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Comment by Pigo | Hacker News Reader

>because these sites were long known to local people, they had invariably been disturbed, if not badly looted.

No kidding. I had a Spanish teacher in high school from Peru who'd bring in artifacts he'd found in caves around his home town, his collection included a human skull he claimed was from an Andean civilization. It didn't dawn on me until years later how ludicrous it was that this man had kept this skull he'd found in a cave and then took it across the world to be handled by kids. It still had dirt inside of it!

Now I wonder how many laws and customs he'd broken, and whether it was a significant enough find that much was lost by him using it as a trophy.

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This sort of thing almost justifies the "Indiana Jones" style of archaeology to me: if you know that the location of a "historical site" of "great religious significance" just became public knowledge, then the clock is ticking before a bunch of idiot looters come and break all the walls and vases looking for gold, or take home random skulls to put on their desks.

So, presuming you're an archaeologist and know how to quickly-and-efficiently extract and catalogue artifacts without damaging them; and presuming the country that the site belongs to has no governmental body or NGO willing to protect the site; then you may as well book the first plane ticket there, rush in, (carefully) pick up everything of value, box it all up and ship it to a museum—any museum—where it will be put under glass until the significance of the artifacts can be understood.

If the locals want their history, their museum can get it back from your museum. Until then, it'll at least be protected from ending up in some foreigner's Spanish class.

Major problem: Context is king in archaeology.

The context of an artifact is its position in the site relative to everything else, and it's incredibly important. A stone flake by itself tells you a little, but a stone flake next to a core by a fire with carbonized bones in it tells you a lot more about the people who lived there. This is why archaeological digs painstakingly record the position and orientation of everything they find, in addition to soil features, etc. that might reveal even more. If you see an artifact in a museum that is from an archaeological dig, there's a book in an archive somewhere that has a drawing of the level in which it was found that gives its orientation and position relative to a datum. You could return to the dig and place the artifact in precisely the same location that it was found in using this data.

Archaeology is an evolving discipline, and better ways of extracting additional information from digs with new methods are being found all the time. For this reason, most major digs do not cover 100% of the site. It's considered good practice to leave some of the site undisturbed so that future archaeologists can apply yet-to-be-invented techniques to the site to reveal more than is presently possible.

So, by scooping up artifacts indiana-jones style, you're destroying a huge part of the information that they might have revealed. Is it better than looters digging the place up? Perhaps, but only just barely. It's a highly destructive, unethical act. It's like justifying a smash-and-grab because there's a riot going on and you happen to be slightly more needy than most. There's a small chance that looters won't find the site or that a government will decide to protect it in time, and it's better to take that chance than it is to loot the place and ensure the site is destroyed.

Is there some kind of 3D radar that scans a few meters below surface level? Sounds like that would make the job of recording a lot easier.

Yes, ground penetrating radar/sonar/magnetic sensing all exist and are used, but they're not as good as you'd hope. They're mainly used to help figure out where to dig. There are all sorts of high-tech ways to record the position of artifacts as they're being dug up, but students and volunteers with pens, notebooks, and a little training are usually cheaper.

I love the British Museum as much as the next Brit, but the reality is their museum generally doesn't get it back from your museum, even if they ask very nicely and their museums are pretty good and accessible.

It reminds me of how the Nag Hammadi texts were found by some local farmers in Egypt who wound up burning a few of the texts for a cooking fire without knowing that they contained the work of Gnostic Christians. I wonder how much has been lost by such careless thought.

Or careful thought:

> In 1856, General Alexander Cunningham, later director general of the archaeological survey of northern India, visited Harappa where the British engineers John and William Brunton were laying the East Indian Railway Company line connecting the cities of Karachi and Lahore. John wrote: "I was much exercised in my mind how we were to get ballast for the line of the railway". They were told of an ancient ruined city near the lines, called Brahminabad. Visiting the city, he found it full of hard well-burnt bricks, and, "convinced that there was a grand quarry for the ballast I wanted", the city of Brahminabad was reduced to ballast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation

It doesn't work that way: if something wasn't looted recently you get the most of information not by taking a few "valuable" things but by carefully studying every small trace. This was known even much before the times if Indiana Jones. Surprise: the life is different from the dumbed-down movies. So you have to bring the whole team and some people to protect them. Everything else is a huge loss.

Agreed - as I understand it, the relative and absolute positioning of pieces, and analysis of surrounding dirt, is very often more useful information than anything that can be gleaned from the piece itself.

Back in the 9th grade we visited a dig site and we even got to dig a little with the university folks overseeing. Boy did they get mad when I found an intact pot and unceremoniously ripped it out of the ground to show off. That was just for a dirt patch on a barrier island. I can't imagine how bad ransacking a major site would be.

@67 perhaps you mean unceremoniously?

You're right, I've fallen victim to autocorrect.

> If the locals want their history, their museum can get it back from your museum. Until then, it'll at least be protected from ending up in some foreigner's Spanish class.

go take a look at any bigger western museum. in most, most of the artifacts are foreign and no way they are willingly giving them back. if that would be the case, for example maybe 80% of the Louvre in Paris would be plain empty

>this man had kept this skull he'd found in a cave and then took it across the world

>It still had dirt inside of it

This is probably because I am Australian but this jumped out at me. Australia is free of many parasites, pests, diseases etc that are common in the rest of the world. This is maintained by very strict border controls.

The idea of anyone transporting some random object containing dirt into the country and not having customs officers through a fit is a shock.

You see this type of behavior all over North America too, particularly in the south and southwest where artifacts are commonly found. Looting, graverobbing, and vandalism are the biggest threats to archeological sites worldwide.

Even in the USA, grave robbing is tolerated with only minor penalties even in serious cases. [0] There is no protection for most kinds of archaeological treasures anywhere in the world and the limited non-renewable resource of our past as a species is being steadily wiped out by yahoos for a bit of weekend drunk fun or beer money.

And that doesn't even begin to address systematic ideological Moslem terrorist attacks against Palmyra, Bamiyyan, and many other historic treasures.

[0]http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700182158/Overkill-or-jus...

Grave robbing and the destruction of historical artifacts are definitely an issue, but you should refrain from using the word Moslem, and in it's place use Muslim. The meaning is actually very different, and rather insulting in Arabic:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/524

EDIT: It would appear the "insult" line is a bit of a stretch given how Arabic works, and is perhaps not really that insulting. Yet still, modern scholarship suggests the appropriate transliteration of the word from Arabic is Muslim, not Moslem.

I wonder why there aren't stronger laws against that. To me destroying our cultural heritage is one of the worst crimes one can commit. I'd be all for draconic punishment of destruction of historic artifacts. Is that really such a rare view?

I recall an article from maybe two years ago about a woman in the south west writing inspirational graffiti, or something of that nature, all over protected sites and rock-faces just for social media points. It was so upsetting, people were spewing fire.

I wondered how many he broke myself and could not found any laws prohibiting of transportation of ancient bones. I assume this included skulls.

This is fascinating because it probably dates back to the times of medicinal uses of such.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-o...

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