The figure of a treasure hunter wandering through a plowed field has become as familiar an element of a country landscape as a wedge of cranes in the autumn sky or the stuck car of an overly self-confident mushroom picker. Often, in a freshly plowed field, you can see not one, or even two, but a dozen or more lovers of instrument search. They walk there, you know, looking for something, digging for something, putting something in their pockets and in special bags.
However, how can this be? After all, if you believe numerous reports in the media, all these citizens and citizens are criminals, black archaeologists, grave diggers and robbers of archaeological heritage. And, if this is so, then why are they not caught, detained, or arrested?
Really why?
And, here, there are two points of view, or rather versions. If you believe the opinions of individual archaeologists who periodically give interviews to the same media, this is happening with the direct connivance of the police. Moreover, in some statements of people from science you can hear completely terrible theories. That, they say, the police patronize all these black archaeologists, they also cover and, scary to think, lead.
The second version is that people with a metal detector in a plowed field are not breaking the law and there is no reason for police officers to detain them.
How come? Let's understand it at a level understandable to the common man.
If we consider instrument search as a hobby, then it will be the same hobby as picking mushrooms, hunting or fishing. In instrument search, just like in hunting or fishing, there are areas that you cannot enter. And, if for fishermen and hunters these are environmental protection zones, then for treasure hunters these are objects of archaeological heritage (OAN).
Well, if everything is so simple, then why don’t treasure hunters follow these same rules?
And, because in our country, at the moment, less than one percent of all OANs have cadastral boundaries. Moreover, the presence of an archaeological site in the area is not indicated at all. There are no signs, no publicly accessible register, no satellite maps.
Why is it like this??? Who is to blame and what to do?
And, here again there are two versions. According to official archaeologists, these maps are not published and information signs are not installed at the sites themselves because “black archaeologists” will immediately use this information.
Version two. According to employees of the regional Inspectorates for the Protection of OKN, it is the responsibility of the latter to check all archaeological monuments for their safety once every three years. So, as I assure these comrades, no one sets the boundaries of archaeological sites, because the cost of such work, on average for one site, is estimated at a million rubles or more.
So it turns out that lovers of instrumental search, even with their full desire not to break the law, can, without wanting to break it, and, as extensive judicial practice shows, they do.
