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Comment by mindvirus | Hacker News Reader

"Sadly, in this room too, a part of the archaeological heritage has been lost due to tunnels dug by grave robbers who, throughout the villa, have caused a total amount of damage estimated at almost 2 million euros."

I'm curious what that means. How do you "value" something like Pompeii? Are they just saying that they stole gold and silver worth that much, or that the damage to the ruins costs that much more to repair/recover?

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Might also be the value of the stolen property on the black market. There are unfortunately enough unscrupulous antiquities collectors, that one can estimate “market value” of Roman amphorae, jewelry, and other items.

I'm imagining it's parallel to cops announcing the value of drug seizures at (variously inaccurate) estimates of "street value", but for black market antiques.

It could also be how much it costs to repair the damage they did.

'repair' is a bit of a fuzzy concept when you're talking about an archaeological site, though, still more when we're talking about a site that was caught up in a volcanic eruption.

You can literally never repair it to the state it was in before the robbery, in the sense of restoring it to a pristine condition as it was left by the eruption.

You can also literally never step in the same river twice, but that's a bit more metaphysical than literal. Photos by the robbers before they vandalized the site would be invaluable. Nowhere near as good as if they'd left it intact, but better than nothing.

The whole question of this thread is how they are putting a ‘value’ on the damage done.

If photos (which presumably do not exist) of the site in pristine pre-robbery condition existed would be, as you say, ‘invaluable’, then how can we put a value on the damage done?

Semantically I find it a bit funny we call the thieves "grave robbers". If they're stealing from someone's grave, isn't the current excavation robbing someone's grave too?

But of course, the current excavation isn't theft because they have approval from the local government who owns this site. The thieves aren't really "grave robbers" because they're not robbing from someone's grave, they're robbing from a publicly owned resource. So they're really "Archaeological Park of Pompeii robbers".

Personal profit angle versus preservation. Although maybe the latter isn’t perfect but the intentions are there.

It’s the same reason an African general is a “warlord”. You can reframe anything in a few choice words.

Pompeii is a mass grave due to the eruption that killed and buried most of the inhabitants.

That's not the point

Why not? It’s a grave and they robbed it.

Suggesting archeologists on the other hand are robbing the grave implies they both don’t own it and the archeologists are taking ownership of whatever is removed. The first might apply but the second doesn’t.

The semantic point I was trying to make is that calling anyone a "grave robber" can be reasonably interpreted to imply the victim of the theft is those whose grave it is. Namely the dead. They're dead, so they certainly aren't consenting to the archeologists' activity either.

But I of course agree the archeologists aren't robbers. But that's because we as a society don't see the artefacts as belonging to the dead, as the phrase "grave robbers" can imply, rather they belong to the current living people and our institutions. So the original thieves aren't robbing from the dead, they're robbing from the people.

That said, there's something extra bad about robbing from the cultural heritage of the people AND desecrating the graves of the dead in the process. I would presume the archeologists would treat the area and the remains of people which much more respect. I really don't think the term "grave robber" is wrong, I just found it semantically interesting. Maybe another term could be "grave desecrating antiquity thieves"

It could be that they have contemporary documentation on the values of various objects and materials. What's the inflation-adjusted conversion rate between 2021 USD and the 79 Roman denarius?

I’d guess it’s akin to insuring a museum. This is the best reference I’ve found on a quick search: https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/heritage/heritage-02-00029...

>> grave robbers

Is this place a grave? It looks more like a natural disaster scene to me. Not every place with a body is a grave. Or maybe it is? How long does a body have to be left undiscovered before we declare the area a grave?

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