Pembrokeshire treasure hunter unearths Celtic chariot | Hacker News Reader

Pembrokeshire treasure hunter unearths Celtic chariot

bbc.com

80 pointsyitchelle38 comments

It seems like the UK government’s Treasure Act really incentivizes the right kind behavior in these situations. He found it, contacted the right people and once it gets evaluated he and the landowner are going to get a big payday. Better than making off with valuable artifacts and destroying the site.

> The Treasure Act allows for a reward up to the market value of the treasure to be shared among the finder and the tenants and/or owner of the land on which the treasure was found. The amount of the reward and how it is divided among the claimants is determined by the Treasure Valuation Committee.

Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996

The Treasure Act 1996 only has territorial extent over E+W+NI, notably excluding Scotland, where treasure is still dealt with under (Scots) Common Law.

Notably, any reward is granted purely to the finder, though there is no default right to search land one does not own (and if discovered without permission of the landowner, there have been cases where the entire reward has been awarded to the landowner); de-facto, following the English and Northern Irish law, landowners normally grant access such that any reward is split equally.

>> market value of the treasure

Key words. If is isn't "treasure" it isn't subject to the act. Material belonging to British military units isn't treasure and remains property of the crown forever (basically all ship-related stuff). Anything else that once belonged to the crown still does. So if some lord buried a stash of silver and never dug it up, you may need to dig into family histories to determine if that lord's property had ever reverted to the crown. Treasure hunting isn't ever simple and you never really know if you can keep the stuff until long after the initial discovery.

Note too that the act speaks of "two or more" coins. One coin is treated differently than a find of two. This goes back to an older distinction between buried treasure and lost property. A single coin may fall out of a pocket and be lost. Two coins together are presumed deliberately buried or otherwise hidden.

Has there ever been a case where treasure belonging to a lord whose assets were seized 500+ years ago was deemed property of the crown?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_trove#England_and_Wal...

"The Crown had a prerogative right to treasure trove, and if the circumstances under which an object was found raised a prima facie presumption that it had been hidden, it belonged to the Crown unless someone else could show a better title to it.[25] The Crown could grant its right to treasure trove to any person in the form of a franchise."

So you didn't dig through the records to see if they have been seized. It belonged to the crown unless you could find reason why it should not. If there was no clear owner, it was presumed to be owned by the crown.

That was back in the 19th century and earlier though.

From around WW1 it became default practice to pay the full value if a museum took it, or return the items to the finder if not. The 96 act added nuance and the split with the land owner. Mainly, I think, thanks to detectorists finding stuff on land that was someone else's.

How is the market value determined, especially for items that have never been sold on the market before?

Rarity, significance, state of conservation... I'm not surprised a market value can be assessed by people working in the field.

There is a market for these things. Perhaps the treasury acts as escrow service, with an ever so slight bias!?

Typically at some kind of auction.

Indeed. These sorts of finds rarely make the news in countries where metal detecting is explicitly and/or effectively against the law -- not because they're not occurring, but because they happen outside of the law and the artifacts are sold on the black market.

How do they determine market value without a market?

For a comedic peek into the culture around Britain's detectorists (ties in nicely with this story), check out the series Detecorists, available on Netflix:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detectorists

> "He emailed a picture to an expert contact who said it was part of a Celtic horse harness and dating from around 600 BC.

Professionals should have taken over here.

> Mr Smith, from Milford Haven, went straight back the following day. He dug down to"[...]

The context layers in a dig betray is often very important. Even if he didn't destroy valuable objects, he most probably destroyed a lot of valuable information!

Sure

But when faced with

"But he had to convince the experts. One of the first he spoke to told him: "No, you're wrong. One's never been found in this part of the country.""

what can you do?

He certainly didn't give up. He seems tenacious. And that seems the right thing to have been done.

> "I knew the importance of them straight away," said Mr Smith who has been prospecting for around 30 years.

> "It was just instinct. I'd read all about chariot burials and just wished it could have been me, so finding this has been a privilege."

The area has a long Celtic history. For readers unfamiliar perhaps with the UK or this part of the UK, some context: the stones in Stonehenge [0] were sourced from the Preseli Hills [1] several hundred kilometers away (in the part of Wales this site is).

Pembrokeshire is beautiful, and somewhat rugged. Rolling hills meet sandy beaches, equally meeting treacherous cliffs. As a child, I remember frequently climbing to the peak of an iron age settlement in the morning, sort-of mixing-in with the sheep left to roam there, then after lunch, a quite long walk down to the sandy beaches it overlooked. Trying to catch shrimp in the sandy pools the escaping tide left.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preseli_Hills

I have similar memories. I remember as kids we used to play in an old castle by the beach, its just open and anyone can go and wander around it. I travel around the UK with my kids and these days everything wants to charge an entry fee, even other castles in similar states of decay/disrepair.

Easily my favourite castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llansteffan_Castle

> I travel around the UK with my kids and these days everything wants to charge an entry fee, even other castles in similar states of decay/disrepair.

> Easily my favourite castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llansteffan_Castle

Llansteffan Castle is free to enter and wander around in the way you did as a kid, despite being privately owned

What's not allowed are things like wedding photography and drone flying, at least without paying (and having various insurance).

Basically it's free unless you're making money from it.

There are free to access castle ruins and buildings of a similar age and much older all over the UK, they're hardly in short supply. Maybe you didn't intend it but this comes across as overly pessimistic. It's hardly as if every bit of history in the country has had a fence put round it to charge an entry fee.

Not trying to say what you're describing doesn't exist, but the only place I can think of that I've been to that charges to see some 3ft high bits of wall would be Old Sarum, but that also has great views.

Indeed there are so many ruined castles, hillforts, vitrified forts and brochs about that even most locals are fairly oblivious to there existence.

Only a tiny percentage charge and are treated as proper tourist attractions.

Coincidence - that's one of my favourite castles too.

He didn't dig very far - only as far as he needed to show what it was - and left most of it for the archaeologists to dig, if you read the article

The article says he's been finding these items for 30+ years. He may not be a "professional" archaeologist but I'm sure he's more than familiar with the process and the protocol around these things as well as the importance of not destroying valuable evidence. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, at least.

But this guy was a hunter. There is a legal tension whenever a hunter finds the tip of what looks to be a big find. Should they hand it to experts, and let the experts make the further discoveries, or thouroughly document the site so they can claim the credit for each object found?

There are normally negotiations, and silly theatrics whereby the original detectorist stands amongst the scientists, so they are seen to be "discovering" each piece as it is unearthed. I dont fault them. Millions might be at stake.

I can't fault the detectorists for wanting to be involved, it would be a real shame to discover something like this and then just hand it straight off to someone else the second things started to get interesting. A lot of these people are very passionate about history, any potential financial incentive might just be a secondary consideration.

In places like britain, or egypt, artifacts are literally everywhere. You cannot put a shovel in without hitting something. So, like it or not, history and science are not always the primary concern. Farmers want thier fields back asap. Teams need to move fast, often with only a single season of actual digging.

very cool find. archeologists also destroy a lot of evidence, and if they find anything that doesn't fit rpevious findings often either ignore it or are highly skeptical, which is why i assume he hd some trouble to convince this was an actual find, and had to ... dig a little deeper :D

> if they find anything that doesn't fit rpevious findings often either ignore it or are highly skeptical\

If they find something that doesn't fit previous findings, they publish on it and get tenure.

You have a very optimistic outlook on the response of the academic community to findings which refute long-help beliefs.

I'm a former academic, so my "optimistic outlook" is informed by direct observation of novel findings being career making. What is your pessimism based on?

Tenure is not a thing in the UK.

It might not be called tenure, but "professor for life" absolutely is a thing at British universities.

"Despite this recent erosion of tenure in the UK, it is still practiced in most universities. Permanent contracts use the word "tenure" for lecturers who are "reappointed to the retiring age". This is equivalent to a US tenure decision"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lecturer

Certainly the impression I got when I worked as a contract researcher for 6 years - if you weren't on an explicitly temporary contract (which I was) then you were probably there for life if you wanted.

Nobody talks about tenure though - there's no great divide between tenure track and non-tenure track. There's no massive achievement when you 'make tenure'. People don't talk about the number of people with tenure, or whether someone has tenure or not.

Generally in the UK, once you've been in a job for a few years, they need a pretty good reason to get rid of you, so it's less of a big difference from a normal permanent employment contract.

I think that's because everyone pretty much has it - so no reason to talk about it.

Isn’t that the same protection that you get with any permanent contract in the UK? You can still be laid-off etc but the assumption is it will continue indefinitely.

Maybe I’m mistaken but I thought American tenure was a different level of protection intended to protect freedom of inquiry.

That may happen sometimes, but there's also examples of findings that contradict popular hypotheses and the person who found it gets their career destroyed and labelled as a "crank" and a "fraud" rather than getting tenure.

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