PAS Cymru to Fight Poverty, Gender and Racial Inequalities Now?

A few comments on a new Detectorist and Finders survey for Wales

Deep Digging in Wales

Ruth Garnault Consultancy, have been appointed to evaluate the current structure, provision and funding of PAS Cymru. We are asking for your views on PAS Cymru. This will help us develop options for the future of the service. [...] . Time is short to produce the report and we would be very grateful if you could complete this form by 6th July. A Welsh version is here: https://forms.gle/8dudCmnmiQA4knBWA. You can be anonymous if you wish.

Seems open to abuse... It is not clear whether these results will be made public and in what form so that the British public can see what is happening to the archaeological heritage. Now, why is PASCymru being treated as a "service" for "finders and detectorists"? The questions are dotty. There are the usual crap ones you'd expect in a survey obviously intended to generate PAS spin. In the section Current strengths and weaknesses of PAS Cymru we read:

"As part of the work to deliver the aims described in the introduction, a core role of PAS Cymru is to record finds. Staff photograph, report on and then return the object. Significant finds would normally be best looked after in accredited museums, which also protects them for future generations. Part of the staff role is to instil this understanding of responsible finding".

There, of course, being "no other" understanding (such as "don't")?

Above all there are some questions about "what PAS does for you" in which the survey omits the fundamental questions  "do you record artefacts that you find with the PAS/how many/ do you use any other means of recording finds/ what are the reasons that [if any]  you do not record some of your finds with the PAS?  Indeed (to establish the scale of operation of PASCymru in the future), "in an average year (pre-covid) how many recordable finds would you be making?"

 But it gets dottier:

What could PAS Cymru do to make a better Wales? (For example, people be healthier, more prosperous, have a better understanding of our culture and heritage, have stronger communities - or anything else you might want to say.)
What does PAS Cymru do now in poorer communities? What else could it do?

and the verbal gymnastics involved in determining "how you think about your gender" and "ethininicity" [sic] (looking forward to seeing the results of that one). Nothing here about education or literacy levels or computer savviness (online recording and dissemination). It seems the Consultancy has been tasked with finding out how to "make PASCymru more inclusive" - but before they do that, they need to find out whether the main source of the finds, the activity of "metal detecting" in fact is "inclusive". I suggest that it most certainly is not, so what are the Welsh planning to do? Find ways of getting LGBT+ people and members of ethnic minorities to get involved in collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record? Eh? Why? We need to be curbing this destructive activity, not getting more and more people doing it...

Not a question here about the Code of Practice or attitudes to what it says about detecting on pasture/grassland, or about whether the detectorist only searches in Wales and what happens bout recording of finds made outside the country.

What also is missing is anything asking "finders and detectorists" what they see as the future of PASCymru when the funding stops (as seems increasingly likely). What alternatives do THEY see? In fact, how many finds are they making a year and how many of them are they reporting? Such a statistic would be vital to determining what the effects of cutting (or altering) the Scheme would be. There is a difference between cutting a scheme where only one-in-eight finds gets recorded (which is what I currently think is about the figure for England and Wales as a whole) and one where six out of eight are (in fact unachievable).

So Ruth Garnault Consultancy, instead of doing something even remotely useful in the area of heritage conservation, has just set out to produce yet another coffee-table document full of fine words and feelgood sentiments about the usual waffle about "iclusivity", "partnership" and "social values" while skipping the real issues of a policy that has at its core the stripping of the archaeological record of Wales to fill the pockets of a small social fragment of greedy collectors.