Posted on 08/06/2020 5:50:09 AM PDT by Red Badger
I've got an older metal detector but maybe I'll treat myself when I retire and get a new one.....
‘Detectorists’ is a pretty good British comedy. Main characters are always correcting people who call them ‘detectors’. There is a nicely restored Triumph TR7 in the show, which looks a lot cooler now than the cars did 40+ years ago.
“reckon” as used in British English is slightly different than American English.
In Brit Speak it means “to calculate”...I reckon..............
Wouldn’t the law be different in all fifty states?
I should live so long as to find anything worth value. But then, I’d have to be a “detectorist,” wouldn’t I? Never mind. I can’t afford the equipment...
;o]
‘Face
:^) I took a walk in a local park that's been mostly abandoned to the wild (used to be pastures and fields, a family I knew) and while wandering around lost, met someone running his detector. Beats me what he was expecting to find. I've never seen so much as a stone arrowhead, and the only precolumbian use of metal was in copper.
There is a federal law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, amended in 1988.
It covers all federal land, all Indian tribes land, and also stuff found during any federal project.
So, it is different for private land.
But it does apply on all rivers, lakes, and coastlines which are considered under federal control.
In some states in the West, federal land is over 75% of the land in the state.
At one pre-Civil war site, with a very cheap detector, I found a hand made, brass, wine keg spigot.
He didn’t sleep for 3 days but couldn’t wait to tell the “Finds Collector” administrator.
Moron...
Who pays them? From where does the money come?
He’s required by law to notify the authorities of a treasure find. But once he does it becomes public knowledge. So he, and his buddies, were just protecting their find.................
I apologize thinking their discovery laws were similar to the ones in the US
In the UK, ALL treasure belongs to The Crown unless otherwise determined...............
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
It’s interesting how the law works. If something is lost, it’s pretty much finders keepers. But if something was hidden, it belongs to the Crown. How is lost/hidden determined—by the coroner. A coin here or there is usually considered lost, while something deliberately buried, like a hoard of coins was hidden.
As noted above, the Crown wisely pays fair value for everything local or national museums consider historic. This also allows ‘experts’ to do the recovery and record the history of the site.
Treasure in the water gets really complicated. If a sunken ship was a national ship, it and everything aboard still belongs to its home nation. A treasure finder might well end up with nothing for his troubles finding it. That has happened with Spanish treasure ships. The laws covering these kinds of things are often very old and certainly don’t seem fair.
‘Detectorists’ is a pretty good British comedy.
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