Hi Paul
no need to be that depressed. Landowners may be less sympathetic than we would like sometimes to archaeology, but (in my experience anyway) are unlikely to plough a site just because they suddenly realise that they have a site on it, and with CSS and arable reversion schemes you can try and encourage them that doing so could cost them money in the long term.
If we are honest, the real threat is likely to be from irresponsible metal detectorists (note carefully the word before metal there please) in terms of sudden access to information on sites. And again, personal experience suggests that they know more about where juicy sites are than (often) SMR's do.
I think the real rub here is that if you have a policy to give access to information, and people don't want a site publicised (for whatever reasons) might they just not inform you of it? This seems to me to be more legitimate an area for concern rather than them discovering sites from your data and damaging them. The answer to that problem is education, which brings us back round to the idea of publicising archaeology and putting SMR's on the web....
Perhaps cynically, what we may need here is for a juicy site to be trashed near to a celebs house who can then get free publicity saying how terrible it is, and in the process force the powers that be to deal with the real issue of damage to sites which is: under resourcing to enable effective monitoring. So if we all publish our data on the web we may get that pay off...., bitter sweet though it may be.
My own view is that the data needs to be out there. The justification for much archaeological work is that it is to help preserve information for future generations. well some of those future generations are already born so we need to contact them..... even though we may not like what they do with that information.
Finally, an idea that has been floated here, but not definitively agreed on, is the possibility that when we put our info on line we would only put on Monuments (as opposed to including events and find spots), and that those sites may be better mapped than the scattered points we have at the moment (IE polygons). The logic is (I think) that whilst we are obliged to give information on archaeology, that is not necessarily the same as giving out a copy of every record in the SMR. The added interpretation may be a useful way of helping to fudge where exactly the Gold Torc was found, whilst giving info about the Iron Age it represents. A bit of a fudge, but it is an idea to consider (and note that is my spin on someone elses idea, not NYCC policy - we haven't got one yet)
Nick Boldrini
SMR Computing Officer
Heritage Unit
North Yorkshire County Council
Direct Dial (01609) 532331
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