The Detectorists Foundation

The Detectorists Foundation is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation registered with the Charity Commission in February 2019.

By becoming a DIF Worldwide Member, 50% of your subscription fee directly supports our Foundation Charity. Once we reach 100 members in any country outside the UK, we commit to reinvesting charitable funds within that country to aid local detectorist causes.

The Foundation is asset-locked with the Institute and our recorded activities as a charity are:

To conserve and preserve our national archaeological heritage including:

1. To advance the education of the public in the subject of metal detecting to archaeological principles.
2. To assist in such ways as the charity trustees think fit in supporting the recording and preservation of discovered portable antiques.
3. To identify and conserve new discoveries of an archaeological nature.

Join the Foundation

Background

A detectorist can play an important role in heritage conservation which goes beyond the discovery of a tangible find, into the potential unlocking of historic and archaeological evidence to help us better understand our past.

The Foundation, in recognising the need to enable detectorists to further engage in the processes post-discovery, wants to help financially with the costs that occur resulting from our actions.  This can include:

• The expert excavation of in-situ detectorists finds.
• A site evaluation to define the nature of new archaeological discoveries by detectorists.
• Resultant costs when recording and entering finds in an archive.

With detectorists as part of the archaeological team, our ability to combine metal detecting and field-walking into a single process opens the potential for us to find dating evidence, from all-material artefacts.

The SPIAS approach develop by the Institute (a systematic, partial, and intensive artefact survey), forms a non-intrusive archaeological survey technique.  When combined with geophysical data, SPIAS can bring valuable information and dating evidence to help evaluate and define an archaeological site.

Forming part of the ‘mitigation’ strategy, practitioner detectorists can work with archaeologists to conserve topsoil, plough horizon and in-site finds through detecting the surface and layers of trenching before mechanical excavation.