The Complexities of Metal Detecting Policy and Practice: A Response to Samuel Hardy, ‘Quantitative Analysis of Open-Source Data on Metal Detecting for Cultural Property’ (Cogent Social Sciences 3, 2017) (original) (raw)
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In a recent study, Samuel A. Hardy (2017) has attempted a wide-ranging comparison of the efficacy of different kinds of regulating metal detecting. Based on a comparison of 12 countries with partially different regulatory regimes, some more liberal, others more restrictive, he arrives at the tentative conclusion that liberal regulatory approaches are less effective than restrictive ones in reducing damage to archaeological evidence. According to the results of his study, the regulatory systems in England and Wales, and the USA, work particularly badly in preventing archaeological damage. In this paper, I demonstrate that his study is seriously methodically flawed, and thus cannot be considered to be the empirical study it pretends to be. As I show, while Hardy uses a reasonably consistent methodology to estimate the size of the metal detecting communities in 10 of the countries he examines, by slightly deflating the membership figures of the respectively largest online metal detecting discussion board or Facebook group in each of them, he deviates massively from this for England and Wales, and the USA. Where these two countries are concerned, while having comparable data of the same quality as for all others, he estimates the size of the respective metal detecting communities based on the vastly inflated numbers of the largest metal detecting association in one, and a miscalculation based on uncorroborated sales figures for metal detectors, second hand information gathered from an online journal article, in the other. I thus argue that Hardy's (2017) study, its results, and the conclusions he draws from them, sadly must be discarded. Rather, I argue that his data, if not manipulated, shows that neither more liberal nor more restrictive regulation of metal detecting is more efficient than the other in reducing archaeological damage.
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