RARE FIND: Amateur archaeologist Sieghard Wolter with a find from the Bronze Age.

By Gudrun Janicke


To the layman only a mysterious crackling is apparent — sometimes a few muffled notes and then a bleeping staccato.
To Sieghard Wolter, a German amateur archaeologist, however, the signals coming through his headphones are music to the ears.
“When I hear the right frequency I know there could be something to find,” says the 50-year-old roofer, who comes from the north-eastern state of Brandenburg and has been fascinated by local history since he was a child.
Wolter is one of around 150 amateur archaeologists who have a licence in the area between the Oder and Elbe rivers.
“We’re happy that they keep their eyes open for us,” says state archaeologist Thomas Kersting. “And they’re no competition for us.”
The men and women, from those just entering work life to retirees, are keen to find out more about their local history.
“Most don’t see themselves as Indiana Jones, searching for buried treasure,” adds Kersting.
There are around 30,000 known archaeological sites in the country. They include Stone and Bronze Age sites, as well as sites dating back to the settlement of the country by the Slavs, the Middle Ages and the modern era.
“But there are countless unknown sites too,” says Kersting.
It’s volunteers who find many of the pieces of the puzzle in the country’s history and the regional authorities offer them many educational courses to help them: Experts give lectures on different eras, explain the significance of certain finds and what to do if they discover something.
There are also 25 people in Brandenburg who have licences to use metal detectors.
But there are many people who use them illegally — the machines only cost around 1,100 dollars; they tend to dig for military souvenirs on the sites of World War II battles, and sell their finds on the blackmarket, says Kersting.
”Archaeological finds belong to the country and are put in museums. Those who don’t hand them in are open to prosecution,” says Kersting. Nevertheless, the number of unreported finds is thought to be very high, he adds.
Those amateurs who dig things up without approval could be destroying important artefacts, says Kersting.
Everyone in Germany has heard of the case of a man in the state of Rheinland-Palatinate who found a unique Barbarian treasure trove dating from the Late Antiquity period worth up to an estimated 575,000 euros (640,000 dollars).
He was given a suspended sentence earlier this year for failing to report it.
It was also treasure hunters who in 1999 discovered the 3,600-year-old Nebra sky disk in Saxony Anhalt — and sold it.
A man and a woman who were found guilty of illegally acquiring and selling the sensational find were given suspended sentences by the district court in Naumburg in 2003.
They had bought the disk from a fence for 230,000 Deutschmarks (118,000 euros) and tried to sell it to the state archaeologist in Saxony-Anhalt for 700,000 Deutschmarks (353,000 euros).
For Wolter, surveying the mowed fields with his detector is almost an addiction.
Hilly areas near water are his favourite place. “They were ideal places for settlers,” he says. And where people live, they usually leave something behind, he adds.
In January he found several hundred silver coins dating back to the beginning of the 13th century in a field in Goetz, near Potsdam.
But Wolter isn’t really interested in the material worth of the two-kilogram find. “For me it’s about the history, about who lived there,” he says.
Volunteers have no right to a finders reward, though they do get a mention in specialist literature.
And volunteers are always making spectacular finds. In 2012, a badger dug out the remains of a skeleton dating back to the early Slavic period in a field in a place called Stolpe an der Oder.
Amateur Lars Wilhelm found the skeleton and then a single silver coin in a nearby forest — by the time he was finished his excavation he had discovered almost 1,000 coins, with a combined weight of almost 600 grams. Researchers are now investigating how the coins may have come to be buried there.
Wolter himself has also made a recent find in Brandenburg, though he won’t specify where in order not to attract illegal treasure hunters.
He’s already packed it to be sent off to the experts, but carefully unwraps it to reveal a five-centimetre-long bronze filigree animal. ”It could be a cow,” he says.
Timelessly worked by its maker, it might have been a cult object Wolter thinks. “I still have to investigate,” he says. —DPA