'll come round? Or take steps to deal with them that are inevitably going to cramp the style of the responsible guys? But then, is it not precisely the passivity of the majority of the "responsible guys" towards the extent of the loutishness in their ranks of the hobby that leads to this situation?

No Reaction: Acquiescence or Apathy?

I pointed out that on a numismatic discussion list a coin collector had announced to his fellows that "archaeologists want to abolish private property" and remarked that not a single collector demurred. Buffy, the author of the "Barford-response" blog claims that I have not:

"cottoned on that when it comes to radical viewpoints, a lot of people simply ignore them. If a far right group hand you their leaflet in the street and you decline to read it or enter into discussion with them, does this mean you accept their viewpoint?.[sic] Of Course not".

Well, firstly in the example he cites, I am sorry, but it does. It means you accept them spreading this type of material about in the streets. I live in Poland, where that act is illegal, and I do not see why Buffy thinks decent people would walk by ignoring the fact that an illegal act was going on under their noses.

Nevertheless, what is being discussed is an opinion expressed on a discussion list, a list where members do not normally simply "ignore" points of view with which they disagree. I imagine that if somebody posted on a British "metal detecting" forum a similar opinion, that "all archaeologists are trying to abolish private property, first they take away your rights to detect, then they will be after your car, we must stop supporting and co-operating with the PAS"... Buffy is suggesting that there would be total silence, even though not everybody on UKDN or Detectorist.uk or Minelabsowners Forum etc etc agrees. Is that the case? Let Buffy try it and see.

Considering the number of posts there have been on the Moneta-L forum on "Government intrusion" and "Government theft" and other such-like topics, and especially the tone in which they are conducted, I think it is not insignficant that there was no response to Rieske's post.

Buffy then gets excited because he realises something:

Hold on, Mr Barford never questions my views on this Blog does he? so HE MUST agree with them using Barfordian logic. Yet another act of capitulation from Mr Paul M Barford- Hoorah

Well, first of all Buffy rarely expresses "views", just cheap jibes, and there is indeed a response to some of them here. There is no point trying to address them all, I have no intention of proving I am not a camel. That is not "capitulation", it means I have better things to do than play an anonymous critic's silly word games. He is just trying to waste everybody's time with his sniping.

Hiding behind a curtain

Buffy the anonymous hate-blogger pretends he cannot see this blog anymore, so he has removed the link (the one that had the numeral "zero" in the place of the letter "o" which is why he could not get it to work) from his own blog. Of course the reasons are transparent, he realises that the reader of his blog need only follow that link to find that his "responses" to the Portable Antiquities and Heritage Issues blog were being noted and answered. They are then found not to be "responses" at all, but merely a series of personal attacks. Now based on the "wikipipedia" dictionary (sic) page he has cached away, he has concluded, from the fact it contains a paucity of information that its author could not find on the internet, that Paul Barford is "hiding behind a curtain". That is rich from somebody who cannot even put his real name under what he writes. Mr Buffy or Mr Welton whatever his name is, is coming very close to stepping over the line here with his speculations and innuendos. First about me and now he is attacking my wife into the bargain. This is intolerable.

By all means let us have some responses to the issues I raise on my blog, let us have some discussion with any "metal detectorists" able and willing to have a proper discussion. Are there any? Certainly the author of the "Barfordisation" blog has well shown his inability to fulfill that role.

This big red round thing Mr Buffy is what we call a "zero", recognise it now?

The zero and the anonymous sniper

Buffy ('What, no Barford Blog?? ') cannot find this blog through the use of the link he himself gives on his "Barford-response" hate-blog. Maybe if he'd paid more attention in school, he'd know the difference between the numeral '0' and the letter 'o', and then he might get it poor chap. Certainly at the moment, this detectorist-ghetto blog is still up and running and reserved for answering the likes of him.

Buffy is trying (Its been a bad week for Barford) to throw a smoke screen over the Wikipedia page that suddenly appeared a few weeks ago. He pretends "It seems that someone hijacked Mr Barfords Wikipipedia (sic)entry and caused the now known to be "less than erudite" one to enter a state of apoplexy before he had to have his own entry removed from the worlds favourite dictionary. (sic) And I missed the whole damn thing. Bugger!". Hardly "highjacking" when a Steve Welton was the entire author of that attack page from beginning to end. A Steve Welton whose writing style shares clear parallels with the idiosyncracies of "Buffy's". Perhaps they are just soul-mates, or maybe there is more in that relationship....

Now Buffy claims "Not all is lost though as I am fortunate enough to have been forwarded a Cached copy of the entry along with the story of events as they unfolded", well, I "wonder" who sent him that, then?

Anyhow, Buffy says: "not only is it amusing, Mr Barfords Wikipedia entry does shed a whole load of new 'personal' light on Mr Barford and his whole 'raison d'etre'". The fact that it was a 'personal' attack presenting untrue information as encyclopaedeic "facts" was the reason why the Wikipedia editors deleted it. There was in fact no "personal" information there, the self-appointed author quite obviously knew nothing about the subject he was writing about beyond what they found in the Internet. By the way Buffy must have had a long "holiday", as Steve Welton began writing that page at the beginning of May and it was deleted in the middle of June.

So one of the things Buffy derives "from the cached Wikipedia page" is that "Barford has no qualifications" (What, no Qualifications?). Well, that's not surprising as that "encyclopedia entry" totally failed to discuss my university background and work, since the author knew nothing of it. Yet Buffy quotes from the Unidroit-L list an old post of mine, the implications which he chooses to ignore. Perhaps he thinks I am lying, but really I do not feel any compulsion to prove myself to a mere "metal detectorist" who canot even put his own true name under what he writes.

Buffy makes a mock confession of having laboured under a misconception about my academic titles [In the circumstances, I find the mocking of Catholics in that post offensive, but cultural sensitivity was never any UK "metal detectorist's" strength]. Nevertheless he'd be hard-put to demonstrate the truth of that with reference to the state of his blog on 7th July, where the only title he uses with reference to me in his blog is "Mr".

Buffy gets a Badger Blessing

Somebody points the readers of an archaeology forum to a blog which he claims to be „bitingly funny” quirky deconstructionism. Sadly the link turns out only to be his metal detecting mate (“Steve Welton’s”) Buffy blog which despite its title ["paul-barford-blog-response"] dismally fails to be a “response” to the portable antiquity issues I raise on my other blog.

The archaeology forum owner who thus tries to boost his metal detecting mate’s falling viewer figures claims that like me he is in some way concerned about what he calls “looting”, but like his pal Buffy does not agree with my “method of delivery and finger pointing” because that is “rather less agreeable in many posts”. Mr Connolly is a “pat-em-on-ther-head “,“hail-good-fellow-show-us-what-you’ve-got” advocate, and then he wonders why I say that he is pro-collecting.

Connolly writes, apparently about me:

As I said about Water Newton... some folk do, others write about what people should do without ever doing anything constructive. (that I can see)

I think that is what he must have said to the IFA when he (at the time a member of their Council) was called to explain himself over his participation in a commercial artefact hunting rally which – several people tried unsuccessfully to warn him – was (in the manner he did it) against the IFA Code of Practice. Now he is no longer in the IFA and trying to set up a parallel “Federation”. It seems to me that when dealing with artefact collecting, especially carried out as a commercial enterprise, there are some very slippery ethical issues involved for the serious archaeologist in "doing" anything in "partnership" with them.

Well, Mr Connolly can carry on patting artefact hunters on the head and cajoling them into showing him some of what they’ve found and taken from the archaeological record. What I have “done” in another area however is more than he, and that is to write with Nigel Swift a fairly detailed and closely referenced book placing in the public eye the other side of the argument and setting UK metal detecting and the associated ethical and practical issues in a wider archaeological and conservation setting.

Mr Connolly may count that as “not constructive”, he may call it “deconstructive”, but personally I think taken as a whole it is rather “instructive” about how shallow and provincial the arguments used by insular pro-artefact-collecting archaeologists like Connolly actually are. I think it says a lot more about the ideological and methodological crisis of British archaeology as anything.

It seems to me that what people sharing Connolly’s credo on artefact hunting and collecting will have to “do” after it comes out is to find some good and coherent arguments against ours, and frankly the kind of derivative ad hominem “response” that an anonymous half-wit metal detecting mouse fetishist is capable of coming up with is not going to help them.

[Connolly warns himself (!) "expect a stiff reply", well here it is, but only on my metal detecting matters ghetto blog which is where mentions of such metalista-trivia belong].

'Arry Stottle's got a lotta bottle but Buffy takes the Biscuit

Buffy, apparentrly the alter ego of Steve Welton the Phantom Biographer reckons he can find examples of all thirteen of “Aristotle’s fallacies” in my writing, specifically on my blog. So he’s found a “filosofy fer dummies” webpage, and is successively copy and pasting bits of it onto his blog as though he’d written it and then added some examples of these logical fallacies that he claims he has found on my blog. ("Paul Barford is often found stumbling over his own arguments and conclusions drawn thus, yet he uses the smokescreen of erudition to provide the defensive cover to the paucity of his arguments.") Well, lets have a look at them. So far he’s only got as far as two of these posts, and seems to have run out of stamina.

The first was, appropriately enough, posted the day after April Fools’ Day – this was devoted to ‘Affirming the Consequent’. "Anyone reading this and Mr Barfords Blog will instantly spot that Affirming the Consequent is a favoured tactic of Mr Paul Barfords to foster his pre-agenda (sic) arguments". Examples of this which Buffy claims he has found on my blog are:

" A bad thing was done by someone using a metal Detector. People using metal detectors do bad things"
"An unethically sourced item passed through the PAS.
Items passing through the PAS are unethical".

Now, actually it would be helpful to the reader for Mr Buffy to put a little hyperlink so that the reader can see where I said these things he is using as his “examples” from my blog. Logic would demand that wouldn’t it? But oddly enough this logic does not apply to Mr Buffy’s black propaganda. The reason for this is perfectly logical in fact.

The reason is that nowhere on my blog do I say "A bad thing was done by someone using a metal Detector. People using metal detectors do bad things". What I say may be paraphrased is the opposite, just because some metal detectorists co-operate with archaeology and such things bring benefit to archaeology, not all metal detectorists can be seen as beneficial to archaeology, in assessing the phenomenon we need to differentiate the one from the other and not say that “metal detecting is good for archaeology”. Some of it quite clearly is not.

Equally Buffy is deceiving his readers when he asserts that I said "An unethically sourced item passed through the PAS. Items passing through the PAS are unethical". What I say is that the items recorded by PAS cannot be assumed to all be of licit origin and from the provenance stated, since PAS cannot carry out any independent checks. This means that potentially an unknown quantity of items in the PAS database are of no use as archaeological data and we have no way of knowing which ones. The example illustrates this fact. It is not so much an example of affirming the consequent as raising an issue which calls into question the total (rather than overall) reliability of a dataset.

It took him another three weeks to think up the next post in the series. This is devoted to the "false cause" fallacy. Allegedly “The Assertion of the false Cause if [sic] a favoured tactic of Barfordisation in action. How many times do we see Mr Paul M Barford squirming his way through various topics, presenting his one sided views of a situation, to further his own false cause without giving the reader the true picture.” [I think that is a question but metal detectorists cannot “do punctuation” ]. Well, he has found three examples of what he says is the “Use of False Cause by Paul Barford”:

" Finding and removing metal artifacts destroys the archaeological record"
"YOUR heritage is being destroyed by metal detecting"
" The PAS sanctions the the sale of metal artifacts"

Well, here he’s lost me. I certainly do say that “finding and removing metal artifacts [from the archaeological record] destroys the archaeological record”. Finding and cutting out all the letter ‘b’s from a medieval manuscript Bible would destroy the Bible as it would yesterday’s Times. That is not an example of false cause.

Number two: “YOUR heritage is being destroyed by metal detecting" – Again, this does not seem to be a quote from my blog. Neither is it an example of false cause. Metal detecting and artefact collecting, by removing evidence from the archaeological record without record, is indeed destroying the archaeological heritage, which belongs to everyone, not just a few selfish collectors.

Maybe Buffy has more luck with his third example, also no link sourcing it to a specific point in my blog… " The PAS sanctions the sale of metal artifacts". Where do I say that? [The word sanctions” on my blog is entirely associated with imposition of UN sanctions in Iraq which began the looting there]. I presume that Buffy means the reader to believe that somewhere on my blog it says that artifacts are bought and sold BECAUSE the PAS sanctions such sales. That would indeed be an example of “false cause”, but Buffy if asked would not be able to say where I say such a (stupid) thing. Because I do not.

I find it really puzzling that somebody would set out to prove the existence of logical fallacies in what somebody writes without actually having a single clear example in mind where there actually is such a thing. It’s a bit like somebody setting out to write a biography of a person in an encyclopedia having no idea at all about who that person is or what they have done.

Despite these deficiencies, Buffy soldiers on. Where he can produce no quotes to back up his claim of logical fallacies, he makes them up. He makes up quotes which do not exist, and therefore does not provide hyperlinks to them, safe in the knowledge that the metal detecting populace of Great Britain is not at all interested in checking the facts for themselves. But metal detectorists are a small minority.

All Mr Buffy's insults and innuendos will not change that. Instead of making up quotes in order to say they are nonsense (as they are, they are also fictional), let the pro-collecting lobby take up real arguments, and produce real arguments against them.

I look forward to the third post on the "fallacies" - let us see if Mr Buffy can make an improvement on his first two wholly unimpressive performances in this field.

I've been deleted

The malicious page on Wikipedia purporting to be an encyclopedia article about me written by a metal detectorist has at last gone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Steve_Welton
Who is Steve Welton and what have I ever done to him? Maybe he'd like to answer that on his equally obnoxious "barfordisation" blog, what is it he has got against me personally and why that he has decided to engage in this destructive vendetta against a single person he has never met, and - it turns out - knows next to nothing about? Why does he not "respond" to the points I make on my blog with something a little less puerile than personal attack?

Mr Welton has not been mentioned a single time on my "Portable Antiquities and Heritage Issues" blog, so the only thing Mr Welton can have against it is that it discusses portable antiquity and heritage issues - obviously he finds that fact uncomfortable. Seeing his inability to answer the points raised, I think we can easily understand why that might be.