Dr. Mark Clinton:

It varies so much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We can pat ourselves on the back. Metal detectors are verbotenhere, we are pretty good at it and An Garda Síochána will pursue it whereas in England, one will often see programmes stating "valuable Saxon coin hoard found by somebody". Of course, the object is important in its own right but it is also about the context. If one finds something wonderful on an excavation, one does not just put it in a box and say "we found this on site." One would be fired in the morning. One would be asked where it came from and whether it came from feature A or feature B. One will often date a monument by an associated object. In other words, we are better than some-----