Sycamore Gap Tree at Hadrian's Wall cut down by 16-year old British Vandal

National Trust

One of the most photographed trees in the world, the Sycamore Gap Tree stood in a dramatic dip in Hadrian's Wall, well within Northumberland National Park and also on land cared for by the National Trust, just next to Milecastle 39. Hadrian’s Wall and Housesteads Fort is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The tree was felled overnight in what appears to be an act of premeditated vandalism. A sixteen-year old boy has been arrested in connection with this heritage crime. Some young heritage vandals in the UK buy metal detectors, some chainsaws.

BBC (Ian Sproat)

Richard Beale/Roma Numismatics Fake Provenance Case

Sarah Saey & the BBC Arabic Investigations team, 'Auctioneer exposed by BBC admits illegally selling rare ancient coins' BBC News Arabic 27th August 2023.

A British auctioneer who was at the centre of a BBC investigation has pleaded guilty at a New York court to a series of charges in connection with unlawful sales of rare ancient coins. Richard Beale, director of London-based auction house Roma Numismatics, admitted two counts of conspiracy and three counts of criminal possession of stolen property, court documents show. He was accused of falsifying the provenance of the most expensive coin ever auctioned - the gold Eid Mar, which fetched $4.19m (£3.29m) in 2020 - and an ancient silver Sicily Naxos Coin, which sold at the same time for $292,000. He has also admitted to falsifying the provenance of a number of silver Alexander the Great decadrachms from the "Gaza Hoard", which were sold by Roma Numismatics and whose suspicious origin was brought to light by a BBC News Arabic documentary in 2020.

Beale is next due to appear before the New York Supreme Criminal Court in March.

Half Full, or Half Empty: "British Museum recovers some of 2,000 stolen items"

Sean Seddon, ' British Museum recovers some of 2,000 stolen items' BBC News 26.08.2023.

About 2,000 items are thought to have been stolen from the British Museum, but some of the missing treasures have started to be recovered, chairman George Osborne has confirmed.[...] The museum, one of the UK's most prestigious cultural institutions, has been under pressure since revealing earlier this month that a number of treasures were reported "missing, stolen or damaged".[...] Mr Osborne - who was appointed as chair of the museum in June 2021 - told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that "we have already started to recover some of the stolen items". "We believe we have been the victim of thefts over a long period of time and frankly more could have been done to prevent them," he said. Asked where the missing items were located, he said "some members of the antiquarian community are actively cooperating with us" and that recoveries so far were a "silver lining to a dark cloud". He said he was confident that "honest people" will return items found to have been stolen, but acknowledged that "others may not".

 

Unlucky

 
A hundred billion galaxies
Each with a billion stars
And Three trillion planets,
Yet in all that mind-boggling complexity
Only one foolish corner was Brexity

The Articles Ten

This is pretty easy to remember, because they both have the same number and similar content:

Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.Paris, France14 November 1970

Article 10
The States Parties to this Convention undertake:
(a) To restrict by education, information and vigilance, movement of cultural property illegally removed from any State Party to this Convention and, as appropriate for each country, oblige antique dealers, subject to penal or administrative sanctions, to maintain a register recording the origin of each item of cultural property, names and addresses of the supplier, description and price of each item sold and to inform the purchaser of the cultural property of the export prohibition to which such property may be subject;
(b) To endeavour by educational means to create and develop in the public mind a realization of the value of cultural property and the threat to the cultural heritage created by theft, clandestine excavations and illicit exports.

Convention for the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage of Europe (revised) (Valletta, 1992)

Article 10
Each Party undertakes:
i to arrange for the relevant public authorities and for scientific institutions to pool information on any illicit excavations identified;
ii to inform the competent authorities in the State of origin which is a Party to this Convention of any offer suspected of coming either from illicit excavations or unlawfully from official excavations, and to provide the necessary details thereof;
iii to take such steps as are necessary to ensure that museums and similar institutions whose acquisition policy is under State control do not acquire elements of the archaeological heritage suspected of coming from uncontrolled finds or illicit excavations or unlawfully from official excavations;
iv as regards museums and similar institutions located in the territory of a Party but the acquisition policy of which is not under State control:
    a to convey to them the text of this (revised) Convention;
    b to spare no effort to ensure respect by the said museums and institutions 
    for the  principles set out in paragraph 3 above;
v to restrict, as far as possible, by education, information, vigilance and co-operation, the transfer of elements of the archaeological heritage obtained from uncontrolled finds or illicit excavations or unlawfully from official excavations.

Now, I reckon this blog is doing what it can to get the message out, but this is my hobby. Ask yourselves which of the archaeological organizations you pay for directly (through subscriptions) and indirectly (come out of other pools of money) are actually ACTIVELY doing very much of that education. outereach or whatever they want to call it. Will my Mum back in rural Homeshire hear the truth about metal detecting, the depletion of the archaeological record and the true face of the antiquities market and the harm they are all doing from the local (allegedly public-facing) archaeological organizations of the UK or from her son in far-off Poland? Come on archies, get on with doing something about this.

Illegal Artefact hunting in Poland: Action Pandora (I)

Artefact hunting in Poland is rather like the Detector-archaeology of Denmark, where amateurs with metal detectors take part in conservation and archaeological programmes either as part of teams or as individuals working on the basis of a permit. In Poland however there are difficulties persuading artefact hunters to actually apply for the permits to allow their work to be integrated with the work mof heritage professionals and archaeologists. It is estimated that only about "1%" of detecting is done on the basis of the proper paperwork. It is estimated by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (MKiDN) that there are some 100 000 active metal detector users in Poland, which means that there is an awful lot of illegal artefact hunting going on. By the same token, very many archaeological and historically important artefacts (in the Polish terminology zabytki) are being taken away from sites with no record of their existence. This is a matter for concern in a country like Poland in which all such objects are automatically state property, for the benefit of all ciitizens. In the past, it has been difficuult to prosecute artefact hunters unless they are caught in the act, or are selling on the internet artefacts that they cannot account for the legal origins of.

The MKiDN and archaeological community have long been pressurising the detecting community to conform to the existing legislation, that was liberalised in 2003 making it easier than it had been for amateurs to apply for permits (while at the same time making it a crime, no longer just an offence, to hunt for artefacts without a permit). This howver had little chance of success against the hardcore criminal collectors. Most of them search for militaria and other artefacts in locations deep in Poland's dense forests where the chances of them being located are next to zero. Most of them avoid selling artefacts openly online or discussing them openly on the several metal detecting forums. They know they are under observation and will be spotted. For the same reason, they keep their collections very much to themselves, especially if they contain old weapons, the Polish authorities are very sensitive about these issues. Nevertheless metal detectorists were frequently targeted during EU-wide actions against culture crime, such as Operation Pandora and Polish police often gained kudos from some of the impressive hauls of confiscated items during such actions.

The Polish artefact hunting and collecting community, unable to clean up their own community decided attack was the best means of defence. Starting in 2021, they began attacking archaeologists and their methods members of staff of the Polish conservation services, including reportedly by harassment. The boasted of their activities in social media. They feigned an interest in  the "well-being of Poland's heritage" as a smoke screen for their activities, which were mainly intended to deflect attention from their own artefact-hunting activities (here digging up and "recovering" artefacts was represented as heritage protection). On their Facebook page the PZE included a series of reports of allegedly improper activities and delays by individual (hard-pressed and severely under resourced) local offices of the conservation services and then the cases they began winning one-by-one in the administrative against them. In just 2022, they started 16 such cases, trying to tie up the conservation services in court proceedings for most of the year. Such an environment does not favour collaboration and it seems that the directorate of the conservation services had had enough of being forced to deal with these deliberately disruptive trouble-makers with their sense of entitlement.

It should be remembered that in recent years (and specially after the legislative changes of 2018) there was a group of law-abiding individuals and collectives of metal detectorists in Poland that fully engaged with the conservation programmes organised by the Polish conservation services and searched and documented their work on the basis of the legally-required paperwork, depositing the finds with museums as required by the permits. These people contributed to our knowledge of the European past.  

But alongside them were those that had no patience to file an application for a permit, or who knew ytthat if they used a permit, they'd actually have to identify the landowner and get permission to search and remove artefacts, and they would lose many of the artefacts because they would be taken for the public collections, instead of the artefact hunter's own collection. The result is that thousands of detector users went out illegally, with no paperwork, chose a site on the basis of how productive it would be of "fanty" (nice finds)  rather than what they'd damage by digging it - but also how visible it was to passers by, so they'd not be disturbed while looting it. This is how most artefact hunting is done in Poland today.

Illegal Artefact Hunting in Poland (II): The "Pandora Paragraphs"

(Second instalment of a two-part article - part one here).
The appointment of a new head of the Historical Monuments Protection Service, Jarosław Sellin (title, Generalny Konserwator Zabytków - GKZ) in January 2022 brought a number of changes. Among them is a solution to Poland's problem with illegal and noisy metal detectorists. A new suite of legislation is currently going through the Polish parliament that might be referred to as the 'Pandora paragraphs'. This incorporates novel digital surveillance methods into the process of 'civilising' (as the Sellin puts it) the metal detectorists and cutting out criminality completely. 

The idea is simple. Having the intention to go out and search a particular property for historical objects with a metal detector, the artefact hunter needs to obtain the landowner's permission. Instead of first applying for a permit, the artefact hunter uses their mobile phone to register the search and supply the relevant personal details, time, extent.  This is done through an application - in fact an entire ICT system called a "Register of Searches" (RPsz). The idea of this system is that it "supports citizens involved in amateur searches for artefacts" but at the same time facilitates the authorities to receive this information about what is happening to these locations, and real time information about each artefact dug up. These have to be entered in real time to avoid charges of illegal appropriation of undocumented artefacts, should a police patrol do a spot check.

Another important feature is that this application is automatically linked to an updated digital map on some form of GIS platform that will contain information of the location and extent of several types of sites and monuments under protection under Poland's several laws (800 000 archaeological sites for example). Polish detectorists have often complained that this information is not easily available to them. Now there will be a dedicated resource to help them stay off these sites (in the register of monuments or included in the Sites and Monuments Record and within 10 meters from them, historical monuments, cultural parks, cemeteries, graves, war graves and places of execution, as well as monuments of extermination and their protection zones). According to the revised law, conducting metal detecting searches in these areas is a crime that exposes the culprit to a fine, restriction of liberty or imprisonment for up to 2 years). If the artefact hunter uses a phone to report detecting on or too near one of these sites, it will be detected by the conservation authorities (even if the searcher does not register a search there, the phone can be traced). Then the procedure can be initiated to punish this offence.   

The attraction for the artefact hunter is that this revision of the legislation eliminates any barriers to getting out in the field, spade in hand, as quickly as possible in the form of an administrative procedure. It allows the searcher to avoid all possible designated no-search areas.* Amateur searches can be conducted there only AFTER first reporting them via the application (non-reporting at the time of beginning the search is also an offence, and again phone records can be checked).

It is in the treatment of the reporting of found artefacts that this system provides the most possibilities for administrators and legislators. It is mandatory for all found objects to be immediately reported, at the moment of discovery, via the application all found objects that may reasonably be presumed to be historical or archaeological finds.** These records stored in the application will later be individually examined by the staff of the provincial conservator's office and declared to be historical artefacts worthy of preservation in a state collection, or artefacts that can be kept (or discarded) by the finder and landowner (or treated as lost property under the regulations regarding this). The staff of the regional conservation offices will have six working days to prepare written feedback (in the form of an administrative decision) on each of the reported artefacts and instructions on further actions.

Obviously present staffing levels in the regional offices run b local government are insufficient for such a process if there are (as the creators of the application assess) 100 000 metal detectorists in Poland. These offices are therefore obliged by this new law to employ more archaeologists to fulfil this role. Rather like Britain's Portable Antiquities Scheme. The latter costs 1.5 million pounds for basic running costs alone, while local government picks up the bill for office space and staff salaries, and eventual expenses if staff have to go into the field. It is estimated (Mike Lewis pers. comm.) that each record in the database costs 30GBP to create, maintain and store. So the Polish government is being very generous with public funds to uphold archaeology. At last. I suppose it is not out of the question that as the database gets bigger, metal detectorists will have to pay some kind of a fee to support its operation. 

Another benefit is that by making use of the application for all people using a metal detector on land, this application immediately creates a full database of the personal data of all metal detectorists in Poland, in addition one linked to a particular phone. These are the new technologies that can be used to keep track of citizens' activities. The application gives law enforcement an ideal tool for detecting and at the same time evidence gathering on cultural property crime. Any seller in a market selling artefacts from metal detecting can be challenged to show a passing police patrol that each artefact on their stall  is on the RPsz database as having been reported and then disclaimed by the state. After 1st May 2024 when this law comes in, any objects not there are by definition of the new law illegal and the seller can be detained on the spot. In the same way, three guys in camo lurking in a forest glade with metal detectors (perhaps located with the aid of phone data) will either be able to show that the search area was previously reported, and all the artefacts in their finds pouches are already in the RPsz database, or again it is arrest on the spot. In the same way, a search of a detectorists house will be speeded up by asking the collector to demonstrate the items they have stored there were excavated before the new law came in (in which case they can show the permits)  and those that were dug subsequently, so should be in the application's database.

All in all therefore, this seems like an interesting resolution of the metal detectorist problem and if used properly a pretty effective way of  'civilising' the milieu - and locking up not a few of the more persistent offenders. 

 

* This nanny state resolution however still does not absolve would-be artefact hunters from the obligation to check the status of the land they intend to search as the database will not contain any information on restrictions arising from other regulations (such as environment-protection laws or information on chemical hazards etc).

** this is a key problem that will have to be resolved. Many Polish artefact hunters question the notion of "archaeological find" in the case of, for example, remains from WW2. They say they are not archaeological material, and so if they go out looking for it, they should not have to register their search. This requires separate documents from the MKiDN establishing with firm guidelines what is and what is not "potentially archaeological material", as this question is crucial to the whole working of the new system. This should not only include metal objects but also worked lithic material and ceramics. It should not be left to the amateur to select out from the material collected in an amateur search what they "think" is "not worth reporting".