Metal Detecting in Louisiana

1. The rule, in full

Louisiana – NOT in this pattern. Reclassified.

Louisiana was flagged earlier as sharing the political-subdivision pattern. It does not, and the lead that put it here was wrong.

Read from the Louisiana Revised Statutes at legis.la.gov (Louisiana State Legislature), RS 41:1605 in full, both subsections. Re-read 4 Oct 2026 and the reclassification is confirmed by the full text, including the section's own heading.

A search summary had described Louisiana as covering "archaeological resources on state-owned lands and lands belonging to political subdivisions." Read at source, the section is headed "§1605. Archaeological finds on state land; state property" – which settles it before the text begins.

Subsection A, in full:

"All sunken or abandoned pre-twentieth century ships and wrecks of the sea and any part of the contents thereof and all archaeological treasure located in, on or under the surface of lands belonging to the state of Louisiana, including its tidelands, submerged lands and beds of its rivers, and the sea within the jurisdiction of this state are hereby declared to be the sole property of the state of Louisiana, under the administration and protection of the secretary of the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism."

Subsection B, in full:

"It shall be unlawful for any agency, political subdivision, group, or person to take, alter, damage, destroy, or excavate on state-owned lands as herein described without first obtaining a permit or contract from the secretary. Permits shall be issued for purely scientific and educational projects and only when all recovered materials are to remain the property of the state and when there is to be no compensation to the permittee based on the value of the recovered remains. Contracts shall be entered into for recovery of materials when compensation is to be made to the contract holder based on the value of the recovered remains." Acts 1989, No. 291, §1.

"Political subdivision" is a category of actor, not a category of land, and subsection B quoted whole makes that unmistakable: the actors listed are "any agency, political subdivision, group, or person", and the land is "state- owned lands as herein described" – described, that is, in subsection A.

And the permit route is narrower than a permit route usually is. Permits issue only for "purely scientific and educational projects", only where everything recovered stays state property, and only where the permittee is not paid by the value of what is found. There is no recreational route at all.

A parish or city in Louisiana needs a permit to dig on state land. The statute says nothing about digging on the city's own land.

Louisiana is an ordinary state-land state. It moves to the Category 1 list and does not answer any municipal row.

This is the fourth time a secondary claim has failed at the primary source, and the first where the failure would have widened a statute's reach rather than narrowed it. The error direction does not matter; the check does.

SWEEP FINDING, 8 Oct 2026: possession is prohibited, and this page did not say so

The reclassification above stands: R.S. 41:1605 reaches state land and answers no municipal row. But it was never the rule a detectorist in a Louisiana state park needed, and the rule that is had never been read.

Read from the Louisiana Office of State Parks' publication of Louisiana Administrative Code Title 25, "Cultural Resources", 419,101 characters extracted, covering Parts I, III, V, VII, IX and XI. Part IX is the Office of State Parks. Checked 8 Oct 2026.

LAC 25:IX.303, "Park Property and Environment", subsection H: "The display, possession, and/or use of metal detectors or similar devices is prohibited. It is strictly forbidden to dig for or otherwise remove any historical feature, relic or artifact. Persons wishing to excavate and remove historical features by professional archaeological means for research purposes must request a permit from the Louisiana Archaeological Survey and Antiquities Commission."

Display and possession, not merely use. This is the strictest detector provision found in any state instrument in this project, and the only one outside the federal National Park Service rule that reaches the machine rather than the activity. Carrying a detector across an OSP site is the offence; nothing need be switched on and nothing need be dug.

Compare 36 CFR 2.1(a)(7), which prohibits "possessing or using a mineral or metal detector, magnetometer, side scan sonar, other metal detecting device, or subbottom profiler" in a national park. Louisiana's state rule is the same shape and is, if anything, wider, because it adds display.

Two neighbouring subsections of the same section matter as well:

303(G): "No person shall excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any cultural or archaeological resource located on any site."

303(B): "No person shall intentionally remove, damage, disturb, or destroy any OSP property or the property of another person, without the consent of the owner. 'Property' shall include but is not limited to structures, watercraft, movables, signs, markers, natural features, cultural features, wildlife, and plants."

(B) is worth reading twice: "movables" is the civil-law term for corporeal movable property, so a dropped coin in an OSP site is the property of another person, and removing it without the owner's consent is within the subsection on its face.

Scope, §301(B): "Unless otherwise stated, the rules govern any and all sites under OSP jurisdiction pursuant to the authority given in Title 56, Chapter 6 of the Revised Statutes of 1950." So: state parks, state historic sites and state preservation areas administered by the Office of State Parks.

Determination: OSP sites only. Does NOT reach municipal parks – which is what the reclassification above established, and it remains correct. Louisiana answers no municipal row. It answers a state-park row emphatically, and this entry previously had nothing to say about it.

There is no recreational permit route. The only permit named is from the Louisiana Archaeological Survey and Antiquities Commission, for professional archaeological research. Nothing in Part IX contemplates a hobbyist authorisation, and nothing in it names a park manager as able to grant one.

Authority and currency: "Promulgated in accordance with R.S. 56:1681-1690 and R.S. 36:204. Promulgated by the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, Office of State Parks, LR 8:634 (December 1982), amended LR 12:89 (February 1986), LR 16:1052 (December 1990), LR 19:308 (March 1993), LR 26:25 (January 2000), LR 27:1673 (October 2001), LR 31:1980 (August 2005), LR 36:1226 (June 2010), LR 43:290 (February 2017)."

Not established: the penalty. §303(A) provides that "the provisions of the Louisiana Criminal Code (R.S. 14:1 et seq.) shall be enforced on all OSP sites", and Part IX was not found to state a penalty for a rule violation as such. Recorded as unread rather than estimated.

Sourcing note

doa.la.gov, which publishes the consolidated Louisiana Administrative Code, returned 404 on the paths tried for the LAC index. Title 25 was read from lastateparks.com, the Office of State Parks' own publication of the title it administers, reached through the proxy after a direct fetch returned 403. The document reproduces each section with its authority note and full amendment history, which is why the currency above can be stated precisely.

Agency publication of the agency's own rule, same standing as the Texas Parks and Wildlife and Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks documents used in this sweep, and the same caveat: it is not the consolidated code.

One more thing this pairs with

Colorado, swept the same day, produced a search summary that attributed 36 CFR 2.1(a)(7)'s possession language to Colorado's parks chapter, where no such provision exists. Louisiana shows the other half of why that has to be checked rather than assumed either way: a state really can prohibit possession, and here one does, in its own words and under its own authority note. The lesson is not that possession claims are usually false. It is that the claim and the document are different things.

2. Cities in Louisiana that publish a rule

No city in Louisiana publishes a metal detecting rule we can quote. Of the 34 cities we checked, 5 had pages on the city’s own site that we found and read, and none of those sets out a rule. For the remaining 29 we could not locate a municipal source, so nothing is claimed about them either way.

This is a finding, not a queue. It is also not proof that no rule exists: a city that posts its rules on a noticeboard, or in a document our searches do not surface, looks exactly the same from here.

3. County rules

No county check has been run for Louisiana. That is not a finding that Louisiana’s counties publish no rules. It means the question was never asked here, and this directory does not assert an answer it has not looked for. The county sweep covered 21 states; Louisiana was not one of them.

4. Cities checked - no published rule

34 cities in Louisiana were checked and have no published rule on this page. Of those, 34 returned no rule, and 0 did return something that has not been published – mostly rules that turned out to govern county land, which are in the county section above. A city here is not a city where detecting is allowed. It is a city whose own published material did not answer the question.

All 34 were checked on 13 September 2026, in one sweep, so that date applies to every row. 1 has no municipal site recorded and is shown without a link rather than dropped, because dropping them would understate what was checked.

5. Clubs in Louisiana

7 in our directory for Louisiana - 2 verified against their own website or group, 5 we could not verify. Verified means we opened the link and read it. All Louisiana clubs on the club directory, with meeting nights and contacts where we have them.

• Acadiana Past Finders Metal Detecting - Facebook group · verified
• Pelican Relic and Recovery Association Metal Detecting Club - Facebook group · verified
• ACTS (Association of Christian Treasure Searchers) Jimmy McWilliams - Keithville · could not verify
• Louisiana Past-finders - Athens · could not verify
• Pelican Relic & Recovery Association - Hammin · could not verify
• Raiders of the Lost World - Hammond · could not verify
• Red Stick Raiders, Jamie Thoms, Linder Rd #5 - Denham Springs · could not verify

6. Land this page does not cover

This page answers for Louisiana state land, and for city and county land where the state rule reaches it. Several other kinds of ground are not covered here, and naming them is more honest than letting a reader assume the page is complete.

Tribal land. This directory does not cover it, and will not.

There are 574 federally recognised tribal nations. Each is a sovereign jurisdiction with its own law, its own permitting, its own enforcement and its own cultural-resource provisions, and none of them is answered by a state's code or by any federal rule quoted on these pages. A one-line instruction to "get tribal permission" would be worse than this paragraph, because it implies one process and one authority where there are 574. If you are on or near tribal land, the governing law is that nation's, and the place to ask is that nation's own offices. Nothing on this page applies there.

BLM land is covered, partly, in its own place. The Bureau of Land Management holds about 245 million acres and the federal rule names metal detectors and permits them, which is the opposite of the national park rule. See BLM land: the detector is named, and permitted. That page covers the base regulation; it does not yet cover the supplementary rules individual BLM State Directors issue for particular field offices.

Named and not examined. These are recorded so their absence is visible rather than silent. No claim is made about any of them:

• Military withdrawn land, including ranges and training areas.
• Bureau of Reclamation land, which surrounds a great many reservoirs.
• Water district and irrigation district land.
• Wilderness, Wilderness Study Areas and National Conservation Areas, which carry designations of their own. And one general point about signs. The commonest piece of reasoning in this subject is "there was no sign, so it was allowed." Arizona's State Land Department answers it in writing, in condition 2 of its own Recreational Permit terms:

"You will comply with all laws, rules, regulations and ordinances. Posting is not required for these provisions to be enforceable."

That is Arizona's sentence about Arizona's provisions and this directory does not present it as the law of any other state. But the proposition it states is the one to carry: nothing read for this project makes a published rule's enforceability depend on a sign at the boundary. Where posting does matter, a specific provision says so, and that provision is quoted on the page where it occurs.