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.
> 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.
Wouldn't it still be a tiny fraction of what was/can be found in Europe no matter how you define it?
(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.
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)
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.
> 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?
Which I think still holds true (again certain materials (especially in combination with certain climatic conditions) just survive for much longer than others).
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.
people do have other values than simply the value of melting King Arthur's crown.