The Death of a Relic Hunter | Hacker News Reader

The Death of a Relic Hunter

newyorker.com

43 pointssamclemens16 comments

Interesting side story about Bill “helping” a friend who had his life completely stolen back in 2012. So strange the thieves knew just where to look for things: https://www.ajc.com/news/local/atlanta-man-struggles-continu...

Bill would give you the shirt off his back (then steal it from you later that night).

I hunted for WW 1 artifacts with my father all through the 1980s in France. We found a lot and I still have a lot. Since this was way before 9/11, we were able to smuggle old, old artillery shells, potato mashers (no wooden handle), and other types of grenades in our checked luggage (plane belly). One interesting piece is a rusted helmet with bullet hole. The metal is flayed inward where the wearer’s skull rests. No idea if anyone was wearing it when it was shot.

Airport-security aside, didn't you have reservations about carrying around unexploded ordnance, especially on a plane?

Presumably this was inert, otherwise I think you'd be extremely stupid to do something like this. Even over inert/historical military hardware like this people can go to jail in many parts of the world.

You could still probably send a lot of that in a chest as ship cargo and it would make it through okay.

Somewhere I read that Italy still had "WWI casualties" up through the 1980ies because of people picking up unexploded ordnance and dying when it exploded.

I've heard this is still true in France [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it was still true in Italy as well. And England, Germany, all over the place really.

Photos of truly massive piles of spent artillery shell casings helped this click for me [2]. Even if the artillery detonates 99% of the time, we're still talking about hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of unexploded shells.

People will be stumbling into unexploded butterfly mines and cluster munitions in Ukraine for generations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNIBE64CAgs

[2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/37a01168a1c386fa1657ae35ce0d0508...

There's still a lot of it in the ground, and the regular digging up of shells and other war metal is nicknamed the iron harvest.

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

Choice quote "The French Département du Déminage (Department of Mine Clearance) recovers about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year."

In 2014 in Belgium there were two casualties.[1] I still have family in that region. When I was a child, one of things I was taught was to never ever touch anything rusty / iron found in the fields close by when we visited them.

Seeing small stacks of rusted ordnance neatly at the entrances of fields is a common sight. Farmers dig them up each year, and put them aside. Bomb disposal does regular rounds.

You'd drive through the region, and the most noticeable remnant of the Great War are the graveyards. However, the War itself is still very much there, just a few odd centimeters buried in the clay soil.

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/20140319-wwi-shell-kills-two-nea...

I grew up near Auschwitz and there's a completely unremarkable field not far from the site of the camp, surrounded by fields and forest, there's a small gravestone near one of the trees and it just reads "on this site, remains of approximately 100k people are buried, please be respectful". Local farmers finding "bits" of human remains is a very common thing in the area unfortunately.

Just wanted to add to the point that the history is all around us, it's not neatly cordoned off and put in museums.

There are still "no go" zones in France due to WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge

> we were able to smuggle old, old artillery shells potato mashers (no wooden handle), and other types of grenades in our checked luggage (plane belly)

If you travel on the Eurostar train from Paris to London...... before boarding at Gare du Nord station you will pass a French bloke by the escalators employed to hold a placard with a sign in English saying not to take unexploded ordnance on the train.

This is because a few years back, some fuckwit did just that, shutting down the channel tunnel for several hours.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32690320

There is airport-style baggage screening misery on Eurostar for several years now - classic case of “this is why we can’t have nice things”.

> In the series, Erquitt describes security at the society as “pitiful” and alleges a coverup of multiple thefts

"I should know, as I am responsible for most of these thefts, and they never reported them"

https://archive.is/EC8CO

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