Chasing the treasure of Cobannus, from the Burgundian countryside to the United States
WHO BENEFITS FROM THE PILLAGE? (1/5) - A Sunday detective confessed in 2008 the looting and dispersal of a fabulous set of Roman goldsmithery, discovered in a field. Archaeologists are still running after these marvels.
No one could have foreseen that the fields of Saint-Aubin-des-Chaumes would be the starting point of an incredible curse of modern times. One fine day in 1977, a couple was walking in a piece of countryside in the Nièvre, eight kilometers south of Vézelay. The eye of Georges-André Colas is attracted by a suspicious roundness which is flush with the ground. He bends down and picks up an ancient currency. Barely stirred, the earth gives him a second, a third. Returning a few months later, armed with a metal detector, the former earthenware worker from Nevers found even better: 82 bronze statuettes and objects, as well as about 6,800 coins. The exhumation of this spectacular Roman treasure spreads out, in the greatest discretion, over several days. Nearly fifty years later, the dispersal of this ensemble still moves French archaeologists who do not lose hope of repatriating, one day, this prodigious treasure to the national collections.
"It's a story of looting...