Thursday 5 May 2011

My Love letter from UK Detectorist

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I got this the other day from Mr Two Sheds Lincoln on Canvey Island, its about my earlier text on the use of the handheld pinpointer in artefact hunting:

So not having to dig a bigger hole to locate the item is not saving time? Of course if the hole was not deep and narrow - and thus dark inside, the person recovering the item would have a better chance of judging its context and associations - rather difficult in the dark by the light of an LED.

Removing the soil around a target gently and systematically - rather than jumping straight to the spot to hoik something out - allows closer observation of its situation and possible associations.

Surely to avoid damage to the object, the best thing is to remove a larger piece of soil around it and gently reduce it from the outside than try to lever something from the side of a hole. You know, that "best practice" everybody used to talk about.

So Mr Lincoln, what is the explanation of metal detectors that have back-lighting to the control panel? For use in very deep narrow holes?

Despite this attempt to persuade us otherwise, it still seems to me that people going out with these probes are fixated on the idea of getting out the metal target as quickly as possible to get on to the next one.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"fixated on the idea of getting out the metal target as quickly as possible to get on to the next one"

Well of course. The denials are invalid. A "good day" is a set number of hours in which the number of finds is higher than average.

In fact, "probes" illustrate the crucial difference between metal detecting and amateur archaeology rather neatly. Detecting is primarily about targeting, archaeology is entirely about learning, hence one group buys many thousands of probes and the other doesn't. We should all be grateful to Mr Two Sheds yet again for inadvertently making it so clear

Lazy Gardens said...

LED backlighting on an LCD control panel (the common kind) makes it easier to read.

Paul Barford said...

Ah, like the one in a digital watch then, next to useless in the day, but a boon at night.

 
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