‘Quidditching’ and the Emergence of New Heritage Identities — Amateur Metal Detecting in Finland

Abstract

This article analyses the historical formation of the metal-detectorist community in Finland, and, at the same time, shows that its homogeneity is somewhat illusory. The study is based on a questionnaire survey of amateur metal detectorists and professional Finnish archaeologists, and their attitudes towards each other. We combine a statistical examination of the structure and attitudes of the amateur detectorist community with an analysis of the discourse used to define and describe the hobby. In Finland, during the last decade, amateurs have become established as a heritage community with their own opinions, internal discussions, and forms of cohesion, and have attempted to become organized into societies. Examining the practice of detecting through the formation of heritage identities has crucial implications for how the challenges posed by metal detectorists are understood. Archaeologists should not just disseminate information on legislation and the scholarly requirements of archaeological material, but instead endeavour to make cultural heritage more broadly meaningful for a wider audience.

Keywords:

• archaeological community
• cultural heritage
• identity
• metal detectorists
• statistical survey

Notes on contributors

Dr Visa Immonen is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and an Adjunct Professor in Archaeology at the University of Turku. In addition to medieval archaeology, his work focuses on the history of cultural heritage management, and cultural heritage as a field of identity politics.

Joonas Kinnunen is a doctoral student at the Department of Archaeology, University of Turku, Finland. He is specializing in the use of statistical methods and social network analysis in archaeology, and is currently studying the social networks and development of Baltic overseas trade during the Hanseatic era.

Notes

1 Nighthawking (Thomas, 2009: 17) is a term referring to illegal metal detecting, usually on protected sites. The perpetrators know the illicit nature of their actions and thus ‘strike’ at night to avoid being caught. Accordingly, those who participate on illegal activities are called ‘nighthawkers’.

2 This is a suitable sample size for a population of 1400 with a 95% confidence level and 6.06% margin of error. The margin of error usually falls between 4% and 8% and decreases respectively if the sample represents a smaller population.

3 With the mean of 3.63 and standard deviation of 1.11 on a scale of 1–5, where 1 is never, and 5 is weekly. See Figure 3.

4 The boxplot shows the median (thick line), the interquartile range (the box), which represents the area where 50% of the answers are (the larger the box, the more dispersed the answers are), the highest and lowest values (the whiskers) where the datum is within 1.5 of the interquartile range, and outliers (dots).

5 With a significance level of 0.05. The Brown-Forsythe test showed no significant difference between means. The One-way ANOVA test showed homogeneity in variance for each question except for the question ‘How often do you revisit a site where nothing has been found previously?’. For this, the Mann-Whitney U test with Bonferroni's correction was applied, and Tukey's HSD test for the others.