In recent weeks, there have been several major news about antiquities in Germany. The events occurred in different locations and they demonstrate that treasures found can become treasures lost.
Only to be found again later.
Somewhere not far from the French border, one or more persons found a huge late Roman era treasure of gold, silver and gems. State archeologists have called them thieves or robbers because the finder or finders apparently did not report the haul to relinquish it to the state. A criminal investigation is under way.
Earlier, in a town in the Frankfurt area, a social worker taking care of an elderly couple was given a tour of the property when he noticed about twenty banana boxes in an old vault. The elderly man explained that he used to rent out the old wine cellars as storage space and that the boxes in question had been sitting there for some twenty years.
Several boxes were coming apart at the edges, so they took a closer look and found old pottery from as far back as two thousand years. Some items showed numbers which must be museum catalog numbers, experts say.
Investigations into the provenance of this treasure are under way but the working hypothesis is that they were stolen when a museum in a nearby town was completely redone and all artifacts had to be put into temporary warehouse storage during the remodel.
Experts were not even surprised such a theft could happen. According to scientists, German museums have a tremendous amount of unclassified and uncatalogued finds in basements, annexes, and storage spaces.
Even correctly cataloged finds get lost to thieves as an example of a Rococo facade in Frankfurt shows, where only one small arch of a whole facade can be accounted for.
In the city of Cologne, construction work in recent years has once again yielded so many finds that archeologists decided to discontinue the digs and leave the discoveries to future generations.
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