Liberale Briten? Fundregelsysteme im Vergleich

A recently widely reported on judgement on theft of archaeological finds from Hereford has created quite a lot of heated debate among archaeologists and metal detectorists, not least because the main culprit was sentences to 10 years in jail. This is incompatible with the widely held misconception in germanophone archaeology that the English and Welsh system of regulating archaeological finds is particularly liberal and ineffective compared to equivalent germanophone systems. In this contribution, I compare the English and Welsh finds regulation system with its German and Austrian equivalents and demonstrate, that the significant difference between them is not their relative liberality or restrictivity, but that the former has taken a pragmatic, while the latter ones are taking an idealistic, but utterly unrealistic approach to regulating this matter. As a consequence, not only is the English and Welsh system extremely far ahead of the German and Austrian ones where the number of finds reports received is concerned, but also much more effective at preventing damage to protected scheduled monuments and where punishing theft of archaeological finds subject to treasure trove regulations.