Who owns found treasure

Please read our Commenting Policy first. Three of four men have been sentenced to a combined 23 years in prison for their roles in finding, hiding and trying to sell a buried trove of Viking loot in the United Kingdom. The Viking hoard included silver ingots, gold coins and jewelry that could re-shape the history books, police said.

However, the treasure-hunters who found it tried to keep it for themselves and sell it off piecemeal. George Powell, 38, Layton Davies, 51, and Simon Wicks, 57, have been convicted of theft, conspiracy to conceal criminal property and conspiracy to convert criminal property.

Powell was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Davies to 8. Paul Wells, 60, has also been convicted of conspiracy to conceal criminal property in connection with the case. He is due to be sentenced on Dec. Governments have been issuing rules about lost and found property—who owns it and how it shall be divided—for millennia.

Today, if an Londoner unearths rare golden coins in his backyard, those belong to the royal family—who would likely pay the digger a handsome fee. But what if someone stumbles across something valuable on public property? Authorities must then wait 90 days, advertise the lost property for a week, and finally release it to the person who found it if no one could prove ownership. A legal distinction that often comes to bear is whether property is abandoned, lost or mislaid.

Abandoned property is something forsaken by a previous owner, who has no intention of returning for it. In other words, museums get a preemptive right to purchase a treasure. The market value is above the amount an antique dealer would pay. As the antique dealer wants to resell items with a margin of profit at market value, they will pay an amount smaller than the market value. Therefore, selling an item directly at market value to a museum can potentially be more profitable for the finder, who skips the middle man and their profit margin.

Compared to other countries, it is a very good arrangement for finders. However, failure to submit found treasure will earn heavy penalties. For example, in , two men were sentenced to ten and eight-and-a-half years of jail time respectively for not having reported a find from the Viking age they made in with metal detectors. Most of the treasure was lost, as the finders sold off many of the coins on the private market.

The English law here is not applicable to Scotland. That said, treasures found in Scotland are also the property of the crown. Nevertheless, the process of what happens when someone finds a treasure is not dissimilar to what happens in the rest of the UK: The find gets assessed by an agency called the Treasure Trove Unit at the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh. The latter is applicable to abandoned goods. The treasure then gets offered to museums. If they are interested in acquiring a treasure, they pay a reward to the finder.

A notable difference to the situation in the rest of the United Kingdom, is that in Scotland, treasure trove law not only applies to coins and other objects made of precious metals. All kinds of artifacts can be deemed treasure in Scottish law. In this case, all kinds of objects can be seen as treasures: fossils, pottery tessels and of course coins, jewelry etc. It generally only applies to objects of scientific value.

Every federal state has their own law that also regulates if a finder gets remuneration. Even though every state has their own law, contrasting with many other places, the gist is this: The state owns all treasures and hardly any state will pay a reward for objects. Bavaria is the odd one in the bunch and has no law regarding treasure troves at all.

Now you may ask, why is the state so precious about owning these treasures? The answer is that there is a conflict of interest at play: the interests of finders in remuneration clash with a societal interest in research. Regulating what to do when artifacts are found is deemed as a necessity, because found objects could be of great scientific value.

The San Jose is one of thousands of shipwrecks around the world and excavating historic cargo is an enticing prospect for archaeologists and treasure hunters. There are international agreements that have rules for some parts of the treasure-hunting process. However, the decision of who is entitled to keep the contents of a valuable vessel tends to end up being made between countries under international law, says Robert Mackintosh, a lawyer and archaeologist at Southampton University.

For example, the ship's original owner has a viable right to ownership. But that right can be superseded by the country which owns the national waters in which the ship was discovered. And hunting for treasure on sunken ships is big business. Speculation about the value of the contents of a wreck can skyrocket even before items have been removed. But often the operational costs of the archaeological investigation can be higher than the value of the wreck itself, says Mr Campbell.

Even so, experts agree that the San Jose has immense financial and cultural value. The Unesco convention on underwater cultural heritage includes rules to help guide best practice for underwater excavations and guidelines regarding the qualifications required for people involved in conservation and site management. The part of Unesco that oversees underwater heritage sites told the BBC it would be delighted to play a role settling claims over shipwrecks.