Abstract
Metal detecting is a unique way of experiencing the historic landscape, allowing many amateurs to access heritage hands-on in a way that would otherwise be impossible, locating and unearthing their own fragment of the archaeological record. With a conservative estimate of 15,000 people currently detecting in the UK, and 1,122,998 objects recorded to date (October 2015) on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database since its inception in 1997, England’s historic places are being walked, searched and mapped by a significantly-sized population whose enthusiasm would be better off integrated into heritage programming, than rebuffed by it and misdirected elsewhere. Achieving this would not only have potential financial benefits for the sector, where cuts are prevalent, but also see the kind of community engagement that is regularly discussed but not often arrived at. Research by the author has shown that the majority of metal detectorists operating in the UK are members of clubs or societies with a local focus; 86% of detectorists (club members, or independent) report that they detect close to home. With a strong attachment to their home area and a good understanding of local history, the conscientious amongst them have been searching the same area for decades, building up a unique resource of artefactual and spatial data that informs a complex milieu of perception. These detectorists generate a unique attachment to the landscape on which they search – producing links between their own experienced version of the landscape and their perceived version of how it was experienced in the past, thus creating a very particular type of place-making. This paper begins by setting out the phenomenological method and the implications of this for studying the perception of landscape, before using qualitative and quantitative data from the author’s research into the attitudes of metal detectorists to consider what this means for metal detecting within a perceived landscape and, by association, how heritage professionals might best approach the issue.
Highlights
Metal detecting in England and Wales is practiced by a long-established community whose number is difficult to accurately gauge
Winkley: The Phenomenology of Metal Detecting of object; this figure, reflects an almost stasis from ten years ago, when Bland (2005) proposed the detecting population was around 10,000. In her 2009 thesis, Thomas (2009: 258) used her data on metal detecting clubs and membership therein to arrive at a result of 16,777 which was rounded down to 14,000. This figure is supported by the author, who would err on the side of caution and estimate that the community probably numbers somewhere between Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS)’s estimates of 10,000 and the National Council for Metal Detecting (NCMD)’s 20,000 (Gray 2011)
The purpose of this paper was to demonstrate that the metal detecting experience is incontrovertibly bound up in landscape – an a rtefact findspot is a special place, and 70 per cent of detectorists reported feeling attached to the areas where they detect regularly
Summary
Metal detecting in England and Wales is practiced by a long-established community whose number is difficult to accurately gauge. Ever since the hobby first became commercialised in the UK when affordable machines became available for the general public around 1969, there have been strong concerns from the heritage sector about the potential damage to the archaeological record and the possible irrevocable loss of associated information (Fletcher 1978; Green & Gregory 1978; Thomas 2009) These concerns were voiced most clearly at the peak of a public anti-detecting backlash which occurred at the end of the 1970s and was typified by the notorious Stop Taking Our Past, or STOP campaign: an initiative comprising 32 member associations including the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) and the Museums Association among others (Addyman 2008). Whilst the CBA-published (1980) campaign leaflet labelled detectorists as ‘thoughtless’, ‘unscrupulous [. . .] pirates’ with a sole aim to ‘plunder [the]
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