PAS Schemes Monitor

Professional archaeology doesn't have a monopoly on finding the past. Across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, metal detectorists and other members of the public report their discoveries to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) — a voluntary programme run by the British Museum that, for the first time, gave this activity real numbers. The Netherlands followed with PAN, Denmark with DIME, and Finland with SuALT. This project compares them.

Most of what these programmes find never reaches academic archaeology. PAS exists to change that — crowdsourcing find locations and object types into a public database, while keeping exact findspots confidential. It's as much a pedagogical project as a research one, and not without its critics; the Annual Reports and the literature below cover that debate in more depth.

I started with PAS data on Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age finds — the period I worked on for my MA thesis — because I already know the material. The map below shows finds by English county, drawn live from the PAS API. I now have access to PAN's Dutch data as well, but their public interface doesn't yet expose a JSON endpoint I can fetch automatically, so for now their map layer shows administrative boundaries only, without a count overlay. The same is true for DIME. Both will get proper data layers as their public APIs allow it — or as I find a reasonable workaround.