Black Market Robbing UK of Its Buried

Submitted by vicky on Tuesday, 18 November 2003 Page Views: 1959

**Rillaton Gold Cup** submitted by Andy B : The Rillaton Gold Cup found burried with a human skeleton in 1837. It is now in the British Museum. Copyright Trusties of the British Museum. (Vote or comment on this photo)

A busy black market in illegally unearthed treasure is robbing Britain of its past and also a better understanding of its present, an expert said Tuesday. "There is a thriving black market in antiquities, a lot of which end up in the United States," said Richard Hobbs, lead curator of the Buried Treasure: Finding Our Past exhibition at the British Museum.

"No one knows how big the black market is, although there have been several attempts to assess it," he told Reuters. "There could potentially be millions of pounds worth of material."

Hobbs said there were several rare but revealing instances of buried treasure being found but then systematically plundered -- such as the Roman temple at Wanborough, Surrey, which was found by chance in 1983 but completely looted a year later.

"Coins from the temple started turning up in sale catalogues about two years later," he said. "Sometimes we can get some of the treasure back. But it is difficult. We want to encourage people to have a responsibility to the past."

Hobbs stressed that not only did the vast majority of treasure hunters who regularly comb the countryside with metal detectors stand little chance of finding anything of value, the handful who did tended to be law-abiding and declare the find.

"Finding something significant or valuable is the same odds as winning the lottery," Hobbs said.

"Every year about 500,000 objects come up. Most of it is junk, but not all. I suppose that every year we get two or three significant treasure finds," he added.

The exhibition, which opens to the public Friday and runs to mid-March, contains some of the key discoveries through the ages -- 95 percent of which have been found by amateurs with metal detectors rather than by trained archaeologists.

There is the Hoxne Hoard of late fourth century Roman coins, and gold and silver jewellery -- the largest such find in Britain -- that earned Eric Lawes 1.75 million pounds in treasure trove when he stumbled across it in 1992 while using a metal detector to search for a lost hammer in Suffolk.

There is also the Mildenhall Treasure of giant Roman silver platters -- the most important find of Roman silver in the world -- unearthed in 1942 also in Suffolk but only declared four years later.

The two finders -- farmer Gordon Butcher and his boss Sidney Ford -- got just 1,000 pounds each to punish them for trying to conceal the treasure.

"We are trying to get across the idea that while the objects are very beautiful, they only mean anything in their context. We are discovering about ourselves and our heritage as a result," Hobbs said.

But among the gold and silver there are also buckets of bent spoons, broken buckles and discarded toys that constitute the majority of what comes up out of the ground.

"Many of these are interesting, although not valuable. They give a peek into the ordinary past," Hobbs said. "Most people just throw them away. But one chap collected 11,000 of them over the years."

Source: Reuters UK 18/11/2003

Contributor Bio for vicky: Ex Megalithic Portal Editor, Co-author of 'Rock Around the Peak - Megalithic Monuments of the Peak District' and... More

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