According to Dr. Leszek Gardela, senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, it is illegal to use a metal detector in Poland unless you are an approved researcher. This would seriously hamper archaeology, as it is amateurs looking for things who make a lot of the finds in West Europe (especially England and Scandinavia) and America.
To an American especially, it just seems like a silly infringement on individual rights. What do they think is going to go wrong if citizens are wandering the beaches looking for lost jewelry?
Several years ago I had an incident when removing a glove to extract car keys from my pocket where my wedding right was flung-off into the fresh snow, I know not where.
ReplyDeleteI was happy that a family from church answered our plea for a metal detector to borrow, that it was not only legal but popular to have them.
When I lived in the UK there were several controversies related to people finding ancient objects when metal-detecting. The sides seem to be fairly summed up in the following Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/18/the-tense-truce-between-detectorists-and-archaeologists
It strikes me that UK culture is particularly amenable to something like the antiquities-reporting program that has been lately set-up. The same approach would not work in other parts of Europe.
It is very important that nobody ever find and take the government’s, I mean other people’s property, and benefit. I’d bet it’s a holdover from the communists but with Poles one never really knows.
ReplyDeleteThe TV show "The Detectorists" inspired my spouse to obtain a detector and use it frequently on the ancestral farmstead. Mostly to find shotgun shell caps and Bits Off Old Tractors...
ReplyDeleteThe UK landscape has a lot more history to dig up than Texas, for all that Texans themselves are quite proud of their one or two centuries of the stuff. The notion that one side of the pond considers "100 years a long time ago and the other 100 miles a long way away" kicks in.
There was very recently, this: https://fortune.com/2023/02/18/fbi-civil-war-gold-dents-run-pennsylvania-lawsuit-dennis-parada-finders-keepers-detectorist/
@ J Melcher - Bill Bryson, an Iowa writer who moved to NH and then East Anglia whom I have written about in the past, discusses the contrast in Notes from a Big Country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_a_Big_Country
ReplyDeleteHis politics are infuriatingly typical for a Midwestern boy who wants to prove that he's a really smart international now, not an ugly American anymore. But he's not stupid or entirely unobservant and his views on the cultural differences are interesting. Like Tom Friedman, he keeps making really astute observations about Hanover NH vs East Anglia, UK, then backpedaling like crazy for the next year.
The law about detectors isn't enforced in Poland. One can easily buy it and I've seen people searching through beaches. I guess it would be used against you in case of finding something valuable. By law it belongs to the state.
ReplyDeleteGood to know. Such things are an unfortunate legacy of communist rule, I believe. There are laws which no one is going to obey, but they are there and they can use them against you if they need them. My favorite example is the public libraries in Romania when we were there fro the late 90s through the early 00s. You could not take out a book for another person. They had to fill out a form on their own. This would automatically eliminate young mothers taking out books for their children, especially preschoolers. Therefore, libraries should not even be carrying books for people learning to read, nor even for learning Romanian. But researchers and young mothers are the main users of libraries everywhere. One might even say they are the most important users.
ReplyDeleteThus, everyone is used to ignoring the government in a hundred ways, because whether you are powerful or not is the only determinant whether you will be found guilty of, say, a hit and run killing a young child. Until the day when the rent comes due, and not only will there be a hundred provable crimes against you, there will be a whole county of people who will not dare stand up for you.
Another possibility, that also aligns with dhill's comment, is that there is probably a goodly amount of ordnance from first half of the 20th century still buried in Poland, and the 'no metal detecting' rule is a good way of deflecting government responsibility if somebody finds and digs up something that goes boom. I don't know if it happens as frequently but I remember reading that there are still no-go zones in France, and French and Belgian farmers regularly dig up shells during spring field work.
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