Easylife wrote: ↑Thu Jul 30, 2026 11:47 pm
Well PAS recording is voluntary, so the individuals choice. Technically finds are only supposed to be recorded with the landowners permission, but PAS never seem bothered about that at all.
No doubt there are various reasons to record or not record certain finds, whether now or at a later date, but there is no time limit so the option to is always there.
The permission from landowner was always an issue when the NCMD were dealing with the early PAS and as you say the PAS management took no notice. They got around this little awkward fact by saying that when a finder recorded a find to the PAS they assumed they had the landowners permission to do so. When pushed a bit more they adopted the approach that the NCMD were just being awkward....mmmm
It remains voluntary to record finds only from some land after the PAS and their archaeological helpers got the administrators of the Agri - environment schemes ( Natural England ) to make it compulsory to record "
All Finds" their words not mine found on agreement land. To reinforce this they added a requirement to adhere to the Code of Practice For Responsible Metal Detecting hence making that voluntary Code compulsory. So neither the finder or more importantly the landowner has any control of finds recording and by default what it is used for.
To pick up on concerns raised by another poster, PAS data is used to feed into the information to assess what parts of a landholding go into an agreement with archaeological strictures attached such as no metal detecting. Naturally the PAS info is used in conjunction with other archaeological data from the HER's as an example to have a field labelled as an archaeological site however once findspot information is given to the PAS there is no control as to how it is used so it is there in the records forever. There are good reasons such as being used to respond to planning applications, but there are also downsides to recording.
FLO's will often record seemingly uninteresting partifacts or simply just pick the best to record so this adds bias to the archaeological record. What i have noticed over the last few years concerns that after my offerings were cherry picked for recording, the FLO has taken a record of where the reject items were found. Now at first i was a bit puzzled by this approach but in reality it is just simply gathering information of which areas are being detected which is a basic information gathering ploy to see how extensive detecting is and so on for future use.
....... It was never, ever, in a million years set up for the benefit of detectorists.
