UK Metal Detectorist Argues Like a US Coiney

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On my main blog I try to show the connection between the type of artefact collecting which the Brits label "metal detecting" with the issue of artefact collecting as a whole. For some curious reason the Brits treat them as two separate issues. They are not of course. In countering the false ideologies of the British "pro-metal detecting" crowd, the antics of a group of US "collectors' rights" advocates is very useful. So it is interesting that metal detectorist "Candice Jarman" (not his real name) in a post called "Depressing stuff in Egyptology" manages to make himself sound exactly like the American Council for Cultural Policy. As a collector he is of the opinion that Egyptological publications do their readers a disservice in that they do not carry

"adverts from antiquities dealers on their pages [...] I am sure many Egyptophiles would love to own a genuine but minor Egyptian antiquity".

No doubt. Many do.

He is also incensed that the 'Tutankhamun - His tomb and his treasures" exhibition contains replicas.

This is what we now have to put up with - as some might say, gaudy fakes! They just don't get it do they! [...] One wonders if in the future replicas will be all we have, and to see a genuine Egyptian antiquity, you will need to be well-off enough to afford a plane ticket to Cairo.

Oh, there's an idea.The airfare to Egypt really should not break the bank for the average Brit these days. It's probably easier for a British metal detectorist to get to Cairo than an upper Egyptian villager to get to London or New York. Many of the objects that the travelling exhibition involves are too fragile to travel. Basically it depends on the presentation and audience. If so many people thought like "Candy", such an exhibition would not be viable. These days the exhibitions rely on design to create atmosphere and multimedia to impart information. This can be well done with sensitivity, or can be botched. To what extent are the actual artefacts needed to get over a particular message?

Candy found it "depressing" that the a New York museum is returning artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb to Egypt:

"As if Egypt did not have enough stuff from the tomb already!"

another return:

"Egyptian museums must have tons of this sort of material stored away in dust-covered boxes in dank musty storerooms, which never see the light of day".

Tired old arguments trotted out by private collectors to justify their part in the no-questions-asked market in antiquities.

"Candy" - referring to the vandalism in the Egyptian Museum - then muses about "repatriation" of antiquities and darkly warns "what can happen to antiquities in Egypt".

IT REALLY IS A NO-BRAINER!!!!!!! EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES ARE PART OF THE COMMON HERITAGE OF MANKIND! THEY WILL BE BETTER PRESERVED FOR FORTHCOMING GENERATIONS IF THEY ARE DISPERSED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS! SAY NO TO REPATRIATION!!!!!

Hmm. North American collectors have no compunction in proposing something like this (for they have nothing much older than 1776 which they consider to be their "own" cultural heritage, except Mount Rushmore which is older). It is curious to see it being proposed by a Brit (assuming "Candy" is British born of course, he writes "artifacts"). What would be the consequences of applying such a model of action to the British archaeological heritage? So by this argument, the Snettisham Torcs should be scattered in world museums in Shanghai, Benin City, San Francisco and Anchorage, the Battersea shield should go to Brisbane for safety, the Lindow Bog Body to Lima. The Waterloo Bridge helmet would go to Oslo. The Staffordshire hoard would be partitioned out for safety to China, the Philippines, New Zealand, Dominica and Canada's Northwest territories. This is the argument these buffoons would like to apply to other people's heritage, from Egypt, Greece, Italy, central America, and the Near East. Now the British Museum (through its Portable Antiquities Scheme) is a "partner" of metal detecting artefact collectors - so maybe a bunch of them could get together and do a Portable Antiquities Scheme conference on "the perils of repatriation: artefact hunting and export" in the course of which they could call for the dismantling of the BM's collection of British Antiquities and their scattering to the four corners of the earth so British culture can be better represented in globalised "universal" (encyclopaedic) museums thus safeguarding the artefacts should central London ever be flooded, suffer a nuclear strike or be ravaged by anti-government revolt (or an uprising by a disgruntled ethnic minority) and looting. Let us see how far they get with those arguments.

An Odd Type of People's Archaeology Being Promoted Here

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Candice Jarman and his new echo Richard "Sheddy" Lincoln seem to have lost their sense of direction. Candice set up his smear-blog to defend his "friends" the British metal detector doing what they do legally and reporting everything to the PAS. recently though he's been increasingly (and tellingly) coming to the defence of the international no-questions-asked market in dugup antiquities, and now (even further from the original target) the people he calls "underclasses" (sic) protesting and looting museum storerooms in Egypt. And on the way raising the question of the "folly of repatriation". This is the "People's Archaeology" that Britain is spending so much through the PAS fostering - museum raiding? The breaking and taking of artefacts from museums and tombs in Egypt is "is not an attempt to loot but a cry of frustration from the poor and dispossessed!" trying to get back their past - just the same as Candice:

There are too many people today who are telling us what we should do and how we should think - the minority trying to impose their views on the majority. In archaeology, we see this in people like Paul Barford, David Gill and Colin Renfrew. The past belongs to us ALL - not just to archaeologists - this blog is just part of the fight back - to reclaim archaeology for the people!

Candice declares:

I passionately believe that archaeology belongs to the people - to all of us - and not just to archaeologists.

Vignette: Candice on the metal detectorists' crusade to break down the museum store doors, Archaeology for the People !

Hot links and metal detected finds in museums

Steve Taylor replies to my previous post asking him to explain what he and his lawyer mean by the use of the term "copyright":

Hello Mr. Barford

You obviously are a very
knowledgeable person and seem to know everything there is to know about nothing.
Here is some information for you to digest about hot linking
and the theft of other peoples videos for your own blog.

You seem to be a collision course for self destruction
on your private war against UK detectorists.I have now instructed the various Museums I have loaned items too over a number of years, to return them, because
of your personal attracts on the hobby.Many of these museums did not have the funding to purchase these items and were loaned by myself for the public to
view.I have told them why I am now asking for the items to be returned, and I now hope to turn the archaeological community against yourself.

Regard Steve Taylor

Hotlinking, aka inline linking, is the practice of displaying a file such as an
image or flash object on a page that is stored on another site. While it has legitimate uses; often people will hotlink images without the permission of the owner of the site being referenced. Because the object is being called from the server of origin, that account is the one that wears the bandwidth expense for delivering the image for display. In the cases of unauthorized hotlinking, it's not only a copyright issue, but
bandwidth theft. It become a particularly nasty problem for sites with many photographs and original images.

Mr Taylor seems to be unaware what the term "hot linking" actually means. In my Portable Antiquities and heritage Issues blog, within a text discussing a video on Google Videos, I provided a hyperlink to the Google Video site which opened a video on that site. this is NOT "hot linking" by any stretch of the imagination. The term seems reasonably clearly explained in the text Mr Taylor cut-and-pasted to me (I am sure he sought the page owner's permission first given the general 'touchiness' of this milieu about such things). So I am puzzled why he does not understand it.

This is simply the normal time-wasting tactics employed by the detecting milieu when they have nothing substantiative to say.

As for taking "his" objects from public display as a reaction to me discussing a video he made of a detecting holiday in Suffolk on a blog, then really that simply demonstrates the depth of the public responsibility detectorists like Mr Taylor display. What were his motives in loaning them to museums in the first place - to offset criticism by archaeologists, or to make a contribution to public knowledge? I wonder if he will be contacting the landowners on whose land these things were found to explain the reasons why he is now not sharing them with the public? We still have no news whether the finds from Suffolk we saw in the video reached the PAS or local museum.