Posted on 01/03/2015 10:47:58 AM PST by SunkenCiv
The suspect, an unidentified man in his 50s, was nabbed by Border Police officers at Khirbat Marmita, an archaeological site near the town of Naham, equipped with a metal detector and digging tools. The man had several bronze pieces in his possession, but he initially denied illegally searching for antiquities and knowing anything about ancient coins, the IAA said in a statement.
Khirbat Marmita is the site of a Roman and Byzantine-era Jewish town, from which recent limited excavations have yielded wine presses, stone vessels, a ritual bath and burial caves. The Judean Highlands around Beit Shemesh are home to scores of archaeological sites dating back thousands of years.
During the police investigation, the suspect admitted to hunting for ancient coins around his hometown of Beit Shemesh with a metal detector.
A search of the suspect's house by IAA inspectors yielded over 800 coins in addition to bronze necklaces, seals and cosmetics tools, arrowheads, as well as equipment for cleaning metal.
Among the items found in the man's house were 2,400-year-old coins from the Persian period in addition to Hellenistic and Roman era currency and some as recent as the Ottoman era, the IAA said. The coins were confiscated as evidence.
Dr. Eitan Klein, deputy head of the IAA's unit to prevent antiquities theft, said that the artifacts found in the man's possession have "no scientific value" because they were plundered from their archaeological setting, and that there was no way to determine where they came from...
He told The Times of Israel that over the course of 2014, the IAA has busted "probably over 100" antiquities thieves.
The IAA said that damaging archaeological sites is a criminal offense with a five-year prison sentence.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofisrael.com ...
Beit Shemesh man caught while prowling archaeological site with metal detector; found to have immense trove of currency, necklaces, seals, arrowheads and more at his home. Coins confiscated from a suspected antiquities thief's home in Beit Shemesh, December 2014 (photo credit: Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery of the Israel Antiquities Authority)
He’s not just a thief. He robs the world of the knowledge of these sites. These guys really bug me.
In general I would agree but on the other hand something about the government having a monopoly on the sites bugs me. Its like they are the authorized grave robbers.
People like this guy deserve to be busted and fined-archaeological sites and objects belong to everyone-not in some rich person’s collection...
If they belong to everybody then i want to sell my share...
Sorry-my post lacked clarity-I should have said they belong where everyone can see them, not for them to be sold like shares of stock or merchandise.
Isn’t this the same kind of thing Indiana Jones did?
Coins from that era are not really that rare. Like arrowheads, I think its better for them to be with regular people who really would enjoy it, and show em off to their friends, than locked away in a file cabinet to realistically never be seen again.
The truth is, most artifacts wind up in an Indiana Jones warehouse. Where the hell did we get the idea that only a professional archaeologist has the right to go look for things of the past?
This damn society denies people the simple pleasure of taking a metal detector out, or wandering around looking for arrowheads.
“They belong in a museum!”
Belong to everyone? That idea of “belong” has no meaning to me. First, 99% of sites will simply NEVER be excavated. It’s almost the whole planet. Areas of long human civilization are everywhere.
Basically imagine excavating everywhere people live today, with a teaspoon. Its really not much less intense than that.
Second, when they finish the site, everything gets cataloged and stored away in a museum or university. Maybe 1% of what they find gets displayed or loaned out.
And Now the movement is for museums to return their finds to the nations where they came from. SO what happens then? We’ve seen at least 4 examples that I can instantly think of. The Buddha statues in Afghanistan blown up by a tank. ISIS destroyed 1800 year old Church that is the tomb of Jonah. The looting of the national Museum in Iraq. The Looting of the museum of antiquities in Egypt. The threats to find a way to destroy the idolatrous pyramids.
In WWII, the German aircraft industry spread their production into a thousand small shops. I just say we should be doing the same with artifacts. They should be in tens of thousands of homes. They would be safer. They would be seen by far more people who loved them. They would probably be just as well understood.
Many if not most amateur collectors and archaeologists are every bit the equals of the university and government paid ones.
this is my official ruling on the matter
The coin top left in the box is Byzantine Empire.
Finders, keepers, losers, weepers
I won’t weep and I won’t moan
‘Cause I found you and your love so true
And I’m keeping you for my own
Heads I win or tails I lose
I bet my heart to win your love
The day you kissed me, good luck was with me
And I thank my lucky stars above
I’m not the kind
To play for fun
I only play for keeps
And I’m keeping all the love I won
Finders, keepers, losers, weepers
The loser has to pay the score
He lost you and I found you
And I’m keeping you forevermore
I’m not the kind
To play for fun
I only play for keeps
And I’m keeping all the love I won
Finders, keepers, losers, weepers
The loser has to pay the score
He lost you and I found you
And I’m keeping you forevermore
He lost you and I found you
And I’m keeping you forevermore
Yeah, he lost you and I found you
And I’m keeping you forevermore
He lost you and I found you
Sorry. I have no problem with people collecting arrowheads and coins in the dirt. Everytime I hike I keep an eye out for arrowheads and if when I find one it’s mine.
I bought a Roman coin in Covent gardens in London once. Theodosius I, I think. It’d probably be a crime to fly home with it today!
I think the antiquities/archaeological finds should stay and be displayed in a country where they are safe from destruction by fanatics-that certainly excludes those countries with governments and people stuck in the 7th century, like Trashcanistan and such.
I do want all the stuff found displayed-it doesn’t belong in a drawer, either. Small private museums are great places-we have a lot of them with wonderful stuff in them-there need to be more, because they proudly display all their stuff. My cousin’s husband went to work for one of those after having taught and conducting digs for a large concern-he was much happier at the smaller place.
I have some arrowheads I’ve found over the years-most people around here do, since all this area is near a river, and was a camping place for the Apaches, Comanches and others. Nobody cares if you have them-they are literally alkl over the rocks on the bank if the river floods.
Oops-”all” over the rocks-sorry about that.
Granted, it's the middle east, and if he was actually hitting recognized sites then he's going to be pretty busted. But look at England, they get most all of their great "troves" from detectorists/hobby researchers and they have rational law to handle it.
There are a lot of places in the US where you can't detect on certain lands, particularly east of the Mississippi, and they subsequently lose whole areas of historically interesting items and clues when a developer comes along and hauls off the top X feet of dirt for cut/fill purposes.
I've a friend who is a fair expert on the area of his town of residence, the city deigned to let him participate in recovering stuff from a construction site for a city building and let him keep ONE bottle from a huge trove of them recovered on the site. A few years later he was walking by the dumpster of the place and it was filled with boxes full of the bottles recovered (worth hundreds at least apiece on the open market), some moron bureaucrat was "cleaning up the place".
The archaeologists and bureaucrats have their own little exclusive "club" that lays claim on everything old, and then does a weak job to actively explore for it and disseminate it. Worse still, their exclusive domain over it allows them to craft interpretations that fit their political and social agendas. For every item that goes into a display, there are probably hundreds that sit in dusty boxes or get squirreled away in their private collections.
Rationally, if people want the history, they should craft the regulation of it so that it facilitates it's discovery and recording of same by enterprising individuals. Most of the general public gets bent out of shape from people treasure hunting and detecting because they can't stand the thought that someone else might gain some joy and/or wealth from "finding" it, not realizing the insane amount of work that hobbyists devote to pursuing their craft.
Many years back I was prospecting up in the Sierra and had found a little gold. I mentioned it to a person I worked a lot with who was a libtard (less so over time :-)) and they were aghast that you could "go out on public lands and just take the wealth of the people from it without having to turn it over/share it". I noted that she was free to round up as many of the under-the-bridge-dwellers as we could see around us at the time, hump them up into the foothills into the 110+ degree heat and spend a 12 hour day digging up, sieving and sluicing out that "wealth". Silence followed...
Coins, bullets and arrowheads are exempt from the antiquities act (unless recently amended) unless intimately associated with an active site/location.
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