cyberdad wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
If its privately owned then its legal.
Some rancher mustve found it on his property, and thus legally owns it.
That goes back to my original question. Historical artifacts or fossils usually have value beyond dollars due to the knowledge they bring to world history and science. I know in the UK if you dig up ancient gold coins they must be declared to the authorities.
Not only that but the EU changed tings in the UK so that anything of value found belongs to the government unless the government decide they are not interested in it. This happened some 20 odd years ago and many of us just gave up the metal detectoring hobby after that as it put a dampener on the excitment of finding things.
In the past in the UK it used to be more sensible in that one would do a deal with the landowner if you were on someone elses land so it would be 60/40 or 50/50 whatever you agreed on if the item was of any value, and very valuable items of historic value or any decent value would be declared to the government and the government would have the first option to buy the item if they wanted it. If not it was yours or between you and the landowner.
I know of one man who found a large gold torque and he used to agree a 50/50 split, and due to the historic interest he arranged for it to be displayed in a museum. The land owner took it from the museum and sold it and did not give him a penny!
He could have sued but he was not into the hobby for money.
Very few people do metal detectoring in the UK these days. In the past, the athorities refused to use metal detectors on official archeology sites, and the guy I knew would go on their discarded soil heaps after they dug and find all sorts of things that they had missed. He started to take them to the people to give them to them but he was met with hostility so he decided to keep the other things in his own collection instead and record where they came from so future generations had an idea of what was there.
This guy provided more information ad items to museums than all the arkeology officials put together! He has passed away now sadly and his collection went to his brother. He had a whole house full of stuff. He showed us draws full of gold rings each individual ring labelled as to where he had found it and when. He would record every little detail about everything he could.
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05 Jul 2022, 7:26 pm
