Comment by dvtv75 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvtv75 | Hacker News Reader

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I suggest you discuss this directly with archaeological faculty at a university, rather than making claims about dynamite - e.g. those who used dynamite were treasure hunters, for example, not archaeologists. Modern archaeologists do share your distress over most of what you've claimed.

For instance, you say "Information which could have been captured with improving technology, if only the excavation had happened later." A not-insignificant amount of archaeology is performed because of an imminent threat to a site, be it natural (rising oceans) or man-made (highways). I recall reading about (what I consider to be) significant Roman sites in London being destroyed after examination because a developer had a building plan for that particular location.

Even Time Team would dig up mosaics in a field, record everything meticulously, present their findings to the public (in a rather unscientific manner), and then bury it again, to protect it.

Go and expand your horizons, instead of making decisions based upon incomplete information. You have some pleasant surprises waiting for you.

> I suggest you discuss this directly with archaeological faculty at a university, rather than making claims about dynamite - e.g. those who used dynamite were treasure hunters, for example, not archaeologists. Modern archaeologists do share your distress over most of what you've claimed.

My experience with academic archaeologists has been that they are pretty myopic on this. They like to dismiss past archaeologists as treasure hunters, but they are also eager to get their hands on all the data they can without much regard for the locals or for preservation. They usually justify this by pointing out that they aren't looking for treasure, in the traditional sense.

> My experience with academic archaeologists has been that they are pretty myopic on this.

I wonder if anyone has done a survey of views? There is some "do no harm", exploit non-destructive techniques, and reserve excavation for rescue archaeology. But seemingly a variety of other standards of care for site conservation and consumption.

Not my field, but one thing I've anecdotally seen underappreciated, is the rate of change in molecular biology, and thus eventually in molecular archaeology (aka bioarchaeology outside the US). Where over a mere decade or two, "can't imagine doing X" can change to "doing X costs years and millions", and then to "new trainee can casually do X in an afternoon", and even to "X is a field-deployable box". With a potential impact... for example, it turns out tooth calculus preserves DNA. So from millennia old teeth, one might sequence the owner, their mouth microbiome (with health information), and the species they've been eating. Grabbing a few soil samples might be ok if you're thinking pollen, but rather less so if a single tiny rat incisor might tell you so much. And proteomics is just getting started. And in addition to biology, there's improving imaging, inorganic materials analysis, bulk data management, robotics, and so on. Aggressive excavation, with 'DSLR, eyeball, sample bagging, brush, sift, and float', while largely unchanged for decades, seems rather more problematic if one looks ahead?

Archaeology is a new and evolving field. In years past, people we certainly would categorize as archhiologists did use dynamite.

(study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture)

And OP's general point remains valid -- scientific instruments and methods evolve. Worth considering "why now?"

> those who used dynamite were treasure hunters, for example, not archaeologists.

This is actually not completely true. Heinrich Schliemann, for example, was widely known and criticized for destroying the ruins of Troy at Hisarlik with dynamite.

Schliemann's case is not that simple, Calvert and Schliemann's work happened before Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Tessa Wheeler and their student Kathleen Kenyon transformed it from amateur antiquarianism to the systematic professional research field we now know. As Stuart Piggott later noted "Wheeler was looking for a professional job [in Archaeology] where the profession had yet to be created".

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