4 ms·

And the uk has that interesting policy where I believe the govt owns any treasure you find. Is it that way in the EU? In the us I believe you own it if you find

by rnk 3y ago

And the uk has that interesting policy where I believe the govt owns any treasure you find. Is it that way in the EU? In the us I believe you own it if you find something, but we don't seem to have as much treasure sitting around everywhere.

toyg 3y ago
Any developed European country will have very strict laws on the subject, typically ensuring the State gets ownership of the artefacts (occasionally in exchange for what it sees as "fair value" to the finder). > we don't seem to have as much treasure sitting around It depends on your definition of treasure, of course. Native-American items that survived generations of nomadic life are definitely treasure, but they clearly weren't seen as such until relatively recently. And as soon as you step into Mexico you have a lot of traditional treasure from pre-Columbian civilizations.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > It depends on your definition of treasure, of course. Wouldn't it still be a tiny fraction of what was/can be found in Europe no matter how you define it?
  - roughly 3y ago
    You'd be surprised. Mexico & Central America in particular were very well populated - Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan were among the largest cities in the world in their respected heydays, and the overall population of both Mexico and of the Andes + Amazonia were on par with European nations of the time. (Ed. - Noting that the thread here was specifically about the US, those populations were also much larger than most are aware, and also had a fairly rich material and social culture, especially in the Pacific Northwest, though admittedly both smaller and unfortunately more biodegradable than the empires in the south. Book recs below still stand.) If you're interested, Charles Mann's 1491 is a fantastic read on the pre-Colombian Americas - these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything also spends a lot of time with the various North American civilizations.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox. I'm not arguing against that. It's just that their metallurgy industries were quite underdeveloped in comparison to those in Europe/Asia. Some types of artefacts etc. are just preserved better than others. e.g. we have massive amounts of clay tablets left by the Hittites, the Ancient Assyrians, Babylonians etc. We have very few or almost no little texts written by (and know relatively overall about them in general) more 'advanced' and 'developed' civilizations like the Etruscans, Carthaginians or the Achaemenid Empire because they used more perishable materials for writing (or possible weren't really that into writing things down like the Persians). Same applies to many other types of material culture. Neolithic Europe for instance was fairly densely populated and possibly quite advanced yet people lived in wooden houses (the climate is of course also much more humid) and didn't write stuff down (possibly due to their more egalitarian nature compared to middle eastern civilizations) and we barely know anything about them too. It's possible that one of the largest cities on earth during the 4th millennium BC were in what is now Ukraine yet we know almost absolutely nothing about them (they had ample supplies of wood, so there was no need to make houses out of mudbricks and due to whatever reasons they had no inclination to build massive tombs or temples)
      - roughly 3y ago
        Well, if you're interested in written materials in particular, the Maya and Aztec codices were in abundance at the time of the Spanish arrival, as were the Incan quipu (which seem to have been an actual writing system and not just an accounting method). They didn't survive contact - the Spanish burned as many of them as they could get their hands on, and today we've only really got a handful of extant examples left. That's unfortunately the answer for what happened to a lot of New World culture (although the climate and terrain deserves its due especially in Central America, where there's oral history of large cities which we're only now finding by lidar because the jungle's so aggressive). The Olmec are an interesting case here, too - beautiful, just stunning sculptural works, going back to ~2000-1500BC. There's really quite a bit of cultural artifacts found and to be found.
        3y ago
rhplus 3y ago
There’s a definition of what constitutes “treasure” in the UK law described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  I was not expecting to find terms that require finding a coroner.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
In the UK (though the law is different in Scotland) it's called 'treasure trove' (though that's not legally correct, I gather) and is assessed by coroners, whose normal responsibility is certifying deaths and reporting on unusual circumstances of deaths. https://www.gov.uk/treasure https://www.gov.uk/treasure rnk> the govt owns any treasure you find. The King, well "the Crown", I guess the £millions we give them each year aren't enough. One of the vestiges of feudalism, he has an army and we (the UK) don't so we apparently abandon reason, and democracy, ... I digress. See the recently updated Treasure Act, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/24 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/24.
- yetanotherloser 3y ago
  Don't be daft. The king is not the crown. Treasure items found in the UK are compulsory purchased by the state, not taken by the king. It's not a bad system in terms of practical results.
foobarian 3y ago
Sounds like an excellent way to ensure that individuals who find valuable historical artifacts never report them to the authorities and possibly remelt them instead.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  You can even melt it down with just a propane blow torch, so no exotic equipment required. For the finder, seems well worth the hit in historical value vs the risk of the government seizing it without adequate compensation.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    why pay a fee to go into a museum and look at interesting old stuff? you'll never get adequate compensation for that cash! people do have other values than simply the value of melting King Arthur's crown.
- yetanotherloser 3y ago
  You get far more from the state as historical value than you would from the scrappy as bullion value. So, no, quite the opposite.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    This is good info.
mint2 3y ago
I assume you’re talking about finding things on private property since it’s illegal to take artifacts on public land in the US older than a certain age

by rnk 3y ago

toyg 3y ago

Any developed European country will have very strict laws on the subject, typically ensuring the State gets ownership of the artefacts (occasionally in exchange for what it sees as "fair value" to the finder). > we don't seem to have as much treasure sitting around It depends on your definition of treasure, of course. Native-American items that survived generations of nomadic life are definitely treasure, but they clearly weren't seen as such until relatively recently. And as soon as you step into Mexico you have a lot of traditional treasure from pre-Columbian civilizations.

qwytw 3y ago
> It depends on your definition of treasure, of course. Wouldn't it still be a tiny fraction of what was/can be found in Europe no matter how you define it?
- roughly 3y ago
  You'd be surprised. Mexico & Central America in particular were very well populated - Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan were among the largest cities in the world in their respected heydays, and the overall population of both Mexico and of the Andes + Amazonia were on par with European nations of the time. (Ed. - Noting that the thread here was specifically about the US, those populations were also much larger than most are aware, and also had a fairly rich material and social culture, especially in the Pacific Northwest, though admittedly both smaller and unfortunately more biodegradable than the empires in the south. Book recs below still stand.) If you're interested, Charles Mann's 1491 is a fantastic read on the pre-Colombian Americas - these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything also spends a lot of time with the various North American civilizations.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox. I'm not arguing against that. It's just that their metallurgy industries were quite underdeveloped in comparison to those in Europe/Asia. Some types of artefacts etc. are just preserved better than others. e.g. we have massive amounts of clay tablets left by the Hittites, the Ancient Assyrians, Babylonians etc. We have very few or almost no little texts written by (and know relatively overall about them in general) more 'advanced' and 'developed' civilizations like the Etruscans, Carthaginians or the Achaemenid Empire because they used more perishable materials for writing (or possible weren't really that into writing things down like the Persians). Same applies to many other types of material culture. Neolithic Europe for instance was fairly densely populated and possibly quite advanced yet people lived in wooden houses (the climate is of course also much more humid) and didn't write stuff down (possibly due to their more egalitarian nature compared to middle eastern civilizations) and we barely know anything about them too. It's possible that one of the largest cities on earth during the 4th millennium BC were in what is now Ukraine yet we know almost absolutely nothing about them (they had ample supplies of wood, so there was no need to make houses out of mudbricks and due to whatever reasons they had no inclination to build massive tombs or temples)
    - roughly 3y ago
      Well, if you're interested in written materials in particular, the Maya and Aztec codices were in abundance at the time of the Spanish arrival, as were the Incan quipu (which seem to have been an actual writing system and not just an accounting method). They didn't survive contact - the Spanish burned as many of them as they could get their hands on, and today we've only really got a handful of extant examples left. That's unfortunately the answer for what happened to a lot of New World culture (although the climate and terrain deserves its due especially in Central America, where there's oral history of large cities which we're only now finding by lidar because the jungle's so aggressive). The Olmec are an interesting case here, too - beautiful, just stunning sculptural works, going back to ~2000-1500BC. There's really quite a bit of cultural artifacts found and to be found.
      - 3y ago

rhplus 3y ago

There’s a definition of what constitutes “treasure” in the UK law described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996

pyinstallwoes 3y ago
I was not expecting to find terms that require finding a coroner.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

In the UK (though the law is different in Scotland) it's called 'treasure trove' (though that's not legally correct, I gather) and is assessed by coroners, whose normal responsibility is certifying deaths and reporting on unusual circumstances of deaths. https://www.gov.uk/treasure https://www.gov.uk/treasure rnk> the govt owns any treasure you find. The King, well "the Crown", I guess the £millions we give them each year aren't enough. One of the vestiges of feudalism, he has an army and we (the UK) don't so we apparently abandon reason, and democracy, ... I digress. See the recently updated Treasure Act, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/24 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/24.

yetanotherloser 3y ago
Don't be daft. The king is not the crown. Treasure items found in the UK are compulsory purchased by the state, not taken by the king. It's not a bad system in terms of practical results.

foobarian 3y ago

Sounds like an excellent way to ensure that individuals who find valuable historical artifacts never report them to the authorities and possibly remelt them instead.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
You can even melt it down with just a propane blow torch, so no exotic equipment required. For the finder, seems well worth the hit in historical value vs the risk of the government seizing it without adequate compensation.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  why pay a fee to go into a museum and look at interesting old stuff? you'll never get adequate compensation for that cash! people do have other values than simply the value of melting King Arthur's crown.
yetanotherloser 3y ago
You get far more from the state as historical value than you would from the scrappy as bullion value. So, no, quite the opposite.
- foobarian 3y ago
  This is good info.

mint2 3y ago

I assume you’re talking about finding things on private property since it’s illegal to take artifacts on public land in the US older than a certain age