Editorial

From Thomas Browne's Urne-Burial to the most recent series of BBC Four's Detectorists, the practice of unearthing archaeological treasures has held an enduring fascination across the centuries. Perhaps the appeal is rooted in the tantalizing thoughts of a link to a lost world submerged just beneath our feet, or, as Browne (2005: 1) puts it: ‘The treasures of time lie high, In Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables’. While the dreams of these treasures may be ubiquitous, the means of recovering such finds are highly contested.

Since the popularization of the metal detector in the 1960s, the relationship between amateur and professional archaeologists in the UK has often been fraught, with the Stop taking our Past! campaign, launched in 1979, and the responses to this from the Detectorist Information Group (Thomas, 2012). Through a process of on-going dialogue, relationships between these opposing groups have been repaired and strengthened, culminating in the introduction of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) in 1997. This has produced a partnership in which amateur archaeologists have contributed vital work to help uncover the archaeological patrimony, while professionals have benefited from the contextual information accrued from accurate finds recording. This is not to belie the continual problems of ‘Nighthawking’ (cf. Milmo, 2015; Oxford Archaeology, 2009) throughout the country, but that each year seems to bring a record number of reported finds for PAS is an encouraging sign of the power of outreach and compromise (Kennedy, 2016).

However, archaeological looting remains a significant problem in a range of contexts around the globe. While PAS is an example of the productive way that technology (i.e. the internet) can engineer solutions, it can also be problematic in terms of creating platforms for illicit detectorists and black market sales (e.g. Chippindale & Gill, 2001). There are a multiplicity of circumstances in which illicit detectorist activity takes place and differing approaches to combating this problem; even in Europe the nuances of archaeological legislation can vary significantly in neighbouring territories and require bespoke responses (cf. Deckers, et al., 2016). It is, therefore, increasingly important that work continues to be done to understand the metal-detecting community – the desires, circumstances, and motivations of those who participate in this activity – to better craft collaborative solutions that help preserve archaeological remains.

With this in mind, Public Archaeology is delighted to present a range of papers offering innovative approaches to the subject, with studies addressing the situation from the UK, Finland, and the wider Eastern European context. The analyses here are characterized by attempts to better understand the sociological and methodological processes of metal detecting, and in so doing offer valuable insights that can be taken forward when addressing the scale and scope of the problem, both in these specific instances, and also in broader contexts.