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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

99 times out of 100 a guy with a metal detector is only finding already disturbed surface material plus, in the case of individual scattered precious metal coins, they don't "date" places very well because their value and use covers multiple time periods because they don't depreciate.

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...