It doesn't make sense at all, because this encourages people to destroy these kinds of things whenever they find them on their land. If you find treasure on your land and you report it then the government comes in and basically takes over your land for a while. They want to let archaeologists investigate, but you usually don't get much compensation. If you rely on that land to make ends meet then it's a bad idea to report it.

I think the rewards need to be high enough that people want to report these.

Edit: there was that case in France where a farmer found a rare mastodon skull and didn't want to bring attention to it because he didn't want amateur paleontologists on his farm: https://www.livescience.com/63060-farmer-finds-mastodon-skul...

"At all" is a very strong wording. Do you really not think that appropriate compensation is all that's needed for this approach to make perfect sense?

Sure, but we already have compensation that is supposed to be appropriate, but people clearly don't think it's enough.

You usually get, at least in the UK, what's assessed as the valuation. That's then split between finder and land owner.

So it's not like the rewards could reasonably be much higher.

But it doesn't matter for a farmer unless it's a large amount. If a farmer's fields are disrupted then he loses a lot of income, potentially even his livelihood for a while.

Then throw some dirt on top and 'discover' it anew during the harvest? If something has been there for hundreds or even thousands of years it can probably last another few months. Not really a workable solution for construction, but surely a farmer might get away with it? Or one might store a found object for a while before realising it's historical significance.

But you might still be in violation of the law. There's also the problem that the investigation on the land might take a lot longer than just a couple of months. We had an archaeological finding in our city that took several years before they could use the land again.

> this encourages people to destroy these kinds of things whenever they find them on their land.

Totally this.

My former boss owned an old farm house in Italy. He told me that all the neighbours were really worried about digging in their backyards and finding stuff from the Romans.

A neighbour tried to build a house once, the excavator started digging and "old stuff" came up. Somebody told the local police because they were not sure if it was important and immediately the construction site was shut down until the government started to investigate this lot.

Investigations took several years and no compensation was paid.

Since then, it's an unwritten agreement that nobody calls the police when something comes up and the excavator just crashes everything...