27th April 2011, 06:01 PM
the invisible man Wrote:Whether it ought to be is another matter: ideally any artefacts over, I don't know, say 500 years perhaps, should be publicly owned, but that'll never happen.
This is already the case in Scotland, where objects found during excavation or while metal detecting belong not to the landowner or the finder, but to the Crown (there is of course an argument to be made as to whether these objects should belong to the Crown, or rather should be deemed the property of the Scottish nation, but I don't intend to address the pros and cons of a republic here). The finder of a valuable item may (and usually does) receive an ex gratia payment, but this system does at least mean that the state should have first refusal on finds, hopefully resulting in the ability to prevent the export of interesting or valuable items to private collections
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum