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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gao, post: 2201784, member: 19409&quot;]My concern is more for the destruction of archaeological sites and context than it is with who legally should own what.&nbsp; Once this information is gone, it&#039;s gone.&nbsp; And the Frome Hoard has taught us that even where a coin is located within a vessel can tell us quite a bit of information.&nbsp; And like it or not, a lot of this destruction is by people with metal detectors who sell to modern dealers or throw them right on Ebay, and such people easily being able to make money by doing this encourages the practice.&nbsp; It&#039;s quite reasonable for governments to pass laws to discourage this practice, for this and other reasons.</p><p><br /></p><p>Are these laws often poorly thought out by people who don&#039;t really understand coins?&nbsp; Yep, and it sounds like this law isn&#039;t an exception.&nbsp; The problem is that the coin collecting/dealing community, at least from what I&#039;ve seen, only seems to care about this problem when it comes to effect their business/hobby.&nbsp; If you want this to stop, we need to actually be proactive.&nbsp; We* should be the ones proposing laws to governments that actually make a difference to illegal digging.&nbsp; We should be&nbsp; refusing the sale of coins that we simply know can&#039;t have been legally obtained (i.e. the Antioch Hoard of Gallienus almost certainly came from a country that would not have allowed its sale or export, and we know that nothing was preserved beyond the makeup of the hoard, yet major dealers, like Forvm, seem to have no problem with selling coins from it).&nbsp; We should be telling new collectors why they shouldn&#039;t buy from Eastern European sellers on Ebay who clearly just dug this stuff out of the dirt.&nbsp; Most of us are here because we love history, so we need to show that we care for the preservation of it.&nbsp; If we don&#039;t give everyone else a good reason to think laws like this are unnecessary, then enough of these poorly thought out laws are going to pass to completely screw up the hobby.</p><p><br /></p><p>*I should probably clarify that I&#039;m not intending any sort of moral judgments on an individual collectors here.&nbsp; Whether or not one person buys a denarius or something has virtually no impact on the underlying problem.&nbsp; Issues like this have to be dealt with collectively to have any sort of impact.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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