When on August 20, 2020, at 6 a.m., Patrice T. heard the door of his pavilion in Rosières-les-Salines (Meurthe-et-Moselle) being drummed, he first believed in “Young people who play idiots”. “I jumped up in bed, then got up and shouted, ‘Get the hell out of me!’” But on the threshold, he finds agents from the National Directorate of Intelligence and Customs Investigations (DNRED) as well as police officers and two archaeologists from the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap).
“They told me, ‘Are we going to spend the day together, are you in handcuffs?’ I replied that I was not dangerous, and that I was not going to run away ”, Patrice T. remembers in his living room, five months later, when the muddy snow in his garden replaced the summer grass and he wrote to World to tell his story. That of a treasure hunter, at the origin of one of the largest cases of archaeological seizure in land by French customs: 27,000 objects, estimated at more than 700,000 euros.
The case has just arrived at the Nancy prosecutor’s office and has given rise to the opening of a judicial investigation, with a list of offenses aimed at as long as atypical: carrying out excavations without authorization, non-declaration of archaeological excavations, sale of discovery, alienation of a scientifically coherent archaeological asset, destruction of archaeological heritage, theft of an archaeological discovery, concealment of property resulting from theft, laundering and not keeping the register by a reseller of movable objects .
“Guts hurt”
The gaze sometimes lost in the orange oilcloth of the table at which he is sitting, this house painter, who works in the general services of Eastern Republican, looks a little sheepish in front of the now empty display cases of his buffet. He only has a few bronze coins left, with worn outlines, dating from the Gallo-Roman period. “Customs were mandated to find archaeological objects, I couldn’t deny. “
The DNRED searches the house for three hours, sucks up the data from her computer, and finds two safe keys, which open two large metal cabinets hidden in her mother’s garage. “My gut ached when they opened them. The archaeologists, them, hallucinated: they explained to me that there were in my coffers things which one does not have in the regional museums. I knew it, I know them well ”, boasts Patrice T.
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