Archaeology:The Lounderer of Lorraine has been caught!

Some objects, including an Iron Age torque and a Bronze Age dagger, among those seized in Metz, Lorraine, in December 2020 • AFP

For years, he had been looting archaeological objects with a metal detector and preparing to launder his loot. Some 27,400 pieces were seized from this individual from Lorraine following a year of investigation by Belgian and French customs, the largest seizure of archaeological pieces in France to date. Coins and Roman fibulae, jewelry (bracelets, torques, Merovingian ornaments, etc.), parts of statues, etc. The inventory is not exhaustive.

The objects date from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance. In total, the treasure would be valued at €770,000 by the Drac (Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs) Grand Est. And this looting could have gone on even longer. But the thief, a French resident, wanted to sell his collection, or at least part of it. For this, he acquired land in Belgium in September 2019. Belgian legislation allows the owner of land to keep the archaeological objects discovered there. In France, on the contrary, since the law of 2016, archaeological objects are "presumed to belong to the State as soon as they are brought to light during an archaeological operation and, in the event of a fortuitous discovery, from the recognition of the scientific interest justifying their conservation”.

The man had therefore declared in September 2019 the fortuitous discovery on his land in Belgium of a monetary treasure of 14,154 coins from the Roman period, hoping to be able to keep it officially. But, after going there, an archaeologist from the Belgian services found that the coins could not come from this place. At the end of their investigation, the French and Belgian customs services carried out a search in August 2020 of the Lorraine home of the alleged fraudster. They discovered 13,000 additional archaeological objects there, including a rare piece:a Roman ball-shaped dodecahedron, a 12-sided bronze object of which only around 100 have been found so far. If the capture is beautiful for the customs officers, the archaeological context of all these objects is on the other hand definitively lost, and part of their history is erased.