Thursday 29 November 2012

Dead Grandpa and the Recycling of metal Detector Finds

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If any seeding was going on, where would one get the artefacts? I discussed a video here a few months ago (it has since been removed) of a dealer's 'rummage bin', several hundred fragmented metal artefacts. I have heard a report of a dealer in Norfolk a decade or more ago who had a garage, and on the floor were rows of polythene fertiliser bags full of segregated artefacts, buckles in one, strapends in another etc. He may be dead now, perhaps, and his bagloads of finds dumped on the market. Another source of course are the dead granddads - they have a shed full of metal detected stuff which has to be got rid of. Some of it will end up in a skip with all the old flowerpots, lawnmower spare parts and jamjars in the garden shed. Or the house clearer might suggest
"fifty p each for those thin silver coins, 25p for the ones cut in half, a hundred quid for all those old bits of metal in the boxes in the shed, hundred and fifty if you throw in those two metal detectors too". 
The clueless bereaved granddaughter who'd taken the week off work to clear out Gramps' old stuff may well agree, eager to get the property on the market, and a dealer somewhere is laughing. Too bad about Gramps, whose largely unfinished book on the "History of Piddling-Under-Gryme and the Surrounding Area" ended up in the skip. But " his" (not really) finds carry on giving pleasure. 

Then the unsuspecting FLO is happy when some nice hammereds turn up on a rally. The finder is over the moon, the landowner got a share of the ticket money, the PAS database gets bigger, the PAS looks better, archaeologists have more pictures of medieval coins to look at and dots on their distribution maps. It's what the PAS calls a win-win situation. Everybody is a winner?

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