For the most part I ignore anything coming out of the arch office in Florida. They have two few people, trying to do too many things. They have too many areas, recoveries, etc that are off limits for us the taxpayers to view. When they do recover a site, they give little to no information on it, the items are not put on display for all to enjoy, and I can't imagine how many items have become the personal property of the archies themselves. People ask on forums "where is the Big Mound City?" for example, and the archies will just respond "If you need to go there, call my office, etc, etc"......BS. I just post the coordinates, and share the info. We are the people of Florida, this is OUR archeology, our coordinates, our finds. If they want to do it right, they need to share information, display the the catalog finds, quit running black ops missions. Otherwise, others will be running black ops missions. I found more than one historical fort in Florida on my own. Forts that were long lost. The coordinates you can find no where. I contacted the land private owner, and found that the usual suspect archie was already snooping the land. There is no official record that the archie office in Florida was pursuing anything of the such, so it was like totally off the books or hidden.
So now when I find a fort, or something diving, I keep my mouth shut, it stays with me. In my mind, its the States loss. I have spent a lot of time in school, with access to some of the most ridiculous archives and information available to anyone, I do my research and find very interesting things. The issue is, if I post about it, the archies would step in and order the place now "off limits", if I contact Florida, they will just plain kick me out, even though they never would have found the location if I hadn't told them in the first place.
Case in point, Ft. Lauderdale. There were three Fort Lauderdales, the last site was unknown. A well known detectors who frequents this forum was finding musket balls and relics at its unknown site for years. He finally told the government. Immediately they do "no metal detecting" for that area........forgetting that it was in fact a by way of metal detecting citizen they found out about it in the first place!
TroutBumDave, Welcome to our hobby. I went back and read this thread as it was pretty old. Sometimes people tend to wander off the thread and disagreements and such come up. That's the nature of different opinions and misunderstandings. I just go out looking for places to dive and MD with one of my many detectors. To answer the original question; it is NOT illegal to dig something over 100 years old. Finding it is not the problem. It is, however, just getting harder to LEGALLY keep it. Many states are dropping some real stupid laws on us that say we have to do really stupid things like return items to the place we recovered them, turn them in to the proper departmental idiot and such. Some states have 50 year limits and some have 100. I live and detect beaches, wrecks, schoolyards, parks and any place else I happen to wander into. I have never run into anyone who thought they were going to make me return anything to the ground or give it to them or turn it in. I have gone out detector diving for weeks on end and never had anyone of authority even question me about any of my hunts. Nor have I been stupid enough to call and ask them if I could keep a coin or anything in my dive bag. I am in Florida. Their laws are getting worse every time one of our elected turncoats walks in and introduces a new bill about treasure hunting, detecting or just having a detector on state property. My grandparents lived here and so it went all the way back into the 20's. I remember someone of very high notoriety, whom I will not mention, using dynamite on the reefs back in the early days. I have been involved in treasure hunting as far back as the late 50's. Things that were acceptable conduct then have long since been deemed criminal activities. Some I agree with and some I don't. I'm not saying what I would do if I did find that next big find. Some of these laws are going to turn some of us into real pirates. We all know archeologists and science are not pure evil entities that are out to get us. They are just one small piece of the whole machine that would have us stay out of their domain and leave our finds in the ocean to rot away so no other soul would ever see whatever it was that we found and that they did not. The laws they write and drop on us is just an annoying part of our hobby that we have to get around or eliminate. This goes on in every hobby that someone does not agree with. Some will oppose anything to get their name in the record books or newspaper. These people are not doing the same thing we are doing. They are trying to stop us from doing what we do because they think, like you, that we are dumb, uneducated fast food workers who have no idea of what we are doing. We, as a hobby oriented bunch of uneducated fast food workers, have uncovered and recovered more than the so called professional archeologists have. If they would work WITH us instead of trying to deal us out, they would be so much the better with our help. We number in the hundreds of thousands and they number in a few thousand. If we were rewarded instead of being penalized we would be so much more willing to share what we know and find and not have to hide our efforts and finds. Most of the wrecks and finds made would never be found without our help in researching and spending our own money searching and recovering treasure, artifacts and long lost shipwrecks. If we had an incentive to call in the archeologists when we make a discovery we would. Work with us and not against us before you draw an opinion that we are the problem. We are the solution to their inept attempts to discover all of the lost history laying all over the globe. If they ask us real nice and let us share in the find we may show them where to look or call them when we find it. How's that for incentive and motive?
