Ninth-Century Coins Change Our Understanding of Alfred the Great
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Although these guys obviously wanted to make a quick buck and to hell with history.
If the human remains are of ancient Native American origin, then there may be other restrictions of what cane be done with the remains and any associated funerary objects.
Nor (in the US) do most people get to use birds, eggs, or even feathers of 1,000+ species of birds, even if found on their land, because of endangered species law (starting with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918).
And someone may have ownership rights to the land, but not mineral rights.
Therefore, land ownership clearly does not mean ownership and control of everything on the land.
You are entitled to fight in court, and if you lose, you get whatever the goverment feels right to pay for the land.
Without it, you couldn't build things like roads.
It's not that ot does not belong to them: if the find is deemed a treasure they are obligated to offer it to museums for purchase at a price set by a valuation committee.
If museums are interested then they keep it and can do whatever they want with it.
IMHO, either you sell at auction to find out orr you ask experts to value.
Since the sale is not on the open market they picked the second option, which is reasonable.
The spirit of this kind of laws is not only to protect the patrimony but to keep the objects within the boundaries of the country. Without these laws the objects will fly to the best buyer in the globe.
Whenever I'm in a museum abroad I always like to visit the Dutch/Flemish masters section. There are good ones in Spain but those are honourable spoils of war. The American museums are wealthy industrialists buying paintings at an auction.
There are also more complex cases, for example the recovery of stolen art from the Nazis.
Are you saying that taking paintings via violence is ethically better than buying them on the open market?
The post must be a joke or sarcasm surely?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
I think that's the right call. A common person can find an old coin and not really think about the historical impact it has. Merely keep it on his or her shelf or bring it to a shop for some extra cash.
But once you're in the realm of finding multiple coins, the onus kinda changes. There may be more, greed sets in and wanting to conceal the find is bad. Also, England doesn't "take their treasure" it buys it off of them if the museum wants to buy it and for a fair price.
I used to be annoyed/bewildered at it, but ever since the time sitting on a bench in the park got criminalised, I get it. There is no common good in a low trust society.
What does that mean?
Yes, taking your history seriously is a good thing.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-case-of-the-4-million-g...
while the free market generally works, when you have a one-of-a-kind item which could never be replaced and uber-rich people who'd like to lock it up so that no one can see it, the idea of a "fair price" kinda breaks down.
1. https://www.ashmolean.org/watlington-hoard) 2. https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/751244
I wonder about the nature of this reform.
E.g. were prior coins not made of "high-quality silver"?
> Don't fill out treasure form 205
> Go to jail
lol
* Acquire treasure in dubious circumstances ("jury heard that Pilling, from Rossendale, Lancashire, was in possession of the coins knowing they should have been declared. Pilling has never disclosed the full identity of the person he acquired them from. Pilling recruited Best, of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, to try to sell the coins.")
* Spend years selling the treasure in a manner that makes it clear you understand that it's a crime ("Best, who sent an email which read: “They are a hoard as you know they are this can cause me problems all you had to do was say you didn’t want them and that was the end of it.”)
* Go to jail after remaining uncooperative and failing to provide leads that could recover more of the treasure
It seems like a slippery slope that favours the most powerful entity, the government, over many smaller entities - millions of landowners.
I understand the argument that history is to be preserved, but this seems especially draconian. I recently saw another guy from England post on Twitter that badgers tunnelled out his house foundation and he's not allowed to do anything about it, on pains of six months in prison.
In every society, you need a balance of power. You can't let the Sir Humphreys [1] take over.
He did indeed say (tweet) that [1] ...
> In every society, you need a balance of power.
Which in this case exists - there's a clear exception [2] that allows him to take action to prevent damage to his house.
See:
[1] https://twitter.com/mhudack/status/1650854942511448064
[2] https://twitter.com/TheAlanColeShow/status/16510204110253670...
Here's the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
I'm not British but even I've heard about the law by watching Time Team on YouTube.
Just because you think X is bad doesn't make Y bad.
In the US the government can prevent you from killing a protected species, picking up the feathers of a protected species, digging up a graveyard without permission, desecrating burial goods on your land, and more.
US state laws regarding treasure troves may require reporting as well, says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_trove#State_laws , and different states have different conclusions about who gets to keep the treasure.
I don't see how this British law stands out in any way as being unbalanced or especially draconian.
Ownership is always limited in various ways. Property rights are a social arrangement, in which the community agrees to recognize and enforce certain exclusive rights for individuals, but under set conditions.
One of the conditions of land ownership in the UK is that if you find something of great historical importance, you don't get to keep it. That's a perfectly reasonable arrangement, in my opinion. The idea is that ancient objects such as these coins are the heritage of the entire community.
* Exceptions exist for subterranean mineral wealth, e.g. mining licenses can be issued against the wishes of a land owner
* Similarly the landowner has no exclusive right to the air above the property beyond some low altitude
* Compulsory acquisition can be invoked by the state
In many cases the landowner is compensated, though they may not like the amount. In the case of treasure in the UK the 1996 Act provides for a reward of "up to the market value". In those case the treasure hunters weren't on their own land and (https://www.herefordshirehoard.co.uk/the-story):
"The judge who sentenced the men said they had cheated not only the landowner, but also the public of ‘exceptionally rare and significant coins’.
Had the metal detectorists stayed on the right side of the law they could have expected to receive, as the judge pointed out to them, a half share or a third share of the hoard’s value."
Go try to build an unusually tall structure on your residential lot, or two houses on one lot, or a multifamily dwelling in single family zoning, or even just a shed right up next to your property line.
Go try to build something the wrong way; build a vernacular house, with no formal blue prints.
Owning property conveys a number of rights, but it is very easy to run up against the limits of those rights.
Have you ever owned land and/or built a house ?
They can force you to do a lot of shit actually, and most of it makes sense because people before you were dumb as fuck and thought they could build their own 4 stories house out of dried cow shit and plywood
Same reasons new cars have seatbelts, airbags, abs. Same reason tall building have to have emergency exits, proper ventilation, fire retardant material, &c.
If you think this "found a coin can't keep it" is a slippery slope you must live in a very weird place because I can come up with hundreds of more restrictive laws that you have to abide by since you're born.
We built communities out of common interests and for safety, not for absolute freedom to do whatever the fuck we want while disregarding everything and everyone else
> You can't let the Sir Humphreys [1] take over.
Would you have an issue if I built a 50m tall tower next to your garden, shading your entire land from the sun ?
Or if I dig a well to tap into our common underground water reserve but drain it in a month to sell bottled water ?
There are many Tudor farm houses built out of dried cow/horse shit and hair where this hoard was found, and school children visit these 500 year old buildings daily to experience the engineering of these dumb people.
It's an intolerable impertinence that these buildings can't be knocked down and replaced with glass and steel boxes that conform to the latest construction regulations.
Have you heard of things like "The Great fire of London" though ?