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[Matt Lukes]

OH absolutely- and construction is even worse; putting up shopping malls and housing over priceless sites is unforgivable. It is certainly good that there are responsible detectorists out there- archaeologists are severely restricted by time and funding, so amateurs help a lot; just consider Kalkreise- not found by an archaeologist, but by an amateur, assisted invaluably by other amateurs who had collected objects that allowed the site's identifification. But these people didn't dig stuff up to sell, and when there was a reason to do serious research, they quite correctly submitted their material to help.

In the case of this rule it's simply that searching for and selling artifacts is illegal in much of Europe, as it should be, and although not a European entity, RAT being ultimately an academic site, stands on the side of archaeology, which ultimately loses out to looters. Sure publications are often painfully slow in coming, and artifacts are sometimes forgotten in museum store rooms, but the material is there- when something's dug up by a looter and sold to some private individual, it could be an incredible loss to science. It's ironically less bad that things are now easily found on auction websites because at least that allows us images of an object that might otherwise never be seen...