Journal jd's Journal: Treasure-Seekers Plunder Ancient Treasure 2
There are many schools of thought on this sort of thing. There are those who would argue that the treasure was hidden quickly, so there is no archaeological information lost, provided some examples remain to be studied. Museums and galleries often end up with stolen objects anyway (the Getty museum and the Louvre being recent examples), so in all probability they aren't going to be lost to society. Besides which, many countries treat their national heritage disgracefully, so many of these stolen items might actually be treated vastly better than they would have been.
I don't personally agree with the methods, there, but Governments have shown themselves totally incompetent at protecting either national heritage or world heritage, so if there is to be any heritage at all, it is going to have to receive protection from somewhere else.
Another school of thought is that such excavations should be performed by trained archaeologists, who can document everything in detail, who are trained in the correct way to preserve every last iota of information, and who can ensure that nothing is lost.
Again, there is a lot to be said for this approach. Except that archaeologists are poorly funded, have a tendancy for naivety when it comes to dealing with people (Seahenge, Dead Sea Scrolls, etc) or indeed the information they collect (Seahenge, Dead Sea Scrolls, etc). Their interpretations often fail to properly document sources and are prone to speculation where little evidence exists. Archaeologists simply don't have the means to carry out the kind of excavation required, and wouldn't necessarily have the skills required even if they did.
The third option is to leave the stuff where it is. The world has moved on, let it rest in peace. We already have a lot from that period of time, why would we need a few hundred thousand items more?
This line of thinking ignores that everything has a story to tell. It assumes some sort of equivalence between ancient art (where everything was unique and took time and skill to make) and modern art (where everything is mass-produced on a production line). It also assumes that such ancient artifacts take up space that we need. The world is a BIG place. Things can be moved. Or built around, as happened with the Rose Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. We're not even restricted to the two dimensions of the surface.
The last option is a mix of the above. Archaeologists rarely need the original object, museums never do. We can etch the surface of an object to within a few tens of nanometers, can identify the composition of a dye or paint an atom at a time, and can read long-erased writings from trace amounts of residual molecules.
This approach would argue that whilst archaeological context is the ideal, vast amounts of information could very easily be extracted from any collected item, if anyone could be bothered to do so - certainly far more than necessary for a museum to exhibit ancient history that would otherwise be lost, and probably far more than would be needed by archaeologists to produce extremely detailed conclusions and infer the vast majority of information they'd have collected if they'd dug the items up themselves.
In the end, I want the maximum information possible to be preserved and for the artifacts to be protected and preserved as best as possible. Plundering is probably not the best way to achieve this. Anything not gold or silver is likely being destroyed, in the Dacia site, for example. But if it ends up with anything being salvaged at all, it'll be an improvement, as bad as it is.
Better solutions are needed, but it is doubtful any will be developed in time to save those things that need such a solution to survive.
Archeology at Bandolier National Monument (Score:2)