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A Right Jersey Royal Mess! (Why Shouldn’t Archaeologists Sell Valuable Finds?) – WB 28th Jan 2022
95 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to Watching Brief. As the name implies, each week Marc (Mr Soup) & Andy Brockman of the Pipeline (Where history is tomorrow's news) cast an eye over news stories, topical media and entertainment and discuss and debate what they find.
#archaeologynews #thepipeline #archaeosoup
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/archaeosoup
***
0:00 Introduction
3:18 Climate Change & UK Archaeology
7:49 Stoke Museums to Cut Curators!
18:27 Le Câtillon II Coin Hoard, Jersey
27:27 Negotiating a Price!
41:30 Effect on Local Museums
42:58 Shouldn’t We Also Sell Stuff?
1:00:27 How Can We Bring People ‘In’?
1:04:40 Why Don’t We Just Buy Archaeology?
1:06:02 Conclusions
***
Link of the Week:
Climate Change threatening Buried UK Treasures:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60091485
***
Links:
Stoke ditches curators for museums to become film locations:
Statement: Stoke-on-Trent Museums:
https://www.stoke.gov.uk/news/article/994/statement_-_stoke-on-trent_museums
How to respond to the consultation
The full budget proposals are at: www.stoke.gov.uk/budget2022
People can give their views in the following ways:
[email protected], twitter.com/sotcitycouncil
facebook.com/sotcitycouncil
Or write to us at Budget 2022, Civic Centre, Glebe Street, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 1HH.
***
Fears Jersey Award Could Lead to Inflated Valuations Under Treasures Act:
Jersey: Did we just invent “Casino Metal Detecting”? :
https://player.whooshkaa.com/episode/947418
Experts in the UK tasked with valuing the record-breaking 2,000 year old Le Câtillon Coin Hoard… :
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/insight-how-coin-hoard-payment-was-decided/
Ministers ‘frustrated’ by coin hoard payment delay:
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/ministers-frustrated-coin-hoard-payment-delay/
Gov refuses to confirm payment to Coin Hoard finders:
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/gov-refuses-confirm-coin-hoard-payment/
Valuation battles frustrates coin hoard sale:
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/more-one-valuation-coin-hoard/
Gov overrules Jersey Heritage and top official with £4.25m coin hoard fee:
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/concerns-raised-after-government-agrees-425m-coin-hoard/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Soupcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Soupcast, coming to you from Archaeosoup Towers. By popular demand, we're taking selected videos from the Archaeosoup back catalogue and bringing them to you as convenient podcasts. As the name implies, with Archaeosoup you get a bit of everything thrown into the pot. Archaeology, discussion, humour and debate. You can find out more at archaeosoup.com. So sit back, relax and enjoy our hearty helping of Archaeosoup.
Catch Up and Personal Updates
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Watching Brief for the week of the 24th of January 2022. I am joined as ever by my
00:00:49
Speaker
Well, you know, freshly haircut and slightly gone through the ringer co-host, Mr Andy Brockman. It's been... It's been about, you know, 10 to 12 days since we've really had a good sense of when we might be able to record. Some stuff has been happening with you, some stuff has been happening here literally actually outside the house here at Arceo Soup Towers. But how is everything at House Brockman, Mr Andy? Mr Andy, Mr Brockman.
00:01:17
Speaker
No, we're fine. Thank you.
External Factors Affecting Recording
00:01:20
Speaker
We had a family agree that my partner's mother died sadly last week, so it did rather throw things, but we're well and thank you. We're back to normal now, more or less. Excellent, excellent. As normal as normal as either of us can be, really, I suppose.
00:01:36
Speaker
You might say that. I couldn't possibly comment, as I always say. For my part, we've had gas works outside for going on six weeks now, I think. Getting very close to six weeks in one form or another. And literally yesterday, I couldn't hear myself think. So it's been interesting. Plus, as well, I've had an ongoing cold.
00:02:04
Speaker
Sabotaging me here and there anyway, regardless, regardless of whatever else is happening in life.
Climate Change and Archaeology
00:02:10
Speaker
I'm watching Brief It Does. I'm being ambushed by a piece of cake. Hang on, hang on. Go back, down, down, down, down, down. Stay. Sorry about that.
00:02:26
Speaker
It's OK, it's OK. I was tempted to bring some whisky to our work event today, but I'm having to make do with it with a take away coffee instead. Don't worry. If you look over my shoulder here, you'll see that I've fully prepared for a work event. Excellent. That's really good.
00:02:45
Speaker
I've sent out all the invitations, but I've asked people to delete the emails in the WhatsApp chat. Excellent. Well, that's very sensible. But also that's very above, all above board. All above board. There's nothing at school for Metropolitan Police to investigate.
00:03:03
Speaker
Dear reader, dear listener, wonderful viewer, please just look at what's happening in the UK at the moment. You'll get some sense of what we're riveting on about. But anyway, regardless of whether or not, for example, our country's leaders are on the lash. We have a watching brief and it is continuing. And this week we have
00:03:27
Speaker
Well, I tease this question, the biggest question we're asking this week, a few days ago, in the form of asking, should archaeologists just bite the bullet, as it were, and start selling material that we recover in archaeological sites in order to fund our research? But before we get into that, we're starting off with the link of the week. And we've gone with a news story from BBC News, headlined Climate Change Threatening Buried UK Treasures.
00:03:56
Speaker
And this is interesting in the context of, I believe, was it last summer, possibly even the summer before as well, there were stories about the heat revealing, you know, hidden towns and ditches and other potential archaeological sites where you could basically see crop marks, the relative humidity of the archaeology and the soil around it was different to each other, and therefore the
00:04:21
Speaker
the heat was upping the ability to see archaeology. But in this instance, what we have, and this is actually at Vindolanda, just up the road from me, is heat affecting what we call anoxic archaeology. So the fact that this archaeology is sealed in an oxygen-less waterlogged environment is the reason that, for example, we have leather shoes and documents, for example, from the Roman world, most famously at Vindolanda.
00:04:48
Speaker
surviving. And so, I mean, this is one of many stories along these lines. There's lots of stories at the moment, aren't there, about glacier melt, for example, yielding ancient Norse artifacts and prehistoric material. This is happening here in the UK right now. And do you think
00:05:09
Speaker
Is it no longer controversial to actually say that climate change is likely to be an element here? For the last 10 years, we've had various people saying, you can't take one weather event and map that onto a whole climate shift or climate change. But do you think this is now a relatively uncontroversial headline to have in the BBC?
00:05:30
Speaker
I'm considering the BBC's record in discussing what was called climate change, what's now normally termed actually the climate emergency. At one stage, the BBC had a reputation for always wanting to balance somebody who was promoting the idea of human-influenced
00:05:54
Speaker
climate change with somebody who was saying it was nonsense. Most famously the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson who has been heavily involved in what again many people would say is climate change denial or climate emergency denial.
00:06:10
Speaker
I think that the United Nations report last year was a game changer. There you had the world's leading international representative body saying basically this is a thing and this is what's happening and this is what's happening all over the world.
00:06:26
Speaker
And coupled with that is the kind of reporting that you've just alluded to, even just in the archaeological world, of snow and glacier melt in pretty much all of the world's major mountain ranges. There was a recently report about
00:06:46
Speaker
in the Himalayas, for instance. We've heard reports from the Swiss and Italian Alps. You alluded to the Norse material and other European Iron Age material and earlier even that's turned up in places like the mountains of Norway. So I think we're going to see more and more of this.
00:07:10
Speaker
bodies like historic England are issuing reports predicting what might happen and how, what mitigation strategies that heritage bodies and owners of heritage properties and so on can take. This is one of those moments I think when evidence that archaeologists record absolutely intersect with what's happening in the world of politics and science and
00:07:39
Speaker
I think we're linking to Justin Rollat's report for the BBC. And I think it's significant that, you know, a leading BBC science journalist is writing up a report like that, which goes across BBC platforms. We're going to see more of the same, I think, sadly. Yeah.
00:08:02
Speaker
I think so and on the one hand it is a boon for data and data gathering. These headlines are often pitched as you know wondrous things emerging from the ice but it also is happening for a reason.
Redundancy of Museum Staff in Stoke-on-Trent
00:08:17
Speaker
The second thing that we wanted to pick up on before we get into the meat, as it were, or even the lovely vegetarian haggis, in fact, recently we had Burn's Night here, of the story of this episode this week. I'll apologise to a Scottish viewer who might think that the concept of a vegetarian haggis is actually something that has been invented by the Sassnacht as a national view.
00:08:41
Speaker
No, no, not at all. It's a Scottish company and actually most of my Scottish friends think it's lovely. They're lovely. They are lovely. You should try it. Try it. Give it a go. We've more than tried it. We actually had one for our celebration here. My Scottish blood, if there's any, is incredibly diluted, but Rachel McPartner's maternal family are Scottish. So we feel we can do it without cultural appropriation.
00:09:11
Speaker
Fair enough. At least you're willing to try. An awful lot of people, especially in the south of England, hear the word haggis and bulk. But then again, they're happy to eat a blood sausage, namely a black blood egg. Anyway, before we
00:09:26
Speaker
get into the haggis of this week's episode. We also just wanted to point out the story that came out of Stoke on Trent. This is in artindustry.co.uk. Stoke ditches curators for museums to become film locations. I'll quickly just read the opening of that story. Stoke on Trent City Council is making its ceramics curators in two museums
00:09:50
Speaker
redundant in order to turn the venues into film locations. Curators and management staff at the Gladstone Museum, with its famously recognizable brick bottle kilns, where Channel 4's popular The Great Pottery Throwdown is filmed, and the Pottery Museum and Art Gallery have been told that all of their posts are to be deleted.
00:10:10
Speaker
deleted, very delete, as the council seeks to cut £7.1 million from its annual budget. Both were scheduled for to reopen in January, on January the 18th after a Christmas closure, lengthened by the Omicron Covid crisis. So not a great New Year's present for those curators. This was a story that was written on the 7th of January, but it's been in the air really throughout the month.
00:10:35
Speaker
Is it cut and dry? Is it as simple as that? I'm not sure that the council necessarily would agree. No. Shortly after that story came out, the proverbial hit the fan, certainly in the ceramics world. The clay hit the fan. The clay hit the wheel. Yes. In that Stoke-on-Trent is
00:11:00
Speaker
One of its alternate names is the potteries. It is world famous for the great pottery companies that produce a pioneer mass production of pottery in the 18th, 19th century.
00:11:14
Speaker
The Stoke Museums in particular, the Gladster Museum and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery hold certainly nationally, probably internationally important collections of ceramics. And there is a link directly with the manufacturing of those ceramics.
00:11:34
Speaker
And they have been expertly curated by museum staff. And part of the issue here is that as part of cost cutting effectively, Stoke contract council have said that they're going to close the museums for part of the year. They're going to redesign the staffing of the museums, which includes, according to the current proposal, sacking all the specialist ceramics curators.
00:12:04
Speaker
And that's the thing that's really alarmed the ceramics world. This is internationally important, not just because we find it interesting, but because actually this area pioneered many new ceramic techniques. They imported ideas and glazing and decoration techniques from around the world.
00:12:24
Speaker
they represent not only a technological development in history but also actually a very much a social history as well, the function of ceramics over the past few hundred years, the tie-in between ceramics and social movements and things like a protest, for example, against the use of sugar or linked with anti-slavery protests, this kind of thing,
00:12:49
Speaker
Well, people will be familiar with the Wedgwood family who were a leading family in the pottery. You know, it's an internationally famous brand still. And two things I just alluded to there. Obviously, the famous sort of neoclassical designs that Wedgwood are famous for, but also their involvement in social movements and the fact that Charles Darwin was a member of the family as well.
00:13:18
Speaker
Oh really, really interesting, okay. Yeah, his famous Josiah Wedgwood was his uncle. Right, okay. Well, and just briefly then, is this partly part of the issue here is that because we are still so familiar with pottery in our day-to-day lives, if I wasn't drinking out of that cup today, I'd be drinking out of one of the ceramic mugs from the kitchen and it's... Yeah, like the one that I have here, I'm about to take a sip from now.
00:13:47
Speaker
precisely, yeah, these are day to day items. I mean, frankly, even the technology that forms our toilets, for example, you know, the fact that we're so familiar with this stuff, and it's so, in many ways, mundane, may well lead to the notion that somehow a museum of pottery...
00:14:06
Speaker
I once spent a morning in Southwark excavating an armored shank toilet pan from the 1950s that was in a set of houses that had just been demolished on a development site. Now that's how familiar this stuff is as well and as well as all the other the mass produced transfer printed blue and white and so on which people may be familiar with which crops up on pretty much every archaeological site in the country. I found something in the garden that they did actually.
00:14:35
Speaker
Exactly. And the thing is, you know, it's not just, you know, it's the creativity, it's the process, it's the product, but it's also the people that made it, you know, they pioneered mass production of these things, they pioneered the mass distribution through the canals. And so it's absolutely integral to what we usually call the industrial revolution.
00:15:01
Speaker
But also, as you say, the social element, the idea of having afternoon tea, the tea set that came about through the mass production of pottery in places like Stoke-on-Trent. That's why it's important. And also, in that sense, the growing forms of a better term trickle down effect. It went from being sort of like a bone china aristocratic type thing to being something where people could afford a best set of ceramics. Exactly. When a couple married, one of the wedding presents will be a tea set.
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Tea service. There's another aspect to this story, which is that the Charlton Institute for Archaeologists, SIFA, wrote a letter to Stoke-on-Trent City Council this week asking them to step back from the funding cuts and staffing cuts.
00:15:44
Speaker
and part of their rationale as well as the talking about ceramics was they wanted assurances about the elements of the Staffordshire Hall that are on display in Stoke-on-Trent as well. Obviously Stoke-on, it's a flagship local find and again something that's internationally important. Now you alluded to the local council not agreeing, in fact very shortly after the story broke, Councillor Abbie-Brown who's the leader of Stoke-on-Trent City Council issued a press release and
00:16:14
Speaker
When you look at a press release, you see the bits that's in bold type, which is the line to take, is the line that they want the media to pick up. And right at the top of the, in quote, in bold, it's simply not true that Gladstone Museum and Pottery's Museum and Art Gallery are closing, nor that staff have been sacked. Now, that is misdirection, because that's not what happened. Well, and to be fair, she said, nor that all staff have been sacked.
00:16:41
Speaker
Yes. Because that's not what people were accusing them of. It's a proposal. So that's sort of getting their retaliation in first. It's bought in the trades called a pre-buddle.
00:17:03
Speaker
And in fact, if you go through the rest of quite a long press release, in fact, I think a lot of people would say basically it's a word salad. Yes. It's a word salad of saying how wonderful Sloke is and how wonderful their collections are and how they of course they're going to look after them in an appropriate way. None of it steps back from any of the proposals in the budget documents for the coming year 2022, 2023.
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah. And that includes the sacking of the expert curators and so on. So I think in the end, the issue without consultation at the moment, if people who are watching this want to comment, the links are there. And it's a story that will run. And I think it's a story we'll probably see elsewhere as well. But basically,
00:17:54
Speaker
You have a local authority that through an accident of history is in charge of an internationally important collection. But it's not funded to do that.
00:18:06
Speaker
And I think down the line that people will be pressing for perhaps more adequate funding, possibly even central funding of major museums like this. People have made the point that, for example, Liverpool museums are funded centrally by the government, not by the local authority, primarily.
Jersey Hoard Valuation Issues
00:18:28
Speaker
and you have branches of example Imperial War Museum North, so for example you could see potentially a Victoria and Albert Museum ceramics branch in Stoke-on-Trent, which would remove the pain from the local authority in having to support something that is obviously expensive as well as being important.
00:18:49
Speaker
Anyway, given that those are our opening things to keep an eye on, now we move on to the haggis. The veggie haggis or not, as it may well be, of this week's episode.
00:19:03
Speaker
and the tatty's and neeps because it's a full meal of a story rather than just a snack. Well indeed although in in this household we have Brussels sprouts and gravy on there as well which is somewhat controversial. Which I was going to say well that again is entirely good fitting to a somewhat controversial story so yeah okay well yeah let's crack home with the main course. So sit down, bib on,
00:19:27
Speaker
Cut the re-out. This story has the headline in the pipeline that you wrote. Fears Jersey Award could lead to inflated valuations under Treasure Act. This is an interesting one because
00:19:44
Speaker
It touches on a broader story that we've touched on I think not that long ago actually in Watching Brief, where often treasure enthusiasts, people who go out with metal detectors and who find treasure in what we want it valued in order to benefit from their discoveries militarily.
00:20:00
Speaker
will accuse the Treasury Evaluation Committee of undervaluing their discoveries, their hordes, their artefacts, because apparently for some reason they make money out of this. It's unclear, but in the commentary and in the discussions that happen around this stuff, often that's the accusation.
00:20:20
Speaker
But this is an interesting example here, though, because Jersey is connected to, as it were, London, to Britain, but also it has its own governance. Jersey, for people who aren't familiar, is an island just off the west coast of France. And if you're not familiar with the northern European map, you may well think it even looks like it should belong, possibly, to France. But it doesn't. It's actually its own entity. It's what's called a ballet wick.
00:20:47
Speaker
So it has historical connections to Britain, it has legal customs and cultural customs that are very much British in that sense, but it also has its own rules and regulations. And so when these questions arose on Jersey, an interesting case study unfolded.
00:21:05
Speaker
The other thing to know about Jersey is that as its economy is currently configured, there are three strands to it. One is agriculture, and people might be familiar with Jersey cows and Jersey cream and that kind of thing, and tomatoes and flowers.
00:21:20
Speaker
and potatoes also and potatoes also tourism which again is in the summer certainly and certainly pre-covid was a one of the main mainstays of the jersey economy but the big thing that jersey is famous for is as a an offshore financial center
00:21:40
Speaker
Many, many companies are registered on Jersey because of its somewhat kindly less stringent financial regulation than other parts of the world. Certainly mainland Britain, particularly its taxation system. So, money
00:22:05
Speaker
The money and the value of financial products and so on is something that people on, certainly the Jersey government is very familiar with. So that's the foundation.
00:22:18
Speaker
So in a sense that you have a medieval, the vestige of the Orgeman empire in France coming up against modern high finance. And what happened basically with Le Côtillon to Hoard, which is what this story is about,
00:22:40
Speaker
In the early 1960s, on a farm in Jersey, a hoard of pre-Roman Iron Age material, precious metals, coins, other objects, was discovered.
00:22:53
Speaker
two metal detectorists, Richard Miles and Reg Mead, began to detect on the farm with the permission of the landowner. They were expecting to find what they thought was the rest of the hoard. It had the hallmarks of being part of a larger deposit. And in the early summer of 2012, they did find a massive hoard.
00:23:16
Speaker
It subsequently came out at something like 70,000 coins, which is the largest ever collection of Celtic coins found in one place. The largest collection of talks, that's Celtic net rings, that have been found in Europe. But they also did the right thing. They contacted Jersey Heritage,
00:23:41
Speaker
the equivalent of English heritage on Jersey, they put a team of archaeologists in, the find was block lifted to be excavated in the lab and in the lab they found that there were, for example, a fabric bag that contained gold and silver jewellery and ingots of precious metals. They also found environmental materials, so you know the millipedes, the centipedes, the pollen and the leaves and so on, so they were able to do a full archaeological analysis of the find.
00:24:06
Speaker
So far, so good. That's how it should be. That's how, you know, archaeologists often in Britain scream that hordes should be excavated in that way. So, so far, so by the book, except the book on Jersey is very different to the book in England, because there is no equivalent of the Treasure Act 1996 on Jersey and the process around the Treasure Act 1996, which
00:24:36
Speaker
basically adjudicates treasure finds and allocates a value to them which rewards the finder for being honest and declaring it and the landowner on whose land the material is found and it's a sort of, it's something we, you know, archaeologists accept it because it means that the material can then be retained in a museum rather than going to a private collection and it, you know, it can be bought for the nation
00:25:03
Speaker
because it's that important and so on and so on. So although traditionally, certainly in the UK, archaeology doesn't allow you to take a financial reward from things that you find.
00:25:15
Speaker
the Treasure Act accepts that members of the public don't have the same ethical system and that the legal system allows for ownership and therefore you have to effectively buy the material from the state. It's also worthwhile saying that it comes very specifically in Britain in the context of people in our society who own huge swathes of land on this island. So not being too cynical, but it also ensures that the people who own land
00:25:44
Speaker
Get to benefit from anything that's found on their land so that's one of the reasons why the structure exists is is it. It's not only a means to benefit as a metal detector is for example or someone who finds this material but also it ensures that the legal structure.
00:26:03
Speaker
Frankly, it's also about access to land because landowners don't want undocumented people running across their land with metal detectorists. They want to have that direct connection. So anyway, that's a slate of sites. Go ahead. Okay. So when the find turned up, the government of Jersey and the finders had to work out what to do about it. And obviously the interested parties like Jersey Heritage.
00:26:28
Speaker
As things stand on the island of Jersey, which has, as you said, has its own legal jurisdiction, there is no equivalent of the Treasure Act 1996. What there was is a legal framework based on the medieval law of the Treasure Trove.
00:26:44
Speaker
which was abolished in England in 1996 by the Treasure Act because it was seen not fit for purpose. And what Treasure Trove meant was that, for example, if something had been buried without the intention to be recovered, and the most famous example is the Sutton Hoo treasure, it went to the landowner.
00:27:02
Speaker
And you can see the problem here that there will be nothing to stop the landowner selling it off. We were lucky with Sutton Hoo that Mrs. Pretty decided to donate the entire find to the British Museum. She didn't have to do that. Legally, the coroner had said it was hers, under treasure trove. So you can see the problem.
00:27:26
Speaker
The government of Jersey agreed with miles and me and the landowner was that they would observe the spirit and the process of the Treasury Act 1996 which meant that the find will be valued by the Treasure Valuation Committee.
00:27:42
Speaker
And once the valuation is accepted, it will be split between the landowner and the finders, and the state will be able to take on the find and make it part of its tourist offer. Now, by this time, the lab work was being paid for, the analysis was being paid, paid for, the conservation was being paid for. And by the end of the TVC's valuation period, the state was in for something like three-quarters of a million pounds.
00:28:11
Speaker
So in that sense the Jersey government had invested in this now. They'd invested exactly through Jersey Heritage. They spent a lot of money on making this
00:28:22
Speaker
find bringing it up to a proper conservation standard and ready to be displayed or on the way to being displayed. The TBC Met, which is based on the British Museum, it's facilitated by the British Museum and the portable anti-production scheme, but it's not part of the portable anti-production scheme.
00:28:42
Speaker
It's a government body. And it's made up of archaeologists, experts in cultural material, based on particular experts with expertise in certain things. They need a specialist report. And there are also representatives of finders, and there are representatives of the commercial antiquities world. And I think, again, we have to remember in this that although archaeologists would often frown on it,
00:29:09
Speaker
there is often great expertise in particular kinds of antiquity in the commercial auction world. You have expert people writing very often very strong reports on particular objects, finds, whatever that are coming up in an auction catalogue. Basically cut to the chase, the TBC
00:29:36
Speaker
agreed to evaluation having been approached by Jersey.
00:29:43
Speaker
The process was somewhat drawn out because initially they didn't know how many coins there were, they didn't know what they were, they didn't know whether there were any particularly rare ones, tribes that hadn't been recognized as minting coins before or whatever. But in the end, the TBC, in 2017, the TBC suggested the government of Jersey settle on the basis of evaluation of just under two million pounds.
00:30:13
Speaker
that would be to acquire the hoard for the state. And that was submitted in January 2018.
00:30:25
Speaker
Okay, so this is six years after the discovery in 2012. Absolutely. As you can see now, by this time, again, there are suggestions, for example, the findings were getting quite anxious about the length of time this was all taking, and so on and so on and so on. Anyway, because they had agreed to follow the process of the Treasury Act, even though it had no legal basis in Jersey,
00:30:51
Speaker
they were able to quote paragraph 67 of the Code of Practice that pertains in England, whereby interested parties, museum, landowner, finder, can question and submit their own evidence of valuation to the TBC.
00:31:12
Speaker
So what they did was go to Chris Rudd Limited, which is an English dealer in Celtic coins. They style themselves as the only antiquities firm that deals only in Celtic coins. It was started by a guy called Chris Rudd, who's an expert on the subject, who's now semi-retired. He's getting on in years. And it's currently run by a woman called Elizabeth Cotton.
00:31:36
Speaker
Okay. And they came back with a valuation, not of just under 2 million pounds, but a valuation of something just of just over 6 million pounds, yeah, three times as much.
00:31:51
Speaker
Well, you've written here in the article £6,094,775. Just shy of £6.1, I suppose, isn't it? That's right. And with that valuation came suggestions that, for example, the TVC had skimped on the job, that their initial report was very short, or that they finally had expert reports mounting up to 60 pages.
00:32:18
Speaker
The finders submitted a report from Rudds that ran to 800 pages, including expert contributions. It was almost as though they were trying to bring an overwhelming weight of fire down on the Jersey government to increase the valuation. The Jersey government
00:32:45
Speaker
basically said, at this point, the TVC stood by its original valuation.
00:32:56
Speaker
But they also recommended to the receiver general, who's the chief legal officer involved on Jersey, that they commissioned a further valuation. And this time, they went to France, they went to a company called CGB numismatics in Paris. They came back with a valuation that matched ruts, just over 6 million.
00:33:20
Speaker
but they did it on the basis that the hoarder split up into auction lots. Now we don't know why they did that because the basis of the valuation, certainly from the TVC, is that the hoard is kept together because otherwise it loses its archaeological and cultural value.
00:33:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And in that sense, the hoard represents not so much a discrete, because arguably it's been found in multiple parts, but it certainly represents a trackable context. It's a story that binds these artifacts together, and not least, for example, in terms of the environmental finds that were found in the block of soil. And to separate them reduces that from a story more further down, I suppose, the ladder towards intrinsic value, or maybe artistic value as well.
00:34:06
Speaker
But nonetheless, it was the same valuation, regardless of how they, they, they recommended selling it. It came to just, let's explain one. That's right. There was clearly some negotiation went on, some turning and throwing went on. And in January 2020, the receiver general decided to sort of split the difference and make an offer of 4.25 million. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:32
Speaker
Um, now that came across the desk of language. Can I just say that number out loud? Four, 4,250,000. So 4.25. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. But anyway, go ahead. It's not, it's, it's, it's not a bad day's work. No. Um,
00:34:52
Speaker
Look, this came across the desk of Geico Richard Corrigan, who's the Director General of the Economy, including cultural arts and heritage on Jersey. He's a senior civil servant, like a sort of senior civil servant at the UK Treasury. Yeah. And he took the opinion that the government who would negotiate this
00:35:22
Speaker
halfway house, this 4 million, were doing the wrong thing. But the best value for the people of Jersey was to stick with TBC's original suggestion of 1.997. Yeah, yeah. Just under 2 million quid. There were crunch meetings of the Council of Ministers. That's like the cabinets of Jersey. This has gone to a very, very high level. Yes.
00:35:50
Speaker
And they decided to go with 4 million, 4.25 million. Mr. Corrigan then basically asked for a letter of instruction from the government
00:36:16
Speaker
saying that he didn't think it represented best value for money. He said that he wanted to have a reasonable and defensible valuation. He didn't think that was reasonable and defensible. And he said very pointedly, quote, I'm finally, I'm mindful of the risk of a precedent being formed here.
00:36:40
Speaker
And that, and that precedent being that the private valuations enter into the public market and force the hand of, in this instance, the government of Jersey to pay more than London, for example, was valuing, valuing this hoard out. Yeah. That that's right. Now,
00:37:02
Speaker
Basically, the Chief Minister overrode Corrigan's qualms about the whole thing. Corrigan's qualms about the whole thing. They went with the 4.25 valuation and the logic was outlined by the Chief Minister, no less.
00:37:19
Speaker
who said, had it been decided to split the hold into its component parts for sale to the highest bid, as was what the French company had suggested, considerably more money could have been raised and the treasure trove would have been dispersed across the world and its inherent value to Jersey lost.
00:37:35
Speaker
And he said also, the crown was under no obligation to sell to the island, because again, treasure trove is a crown issue. Yes. Not one of government. This is a legal mess. It's a legal minefield.
00:37:50
Speaker
And the letter to Corrigan instructing him to carry out the transaction went round to five pages. Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, these instructions, they're often requested so that the the enacting civil servant basically has cover.
00:38:08
Speaker
so then they may well do something which is seen to be economically reckless in the future or which is seen to be potentially even morally questionable in other situations. I'll give you an example, the last time I came across a letter of instruction like this, a civil servant asking for a letter of instruction like this, was when I was looking at the background to the Garden Bridge in London which was a
00:38:35
Speaker
rigged procurement under Boris Johnson's mayoralty. When there were accusations of cronyism, massive amounts of government money were passed to a charity and it ended up with the whole project being cancelled without a brick being laid at a cost of something like £48 million.
00:38:59
Speaker
and civil servants in Whitehall asked for written letters of instruction before releasing government money to that project. So that's the kind of, we're dealing with high stakes stuff here. This is the kind of stuff where if it goes wrong, you end up with a knock on the door from the members of the constabulary and facing potential charge of malfeasance in public office. That's how serious this stuff can get.
00:39:25
Speaker
It should be said, this has now happened, hasn't it? Yes, it's a done deal. There's no going back from it. There is a suggestion that it was, shall we say, put out two days before Christmas with the idea being that nobody would look into it too closely, because everyone would be thinking about it with Christmas holiday.
00:39:50
Speaker
And it certainly was put up. Jersey Heritage were furious. They put out a press release.
00:40:07
Speaker
which said, we're fully aware of the practice of valuing similar fines in the UK and have concerns that the ultimate price paid was so far adrift from expert advice from the UK's highly regarded Treasury Valuation Committee. And then they added, such a conclusion could have a detrimental impact on Jersey's reputation and endanger future acquisitions by setting a precedent for inflated valuations. Now,
00:40:32
Speaker
I have to say it's not just Jersey because what the government of Jersey did by, okay, they didn't go all the way to six million quid, but they went
00:40:46
Speaker
to twice as much as the TVC had suggested. Well, but also crucially in Jersey, the annual turnover in terms of tax from the Exchequer that they cracked is 800 million. So this was 2% of their annual budget, their tax into the Treasury as it were. So this is a lot of money for them.
00:41:08
Speaker
Absolutely. But on mainland UK, particularly in England under the Treasure Act 96, the fear is that this gives every metal detectorist who declares the find to the PAS, and it declares the find to the corridor, actually. And then it goes to the TVC, the Treasure Evaluation Committee. It gives them carte blanche to say, whatever the TVC comes back with,
00:41:36
Speaker
No, I don't accept that. I'm going to go for a commercial. I'm going to submit a commercial valuation and obviously commercial valuables have a vested interest in getting the highest price they can. Yes, for their client, but also for themselves because they get more commission. Yeah. Yeah. And that's there. As we said before, that's their job. That's okay. That's their job. That's okay. That is fine. Yeah.
00:41:57
Speaker
But the knock-on effect of that is that, for example, it would make it much more expensive for, for example, a local museum, like we've seen the case recently with the auction museum, to obtain fines that have gone through the treasure system and keep them local. We talked earlier about Stoke-on-Trent. It would make it more difficult for a museum like Stoke-on-Trent to raise the money to keep important fines local.
00:42:29
Speaker
And also, it sends out a signal to treasure hunters, people who might use a metal detector, not because they love the history, but because I think it might end up with a payday. Oh, they all love the history though. They all love the history, Andy. Don't you read the tweets? They all love the history. They're not in it for the money. Don't be so cynical.
00:42:51
Speaker
I'm not being cynical, I'm saying that the ones that do see a payday come up when they go out, that that bleep might be the next Staffordshire Hoard or the next Locotial too. It encourages them to think that that bleep might be worth even more than it did
Ethical Dilemmas in Archaeology
00:43:18
Speaker
than it might have done before December when Jersey announced this settlement. Now it has been, the question was asked, I believe it was raised in the podcast that you recorded with your Jersey journalist. I'm sorry, I was moonlighting. My first loyalty is still to The Watching Brief, I promise.
00:43:45
Speaker
whatever, whatever, whatever, I feel used. No, no, in all seriousness, it was meant, this question was raised, have Jersey just invented, as it were, casino metal detecting? Have they just, you know, casino valuation? And this idea that if it wasn't already seen as a way to get rich quick, that now, actually, by taking it to the private market, you can ensure by a factor of,
00:44:12
Speaker
four or five times, rather, 500%, that what you found may be sold for more. And I couldn't help but ask, when you first told me about this story and the slightly crass nature of this and the way that, particularly in Jersey, this could happen and unfold in the way that it did, I couldn't help but ask, why don't we just get in on it?
00:44:39
Speaker
Why don't we just do it? Because maybe, maybe, archaeologists are just jealous. Maybe we're just fed up of seeing things that we would put into a box and that we would maybe put on a museum shelf eventually, having looked at it very carefully in a laboratory, sold by other people for life-changing sums of money, when here we are struggling to get a decent wage, struggling to get our research paid for, struggling to, in some cases, even get a port-a-loo.
00:45:09
Speaker
Like, why shouldn't we just sell stuff? And I'm very much asking the question here, tongue in cheek, but why shouldn't we? Right. Okay. The market's going up.
00:45:27
Speaker
And we talked before about auction companies, Hansons is possibly the most high profile at the moment, who are targeting metal detectors to sell their finds.
00:45:42
Speaker
horse mounds of the same period of Lecoty as the Lecoty on fine, going for £86,000 last year. Where this money comes from is a whole other episode. It's important to say that Reg Mead and Richard Miles, the two detectorists, did the right thing. They got permission from the landowner,
00:46:09
Speaker
They worked without complaint from the landowner. And when they found a major file like that, they called the archaeologist in straight away. Yeah, but this is what we're talking about here is a legal and financial issue. They weren't, you know, they weren't doing anything illegal under current. They were behaving more ethically than many metal detectors you can watch on YouTube every day. Yes.
00:46:34
Speaker
So this is not a personal attack on them. So why shouldn't we ethically follow suit then? Because if archaeology becomes about finding valuables, then it distorts the archaeology. My greatest area of knowledge in this is in maritime archaeology, where companies that shall not be named, honestly,
00:47:04
Speaker
arguably, by going out to find valuable rec sites to fund the archaeology and the non valuable archaeology actually distort the archaeological record because if you look at if you look at Odyssey, for example, the stuff that they well, the most valuable find they made the Mercedes hasn't been published because they did it illegally, unlawfully.
00:47:32
Speaker
most financially valuable. There are stories that other companies, for example, in Africa and in the Far East, have noted wreck sites but don't excavate the local trading ship. They do excavate the East India Company ship that's carrying the Chinese porcelain. So shipwrecks start to turn up on maps of shipwrecks, not so much where shipwrecks are to be found, but rather where valuable artifacts are to be discovered.
00:48:02
Speaker
It's more complex than that. You take a shipwreck, a shipwreck like any archaeological site is a microcosm. It happens to be a shorter-lived microcosm than a settlement site. A settlement site might last for millennia, whereas a shipwreck, it happens in a moment, in a particular year, month, day. Yeah. And the ship itself has a lifespan of maybe 100 years, maybe.
00:48:25
Speaker
Absolutely. There's something like Mary Rose, where they can track the rebuilds and so on. But again, Mary Rose is a case in point. It had valuable canon, but most of those were removed in the 19th century by early divers and the Royal Engineers. What makes the Mary Rose such a valuable site now is the environmental material, those longbows that were kept in anoxic conditions, so that they could actually
00:48:51
Speaker
do experiments to check the draw weight on an actual late medieval longbow. And that's all well and good. But are you now making the case that that is an exception to this potential rule in so much as that clear that had certain national weights behind it? We all heard about the Mary Rose. We wanted it to be found to have cultural import.
00:49:10
Speaker
And are you saying that the private companies who just go after valuable sites would overlook a culturally valuable chip, like, for example, the Mary Rose, because it wasn't really worth their time, and hence distorting the archaeological record? Is that your point? My point is that, for example, there have been fines that have been rewarded in British territory waters of Bronze Age ranks and that kind of thing, because they qualify under the barriers.
00:49:39
Speaker
acts and so on and under the various legal frameworks. But the point is that, say, for example, you have a Viking ship with no valuables on board that turns up, say, on the Goodwin Sands or something like that.
00:50:03
Speaker
If your process is purely about finding the things that can finance your work, and given how expensive archaeology now is from desktop to post X with conservation and so on, if your only concern is finding the material that you can sell to keep that process going,
00:50:25
Speaker
Are you going to excavate scientifically that Romano-British village on the motorway route? Or are you going to excavate the villa that's on the same route? Now under the current system you'd excavate both.
00:50:51
Speaker
But under the proposed system, you would make a financial assessment as to which one might have some gold or trinkets or sellable stuff. Absolutely. The gold rings that have dropped in the bathhouse and gone down the drain. Even more specifically, then, because we've talked about biasing the archaeological record,
00:51:11
Speaker
So more valuable sites will turn up more frequently and less valuable sites will be overlooked. We've talked there about this choice that comes down, the moment of the choice between a more potentially more profitable site and a less profitable site.
00:51:26
Speaker
But specifically what cycle, what's the risk of that cycle? Because you could make the argument that by digging and choosing to dig a more profitable site and selling material on that we might be able to fund digging a Viking toilet where we're unlikely to find anything interesting or a Norse toilet for example. So what's the risk of the cycle?
00:51:48
Speaker
And, you know, there's a famous example that some ultimately sold material from his excavations. I think it was made in castle. Yeah. So to help raise money for the excavation. Yeah. There are bits and pieces of the fringes of this where archaeologists have sort of dabbled in that kind of world. But I think there's an even more fundamental issue.
00:52:17
Speaker
is that if you say that the importance of archaeology primarily is to make a financial return,
00:52:30
Speaker
And you have organizations that are set up to exploit that financial return, and particularly, for example, in the antiquities market, which, okay, it's perfectly legal, if the material is legally obtained, and that's the point, it encourages heritage crime, it encourages night walking, it encourages something which we're already aware of, which is certainly alleged, the laundering of artifacts.
00:52:57
Speaker
There have been allegations, for example, that artifacts that have been found in Ireland have been laundered through Britain because metal detecting in Ireland is illegal.
00:53:08
Speaker
the Republic of Ireland, that is. And that's before we get on to, you know, the heritage crimes, the looting that goes on in war zones and just purely for commercial reasons, you know, the famous Tom Barolo in Italy. But as you say, though, this stuff happens anyway.
00:53:30
Speaker
So what actually is the risk to an archaeological unit or units, for example, competing against each other and engaging in this cycle? It's complicated. But as I say, basically, I think that if you look at the two issues, the distortion of the archaeological record that that will bring about and the increased risk of heritage crime
00:53:57
Speaker
nationally and internationally, which would, you know, it's already difficult enough to track and report and bring to book people involved in heritage crime.
00:54:13
Speaker
We looked at the other a few episodes ago at the investigation in New York into the material that had been stolen in Lebanon. And that took a massive investigation by the district returning to the Southern District of New York. Huge resources. You imagine if
00:54:35
Speaker
We're in an archaeological world where that kind of bad behavior, those bad actors are not just encouraged, but they're then encouraged to do even more of this stuff. It would overwhelm any chance of keeping control
00:54:58
Speaker
But again, you see, I mean, maybe there's an argument there as much as archaeologists by having an idea of practice purity and the sort of philosophy that guides their arm in their trial, that they can then pronounce on people doing quote unquote, bad things. But actually, if an archaeological company, for example, bought a field,
00:55:18
Speaker
with a view to using that investment to monetize that archaeological site and further their own excavation and research requirements. Anyone who came onto that field, Nighthawkers or not, whatever you want to call them, looters, would be transgressing on property. It would be akin to going on into a farmer's field and kidnapping a cow. You could prosecute them. You could much more effectively get on top of that sort of heritage crime. So I'm not sure that's
00:55:47
Speaker
that's necessarily the killer blow here. Can I suggest what I think is the problem? Well I just point out one thing that legally that's already the case. If somebody is on land without permission and takes something from it that's theft and it's increasingly prosecuted as theft. Yes, but the archaeologists have very little
00:56:09
Speaker
recourse other than to try and just cover up as it physically cover up or physically move in some cases quicker than they would like to artifact out of the ground because the police don't, you know, they're not on the spot as they would be for, I don't know, if you try and break into a shop, for example.
00:56:28
Speaker
So it would arguably raise the status of that archaeological property up the heritage crime ladder to something which is a little bit more of a responsive crime, as opposed to one which is, oh, so someone stole some coins last night? What a shame, it doesn't mean.
00:56:48
Speaker
So, again, I'm being performatively here, performatively slightly cynical, but I think there's an argument to be made there that potentially it would help if archaeologists, or if archaeological units simply went, this is ours now, no one can touch it, and we're going to do what we want with it, potentially. Now, can I just, can I actually lay my cards bare having been the devil here and laid out the devil's advocacy?
00:57:18
Speaker
I have to say, in terms of property law and the complexities of land ownership in the UK and so on, there are many, many reasons why that wouldn't work.
00:57:28
Speaker
No, no, no. What you're saying is there are many reasons why it already should work. That's what you're saying. But it's akin to poaching, for example. If you go onto someone's private land and you poach animals, you can be prosecuted in a way that you can't do if it's public property and public land and someone just happens to be there monitoring the animals, for example.
00:57:53
Speaker
But potentially you'll be breaching them, for example, the Wildlife and Countryside Act, depending on what species you were poaching. But again, we're talking about people who know that they're breaking rules anyway. If you're a poacher or a night hawk or whatever, you're breaking rules, just a matter of the extent to which the people who care about that rule breaking can actually grab you and stop you and claim ownership over
00:58:17
Speaker
over this material but anyway the point is I was laying out this whole because I think that there is a case to be made there there is a case to be made there if you if you really wanted you could argue that but I think the problem is the risk is that the cycle would be
00:58:33
Speaker
a rush whereby companies would be competing with each other purely on an investment return model. You would have companies rushing even further to the bottom to pay probably less for the work in order to turn over a profit because now the site actually represents an investment and a potential return on that investment.
00:58:55
Speaker
you would have far more cynical decisions being made over what on the site is actually recorded and what is valuable. And you touched about, we touched on this in terms of, you know, on the large scale and it comes to different types of shipwrecks, but on the same site, okay, fine, we found the latrines, whatever, don't dig there, dig here, this is where people will be storing their goods, this is what we're going to recover, this is what we need to really get our hands on.
00:59:19
Speaker
And then the question is, where does that actually lead to in terms of the broader cultural and economic value of what archaeologists do? It would gut, as it were, the purpose of archaeology. That is actually to understand the story of everyone in humanity, not just the people who had rich stuff, valuable stuff, blingy stuff.
00:59:45
Speaker
rare stuff. As you say it compromises the archaeological record because of the cycle and also you'd be constantly in arrears, you would be always looking for the next big score and it would just be an absolute absolute mess. But how I suppose how can we
01:00:08
Speaker
How can we encourage our metal-detectoring brethren to think about this in that way? Because as it stands, the damage has been done arguably in Jersey. A precedent has been set.
01:00:20
Speaker
And in the coming months and years, we're more and more likely, I think, to see individual antiques dealers, individual, you know, highly specialized brick and mortar stores who, for example, sell coins or broaches or whatever, coming into this market with a view to upping the value, extracting more money from the public purse.
01:00:42
Speaker
and lessening the actual, no matter how much people say it, lessening the actual value of the history. You know, we're just in it for the history. That's often what's said, but it's not what is being demonstrated. How can we bring people in on that conversation in a way that doesn't just seem as though we are simply jealous of the money that's floating around? I think, well, two things. First of all, you outlined
01:01:09
Speaker
an archaeology that is governed by money. That's already the case in contracting archaeology. And even to a certain extent in research archaeology, but certainly in contracting archaeology,
01:01:21
Speaker
You hear, for example, suggestions that project designs are tweaked to make them less oners on developers. That sampling strategies are underdeveloped so that it's cheaper. There are fewer trenches.
01:01:44
Speaker
that kind of thing. The old accusation that you machine through the Victorian to get to the medieval enrollment and that kind of thing.
01:01:53
Speaker
You do a bare minimum recording job on certain things that you can concentrate on. I think because you haven't got enough time because it's too expensive, the time it would actually take to do it archaeologically properly, no developer would tolerate. So in that sense, it's already there in research design in terms of tender bidding, bidding for contracts to do proper archaeological work.
01:02:16
Speaker
But is this a little bit like, and I think I might have said to this to you today, this is a little bit like Batman, which is Batman knows he could at any point, for example, end the Joker. He could kill the Joker. But once he does, he's lost the excuse not just to kill the next guy, and then the next guy, and then the next guy. And he's crossed a line that he can't come back from. Is this the core of the matter here? It's not necessarily about mere ethical
01:02:46
Speaker
I don't know, piety, but it's about actually the fundamental nature of the work that you're doing and the line that we cannot cross. Because when you're shaping a research tender to meet a certain brief, at the very least you're not thinking, well, by the way, sub-clause whatever paragraph, we'll also sell off all the gold and this will be the projected profit from this project.
01:03:12
Speaker
Absolutely. And also, it's a shortcut to, you know, for example,
01:03:24
Speaker
If the company you work for is going to profit from the find that you make, and very few holds turn up on archaeological sites, you might get things like in development archaeology you have things like the Pretzelwell find.
01:03:43
Speaker
which did contain precious materials, precious metals, but was primarily, its importance was cultural for what it said about the early medieval. But in a commercial world, why would you not, for example, ask for a profit share as an archaeologist? Why should you not have a cut of the value?
01:04:13
Speaker
But then where does that leave you with the other archaeologists who were working alongside you but didn't find that hold of coins in the pot that just popped up? You know, it's so fraught with issues that we, you know, and the fundamental thing is, and I know I said right at the beginning, I think that, you know, in
01:04:34
Speaker
in the coin world, in the auction world, you do have people with genuine expertise, ruts have genuine expertise in Celtic coins. But the moment you start to sell them to as archaeologists, I think you lose any
01:04:53
Speaker
any moral authority you might once have had to say, look, this is something that belongs to all of us, this is something that we share, our past is universal. I suppose also as well, a point I was trying to make earlier about ownership would be
01:05:11
Speaker
Arguably, for example, an archaeological team would be able to buy a plot of land and then, based on the potential return, if we're talking about millions of pounds, hire 24-hour-7 security as well for that plot of land.
01:05:27
Speaker
But as you say, the problem is not so much, that's not necessarily the issue. The issue is what would be happening in terms of the next business job and how that job is structured, but also what's happening on site when, as you say, at what point does the cake slicing stop? If the person next to me happens to find a coin,
01:05:53
Speaker
You could literally have legal disputes unfolding based solely upon that one coin find. Exactly. It's Batman. We're Batman. That's what we are. We're Batman.
01:06:08
Speaker
Or Doctor Who. Remember, Doctor Who never kills anybody. Oh, that's true. It gets very close to it sometimes. Yeah, that's true. That's very true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doctor Who tries, he or she, they try to stay out of it and be objective. But then again, they do wield, well, godly power in that sense.
01:06:29
Speaker
I mean, I know we've been around the house. This is a slightly longer episode than we normally try to aim for in a week. But I mean, do you think that is that the sentence that is that more or less what we would suggest that people bring into these sorts of conversations? It's just that the reason we don't cross that line is because it leads ultimately to to a form of professional destruction.
01:06:58
Speaker
I think so. Or the very least cannibalization in some way. Yeah, you know, it's there be dragons and most of them are legal. Yeah. And personally, I don't want to work in an archaeology where it's driven entirely by what's it worth to me.
01:07:23
Speaker
I'm old and sad and I'm from that generation that believes in things like the NHS and public service and that not everything has a price because some things are priceless and I think the heritage that we share is priceless.
01:07:39
Speaker
I agree, I absolutely agree. Like I said, I should say I've been making a fairly blunt, slightly devil's advocate argument here today, but these are the answers, these are the reasons, and we don't.
01:07:56
Speaker
Okay. And what I would say as well, just to finish, is that this started off by talking about Le Catillon.
Future Topics and Audience Engagement
01:08:04
Speaker
Yes. And it is not over as a story yet. There are still things to find out. There is correspondence that we suspect exists that we don't have yet. And
01:08:18
Speaker
I put it this way, watch this space, but also watch the space in terms of the ramifications because I say it happened just before Christmas. There haven't really been time for the ramifications to start to work themselves out, but they will do pretty soon, I think. And we'll be keeping an eye on that. OK, cool.
01:08:37
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, welcome back to us, I suppose. Hopefully that was an interesting conversation for people at home. Please do get involved below as I have to keep it civil, but also keep it, keep it, you know, factual as well. I mean, as I say, there are simple facts. Archaeology is worth money to people and archaeologists need money. I don't know. Archaeological objects are worth money to some people.
01:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, but they are people nonetheless. Yeah, exactly. So in that sense, there's a reason the question should be asked. And hopefully we've gone some way to answering it effectively. If only by having a... There were moments there, I wrote in life, folks who were just listening to this at home, where Andy seemed to be looking at me as though I lost my mind. You're like, what? What are you saying?
01:09:35
Speaker
Yeah. Don't drink the Kool-Aid. No, don't drink the Kool-Aid. No, exactly. Although do drink, obviously, if you're at a work event, whatever else you want to drink. And be careful if you're costing any cakes. Exactly, yes, because they may ambush you. They may just jump in your lap and you won't be able to escape the cake. Any hints or notions or ideas as to what our next episode might be about?
01:10:02
Speaker
I got a few teasers. I think we'll be revisiting the issue of archaeology in universities again. And I think because there are always metal detecting stories, we'll be doing more metal detecting stories. And I think also there are issues around contracting and that kind of thing, which we're going to be looking at in the next few months as well. Yeah.
01:10:30
Speaker
We also as well have our ongoing review as to how we're doing watching Brief as well. There's some stuff to come out of that. And I believe we had some media picks we wanted to talk about before things happened in our respective households. So we may well get around to doing that as well in the near future.
01:10:49
Speaker
And the last thing I'll say is again, I think I'm going to close all future watching briefs with something like this. If you know something's going on in the archaeological world that you'd like us to investigate, if there's something going on in the archaeological world that you think is wrong, if you think people or entities are behaving inappropriately, please let us know in confidence.
01:11:17
Speaker
my DMs are open on Twitter. There's also an email address, an encrypted email address and so on. So if you know, accountability is important, as we're finding particularly in the UK at the moment, where it appears to be failing. And I think, but, you know, for the archaeological world to be healthy,
01:11:40
Speaker
It needs to understand itself and it needs to know what's being done in its name. So this is like, if you've got a story you want us to look at, please let us know. Cool. Who are you going to call? Matt Landy. Thank you very, very much, guys. Have a wonderful week. We'll see you next week. And as I say, do get involved with the conversation below. Until then, take care. Bye bye.
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This podcast episode has been produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network in collaboration with Archaeosoup Productions. Find out more podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.