When did Treasure Hunters become grave robbers?

Great Debates
1

I love watching archeology programs, though I think I’ve seen enough mummies to last me for 100 years. When I was a kid, I devoured book after book written by and about great treasure hunters and dreamed of one day sailing off to exotic lands, stumbling through the deserts of hell and finding vast masses of gold and gems. Then sailing home a rich and famous man.

I never quite managed that.

I read of treasures found in Indian mounds, Pyramids, ancient, buried cities, sunken ships, old settlements, ghost towns, and tombs. Treasure hunters were in their heyday!

National Geographic bespoke of gold, arts, jewels, mysteries, fantastic things under the ancient sands and of ancient treasures picked up for pennies in ‘rustic’ markets, handled by ‘dirty’ people who jabbered and all but pushed the valued items into one’s hands.

Why, a person could become rich just strolling through an Egyptian native market with chicken change in one’s pockets, a pith helmet upon one’s head, jhodpur pants, sturdy boots and wearing a loose, long sleeved white shirt. Short, skinny, swarthy dark men with dirty turbans on and wrapped in dirty robes would eagerly offer to sell you pottery, sculpture, gold and ancient silver from shady alleyways for sheer copper pennies!

Almost every major college in England and some in America had a mummy. Wealthy homes had mummies and ‘unwrapping’ parties, ancient pottery, works of art and exotic things lying about.

Now, I watch the archeologists and they sourly debase ‘tomb robbers’, grave looters, as they find graves and tombs which have been picked over. People decry the hard working, independent treasure hunter who burrows into the dark, often dangerous depths of ancient resting places to scrabble out with some few bits of gold, silver, precious stones to sell. He finds a site unknown to anyone and does the work, takes the risks and now has to smuggle his loot to buyers.

Yet, in the old Roman empire, one of the greatest necropolises ever found is being filled in and destroyed because it was discovered under a city, under a new highway and bridge being built. They’ve barely given archeologists any time to scrabble through the maze of tombs and locals freely go in and out with candles and lamps, through dark depths now being flooded by construction run off, to freely take what they wish.

They’re not considered grave robbers and when the time is up, treasures or valuable information or not, the openings will be dynamighted closed and filled in to support the road.

So, how did treasure hunters become grave robbers? Quite a fall from adventurers and heroes to scum.

In 1000 years, most of us won’t care if someone finds and disturbs our bones, if any are left. Probably the cemetaries then will be under a shopping mall anyhow. We all know quite well how local governments can void land deals, legal contracts and binding purchases if they want any piece of land for use.

I still have old books about Treasure Hunters, fighting through jungles, big damn pistol in hand, machete in the other, seeking and finding an entombed city and claiming the riches there in.

Ballard considers the salvagers of the Titanic tomb robbers. I consider him nuts. It’s there. It’s worth a whole lot of cash. Go get it. Learn something in the process.

2

[Mom’s voice] Oh, Copper! Time to get up and go to school, dear.[/Mom’s voice].

Modern times demand modern laws. Just 'cause you found it, don’t make it yours.

Er, uh, when would this have been? I missed reading about this.

3

OP: *So, how did treasure hunters become grave robbers? Quite a fall from adventurers and heroes to scum. *

Well, for one thing, we changed our ideas somewhat about the autonomy and responsibility of the places where most of these objects were found. Instead of being colonial possessions inhabited by native subjects (sometimes less kindly called “barbarians” or “savages”) for Westerners to explore and develop, they’ve become separate states of fellow human beings with a perfect right to keep the historic treasures of their own cultures.

Another issue is that of establishing provenance: now that archaeologists know a lot more than they did a hundred years ago or so about ancient cultures, the haphazard go-for-the-loot approach of the early archaeologists is more often than not a hindrance to the pursuit of further knowledge about them. Artifacts that turn up on the antiquities market with no reliable information about where they came from and how they were obtained may make collectors salivate, but they make archaeologists tear their hair. It’s much more academically respectable nowadays to make discoveries that expand the historical record with solid data than to bring back a neat pot or a sack of gold coins. And if somebody else illegally sneaks into an archaeological site, avoiding all the laborious negotiations with the local government that you have to go through, and spirits away all the pots and coins before you can even see and identify them—hoo boy, “tomb robber” hardly begins to express what you’d like to call them!

As for how this shift in attitude occurred, it’s probably hard to pin down precisely, but I bet that Lord Elgin’s taking the Elgin Marbles from Greece—even though part of his goal was to protect them—back to England, which caused a lot of criticism, had something to do with it. It’s one thing to take a hoard of gold out of a savage jungle, but it’s quite another to loot classical works of art from the birthplace of Western civilization, what what? :slight_smile: And IIRC the looting and destruction of the Summer Palace by the British in China during the Taiping Rebellion was also widely deplored, even though that was partly an act of war. Sometime in the nineteenth century it just began to be uncool to loot other people’s treasures, although of course something of great value and artistic significance in a highly developed civilization was considered more sacrosanct than somebody’s moldy bones.

4

I studied Nautical Archaeology for a year and was told many stories by my professors.

In one, they had finally located a Roman trading vessel off the coast of Italy. They did a preliminary survey of the site and then had to call it a day.

What they didn’t realize is that their activity had been watched by looters. Overnight, the looters used rakes to hunt for pottery and trinkets. The site was completely destroyed.

With the ship timbers destroyed and the cargo stolen, the site was worthless to the archaeologists. There was nothing to be learned from it.

Treasure hunting is not the romantic image that it used to be portrayed as. Today’s treasure hunters use bulldozers or dynamite to quickly excavate sites. They are destroying knowledge for their own profit.

I actually consider the Titanic to be a completely separate matter. The ship is of no archaeologic importance, so the compalint is not the same. However, I thnk it’s so troubling to some because the looting happened while there were still survivors around. It’d be like having someone digging into your parent’s grave and making money off of the grave goods. It just opened a lot of emotional wounds for some.

Now if the ship had be found 50 years later, I suspect the reaction to the artifact recovery would have been different.

5

Don’t EVEN get me started on the Titanic.
I don’t think it’s so bad that they have brought up items like letters and old suitcases found in the debri field. A lof the letters and some of the items were very interesting-they found a pocketwatch belonging to the father of one of the survivors. They gave it to her, and she kept it with her until she died, and then it was willed to a museum.
HOWEVER…RMS Titanic Inc. is totally out of line. They actually want to drill into the ship because they claim that it is going to be dust in two years. Yet, they don’t have any proof of this. They want to go into the cargo hold and bring out the Renault and the Rubiayat book. (They also claim there is gold bullion in the ship…)
They are nothing but greedy adventurerors.

6

The Titanic actually is crumbling, Guinastasia. Deep-sea bacteria love to munch on metal, and they’re slowly eating the ship. The steel used in the Titanic was low-quality (which was one of the factors in the sinking) and at the rate the microbes are devouring it, the Titanic will be gone in another ten or twenty years or so.

When you see underwater footage of the Titanic you see rust puffs trailing down the sides. They crumble if touched. That’s the waste product that the microbes excrete as they eat away at the ship.

How long does a person have to be dead before their grave is an archaeological site? As another poster stated, there isn’t really that much we can learn from the Titanic.

I understand that we have much to learn from mummies, but something I saw in the Louvre broke my heart: a shrivled blackened mummy, stripped of his coffin and bandages, lying naked in a case with a cloth draped over his thighs, presumably to protect modesty. I looked down at him, and thought that in a thousand years, it could be my shrunken corpse in a case much like this. I felt such pity for him.

This would have been during the Carter/Tutankhamun era, when the English world went a little mad for all things Egyptian. They actually did have Unwrapping Parties. wealthy people would buy a mummy (which at the time were worthless–used for firewood and fertilizer) and ship it home to England. They would then call together all of their friends, and peel the bandages away from the mummy. According to some accounts of Unwrapping Parties that I’ve read, the naked corpse was then propped in the corner of the room for the guests to ogle as they milled about and chatted. Sounds like a hell of an evening, eh?

7

Yes, it is crumbling.
HOWEVER…I don’t believe it is at the rate RMS Titanic would like us to believe. And it does not justify going looking for the Renault. I think the things they found in the debri field-the letters-were much more important.

8

Ballard’s sub pilot dubbed them rusticles.

When I was in an anthropology class, I was told that everything after 1950 (I think that’s the year) is considered “present” and everything before is “past” or “history”. I’m not sure if that is still considered a standard, or if there will ever be plans to change it.

However, I think pretty much anything can be considered archaeological. In fact, some archaeologists are excavating a hippie commune. What matters is what can be gleaned from a site.

Because of the tragedy, the Titanic has got to be the most documented ocean voyage ever. We know all the relevant details of the passengers, have ship specs, and even the identical woodwork from her sister ship the Olympic is still extant. The only thing left to learn was why the ship sank so easily. So in many ways, the dives to the wreckage were nothing more than accident investigations.

However, I don’t think salvaging items is pointless. The ship is a wonderful time capsule from history. I would love to see the exhibit. It would have be polite if they had waited until the survivors had died off before rummaging through the ship though.

As for how long the ship will last… Well, I think there is conflicting signs as to what will happen.

The rusticle growth between Ballard’s first dive and later salvage dives was faster than anyone had anticipated, indicating a rapid disintegration.

However, some theorize that as the rusticles coat the ship, they will act as a protective layer. Also metal samples have shown that the metal is in pretty good condition beneath the rust.

It’s likely that the ship’s structure will collapse in our lifetime, but it’s always possible the ship will survive much longer.

9

I agree with Kimstu that the change in attitude about non-European nations has a lot to do with the change in attitude towards artifact “collectors” from those regions (including archaeologist collectors, as Kennewick man shows). But I have to object to the overly brief story of the Elgin marbles given. Lord Elgin bought (not seized) the ancient marble carvings from the Parthenon (and a few other knick-knacks) from the local government which had possession of them. At the time, that government was the Ottoman Turks, who were regarded by the Greeks themselves as invaders because, well, they were invaders. So the Greeks have never been real happy with the sale, as you might imagine. However, it should be noted that the Turks had done the incredibly clever thing of making the Parthenon - one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, a testament to architectural beauty, a symbol of the glorious foundations of western (and for that matter, much of Islamic) civilization - into a munitions depot. You’ll never guess what happened!

So while we may criticize this event, and question Elgin’s motives, we have to temper that with a little bit of thankfulness, too, that it did happen. Fantastic artworks were preserved. What’s more, history has transpired in such a way over the last century and a half that the marbles probably were better off in the British museum than they would have been in Greece (with the possible exception of that little European spat in the forties when London was bombed).

The Greeks I’ve talked with about this more or less acknowledge the above. Their main gripe is that the Brits STILL have the marbles. The Ottomans went belly up in WWI, and Greek politics, while not as stable as England’s, is sufficiently respectful of its relics (even the radicals) that the marbles would probably be in no real danger there. At any rate, they are a symbol of Greek heritage and while they weren’t exactly acquired by the Brits illegally, neither were they passed on with the approval of the Greeks themselves. So they want them back, and the Brits have been dragging their feet about it (last I heard anyway - it’s not exactly dinner table conversation around here).

10

What about the Royal Irish Navy using the Lusitania for target practice?

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Lissa Thanks for the enlightenment about “unwrapping parties.” I should have quit while I was ahead.

12

Just a small tiff.

If the Greeks want the stuff back, then let them pay current market value for them.

Every time some Turban wearing geek gets his balls in an uproar, war rages through one of the most valued archeological sites in the world and a lot gets bombed into oblivion. Someone is going to hit the Wailing Wall and the Most Holy of Holies ( I can’t recall the name of the place, but it’s a big stone that worshippers walk around in one direction only.) sooner or later. Even the Sphinx was used for target practice by the French.

Perhaps ‘grave robbers’ are doing the world a favor by getting the stuff out of there before it all goes up in a nuclear explosion. Someone there is going to fling a nuke in the name of some religion and others will fling the nukes they ‘never had’ and when the dust settles, we’ll be able to see if the Great Pyramid actually contained any hidden rooms because it’ll be half melted.

Explorers think they found the Great Lighthouse remains in a Greek harbor. The Greeks never mentioned that the huge mass of finished stone and carvings were even laying there. Probably didn’t know, though it’s unlikely they could miss it. However, no one is allowed to salvage anything. Permits have to be obtained just to go down and investigate, map and examine the stuff. Anything brought up has to go back down. They won’t even let the stuff be brought up for themselves.

As for the Titanic, if they can get inside her, great! I want to know what is left inside the hulk, to see pictures, see salvage and articles. The French tried to float away a huge chunk of the hull and lost it. (Along with these enormous bags full of diesel fuel that no one seemed concerned about.) Then they went back with someone else and got it again.

It’s being picked apart as it is. I’d like to see along the corridors where the ROVs can’t reach yet, get down into the third class passage where hundreds of immigrants were trapped and died because they were not allowed to get on deck. The rich came first.

All we ever hear about is Wealthy Mr. So and So who heroically died aboard, and wealthy Mrs. So and So who heroically gave her seat to another to stand by her husband and on and on. Not much about the Mr. O’Donald and his wife and 4 kids who ran into the locked gates as water filled the passages. He was going to start a small import business in the States. Or Miss. Kathryn MacCleary, 22, who was going to meet her husband to be who was trapped aboard by flooded corridors and people jammed at the gates when the Titanic heaved her stern up, slid beneath the waves and split in two.

What articles could be found of these people still trapped far below the luxurious decks of the ship, down at the mud level, buried where even ROV lights don’t reach? Maybe even their bones could be found, in heaps of muck, in the ice cold, the eternal darkness, trapped by tons of rusted metal, their stories silent and untold because they were ‘lower class’?

Someone should go after them, instead of concentrating on locating the staterooms of the rich, salvaging dinnerware, looking for a probably rusted out one of a kind auto, and photographing the rotted hulks of the great rooms.

Tunnel through the wreck if they have to.

A couple of hundred men, women and children were left to die because the rich were more important. Now they’re being left to the depths, the darkness, the cold and the silence. They’re still not important.

(Sorry. Got carried away and hijacked my own thread.)

13

The French most certainly did NOT use the Sphinx for target practice. The story about Napolean’s troops using a cannon to blast off the Sphinx’s nose was a bit of propagandizing used to (further) tar Napolean’s image. Unfortunately, the propaganda was believed widely enough that it has been passed on as fact for years. Drawings and paintings of the Sphinx that clearly predate the arrival of the French show the Sphinx’s nose in its present state, and Napolean’s writings indicate that he was very impressed with the Egyptian monuments and wouldn’t intentionally deface them. Here’s a link to a page you might find interesting.

http://www.historyserver.org/napoleon.series/faq/c_sphinx.html

14

That’s not a terribly enlightened viewpoint, you know. It almost seems tinged with the sort of racist rationalization that was used by the those adventurous explorers of old. The ‘wogs’ can’t take care of their own history, so we’ll have to go in and do it for them, the poor little savages.

It is their history, isn’t it? Or do you really feel that the treasure hunters should be able to waltz in and make the decisions about what to bring up and what to leave in place?

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CopperTears: *Perhaps ‘grave robbers’ are doing the world a favor by getting the stuff out of there before it all goes up in a nuclear explosion. Someone there is going to fling a nuke in the name of some religion and others will fling the nukes they ‘never had’ and when the dust settles, we’ll be able to see if the Great Pyramid actually contained any hidden rooms because it’ll be half melted. *

So we should get the Great Pyramid “out of there” before that happens? Man, that’d be quite a trick. :wink: (And by the way, we Americans at least have little room to complain about other people’s propensity to throw nukes at their enemies: so far, we’re the only ones who’ve really done it. And I believe it was a very near thing at one point whether one of the Japanese A-bomb targets was going to be Kyoto. Talk about the needless destruction of historical treasures!)

Nope, I’m with Ankh on this one: if we’re gonna have national sovereignty, it has to include the right to choose what does or doesn’t happen to one’s national treasures. I’m all for using the UN and NGO’s to plead with and/or sponsor nations to preserve these treasures and make them more widely accessible, but no more paternalistic looting, please.

16

Copper Tears-the Titanic is a GRAVE. Besides, it’s not a very safe thing to go down there and start blasting.

If there are dead bodies in there, which I doubt (the only ones that would be left would be so deeply buried in the mud you’ll never find them), let them rest in peace.

(If you’re saying that there’s nothing about the steerage people, that’s bullshit. There has been alot on the class distinction. And they weren’t purposely kept down there-they were sort of just left on their own…it was sort of laissez faire).

I’m sorry, it’s a gravesite. You don’t go digging them up in the name of “history” just to get some “treasure.”

I have no problem with bringing artifacts up-I like that idea. But not at the expense of destroying the wreckage itself.

17

Sorry for the double posts…but…about stealing treasures so they aren’t destroyed in a war…that means Hitler was justified by looting the Catherine and Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). Many of the things he stole have never been found. Most notably the Amber Room panels, from the Catherine Palace. (Recently a small portion of it was found, but the rest are still missing.)
So Hitler did a GREAT service…
:rolleyes:

18

Titanic:

I disagree. Virtually all shipwrecks are graves, but we have no problem in going through them and salvaging what we can. They just brought up the Hunley, sealed, and it is suspected that the bodies of the crew are within it.

Not enough had been made out of the steerage passengers. They were not just left on their own, they were locked in by stewards who were obeying protocol that the first class passengers get off first. Gates were eventually unlocked, but by then the lifeboats were away, most not filled to capacity, the Titanic was near the end and many never made it to the upper decks. By the time the gates were unlocked, the steerage decks were already flooding, with many sections towards the bow already submerged.

She’s a time capsule. The steerage decks, being bottom most, would be mostly sealed by the collapse of the upper structures and mud coming in from the break astern. Chances are they’ll find bones, especially if some remained and died in cabins or sections which sealed off.

If I had an ancestor down there in the dark, I’d certainly want salvagers to poke around there to at least investigate where he/she died and maybe find something of his/hers to go into the memorial display. Chances are, there will be no bones, though we’ve found them by the piles in WW2 Japanese warships.

The documentaries list by name all of the rich who went down with the ship, but very few of the steerage who were held back until too late, except in the closing, rapidly moving passenger lists.

19

I sincerely doubt that there is any place on this earth where artifacts would be safe. In this century alone, England, Italy, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and China were all involved in extremely destructive conflicts.

The fact that Japanese bones were found isn’t a good indicator as to whether bones would be found on the Titanic. There is a wide variety of ocean water conditions.

For instance, the waters around Sweden are anaerobic and organic material eating creatures can’t survive. The warship Vasa survive intact for 400 years underwater. The wood was in good enough condition that people could walk the decks shortly after she was raised.

The Titanic waters, on the other hand, are not organic friendly. It’s estimated that all organic material (except leather) was devoured within a year.

So the waters where the Japanese remains were found (Truk?) were possibly organic material friendly.

Also, it’s not that likely that remains would survive under the mud. Core samples showed that the weight of 2 1/2 miles of water above had compressed the mud into near concrete-like hardness, with only a thin layer of loose sediment on top.

It’s not often I get to talk about stuff I know, so if I rambled, just humor me. :slight_smile:

20

The use of 1950 as “present” comes from radiocarbon (14C) dating. Libby developed it around 1950, so they use that as the measurement.

Kimstu and Guinistasia made most of my points–thanks! Most treasure hunters of old were just that–rich people out on holiday, looking for interesting artifacts to bring home to display. Granted, there were some interested in the past behind the artifacts, but not many. As we learned more about how to interpret the past and apply scientific methods to excavating sites, we started to see more and more the damage that was done to these sites by “treasure hunters”, some of whom were well-meaning.

I won’t even get started on digging gravesites. I’m an archaeologist (well ok, I’m a part-time archaeologist, I’m a technical writer to pay the bills, but I have formal training in it) and I can tell you emphatically that every archaeologist I know hopes and prays to never find a burial. Bad mojo. Guinistasia is right: dead people belong in the ground, where they were placed. There’s nothing to be learned from digging up someone’s ancestors; it’s needless, disrespectful, and just… wrong.