Another New Tomb in the Valley of the Kings?

Praxiteles writes "A radar survey in 2000 found KV63, the tomb excavated near King Tutankhamen's tomb earlier this year. (KV stands for Valley of the Kings). Just announced is that this same radar survey shows an image of what appears to be a shaft to another tomb just 15 meters north of KV63. Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[Anonymous Coward]

My aunt works in Egyptology, and she doesn't have a lot of good things to say about this Reeves guy, so take this all with a grain of salt. The scan has found *something*, but not necessarily a tomb - limestone is naturally porous, and this could very well just be an air bubble. Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.

He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers. Generally not a reputable character.

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[andrewman327]

I view GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) as a diagnostic tool. There are definite cases where GPR has generated false positives. Think about when the FBI destroyed that barn recently while looking for Jimmy Hoffa. This technology cannot be trusted on its own, but it can help reduce the wholesale destruction of exploratory digging. It is possible that this shaft is a natural formation or something else that will not lead to treasure (or a deeper understanding of history).

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[Frosty Piss]

He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers. Generally not a reputable character.

Well... FTA...

Reeves was falsely accused of involvement in antiquities smuggling and his permit was revoked. In August 2005, he was officially cleared of any wrongdoing by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA)

Looks like the Egyptians looked into that and cleared him. Sounds to me like your aunt has a personal axe to grind...

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[hey!]

He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers.

Shades of E A Wallis Budge [thebritishmuseum.ac.uk], a man so vain and unscrupulous, that the British Museum, the organization that he worked for, can only say this of him:

Budge's works are still in print, but this is because they are out of copyright, and so the text can be cheaply reprinted. While they are well illustrated, full of information and extremely cheap, they are at best unreliable, and usually misleading.

They only stopped short of slapping a red banner across his photo with the world "Crackpot".

Yet, nobody says Budge was stupid. Nor that he was unenterprising. He brought home lots of archaeological treasure that the Museum might not have received otherwise, which makes the Museum an important place for scholars. The down side is that he destroyed priceless and possibly irreplaceable knowledge in the process, which undermined the Museum's mission.

So, it isn't out of the question that a freebooting antiquities smuggler found a new, possibly unlooted, probably even royal tomb. IIRC we don't have tombs to match up every ruler we know to have existed from the period where the Valley of the Kings was in use. Furthermore, while most people I know are marginally unethical, very few of them view themselves as ruthlessly bad. Therefore he might not scruple to support antiquities smuggling, but might draw the line at looting a newly discovered tomb. Or the tomb, if it exists, may not be excatable without a fairly major engineering effort.

Or it may not exist at all. But I hope it does. Even a looted tomb is bound to be very interesting, unless all the inscriptions and paintings have been removed.

Re:What??

[mikeisme77]

If it's from all over the world then that would include the Middle East and Asia (which it does as archaelogists from those locations do not like grave robbers either). There are other ways of making a living that don't include robbing your own country of its cultural history (which grave robbers do). The archaeologists I've spoken to (admittedly just a handful) don't seem very interested in 'career changing' discoveries but more so in uncovering the mysteries of the past without destroying the site (which includes trying to avoid digging when possible)--this way when new techniques/technologies arrive int he future the ability to understand these sites will not be lost by digging them up or doing some other destructive means of trying to uncover part of the past now but destroying future knowledge of the past later. The archaeologists seeking a 'career changing' discovery are normally the 'celebrity archaeologists' (like that one Egyptian who took a sledgehammer to a tomb on national TV...) as opposed to the academic arachaeologists.

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[techno-vampire]

Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.

If you'd bothered to RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know this is Slashdot; people never RTFA before posting.) you'd have seen two things. First, he's not saying it is a new tomb but that it might be. Second, he gives credit for the discovery of the other new tomb to the person who excavated it, even thought it had been found earlier in the radar survey.

Plenty of false positives...

[posterlogo]

...called "dry holes" in the KV and surrounding areas, where tomb builders would build the antechamber, but then change their minds and go to another spot. So a supposed shaft, while exciting, even if what rader is picking up really was a product of ancient tomb builders, may still be a dead end.

Re:We should leave some stuff where it is.

[MjrTom]

You are entirely correct. Funding does play a big part (archaeology is incredibly expense if it's done right), however the truth is that for the most part, those of us who do archaeology today are worlds better than those who went before us. We also realize that those who come after us will be much better than we are due to advances in methodology, theory, and technologies such as gradiometry and resistivity. When I was working actively in the academic research side of things we tried to excavate no more than 5% of a site, leave the rest for future archs who will know things we don't, and thus will be able to get information we cannot. It must always be remembered that archaeology is at its heart a destructive science - we can't just do it over again if we screw up, screw ups mean that information is permanently lost.

On the salvage side of things it's slightly different, for example if there was a new interstate highway going through an archaeological site and there was absolutely no way to reroute that road, we would attempt to do 100% recovery of the site. This almost never happens (it'd have to be a really small site - digging right takes a long time and the road builders get pissy if you sit there and delay them for too long. Can't stop progress). In salvage or "Section 106" or whathaveyou style archaeology the rule is to reover as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Re:Is the archaeology.org map correct?

[RedWizzard]

Those coordinates will be in whatever system is used for large scale maps in Egypt. The Valley of the Kings is at 25 degrees 44'25" N 32 degrees 36'05" E.

Re:Archeologist versus Grave Robber

[DerekLyons]

How long does a body have to be in the ground before digging it up the corpse and taking its valuables stops being grave robbing and becomes archeology? Is it archeology if you just take enough pictures and measurements? Shall we do some "archeology" on Westminster Abbey? The Vatican?

Actually archaeological digs on 'recent' burials and in the West is fairly common. (The just completed one at Little Big Horn about a decade back for example.) Then there is the study of the Franklin expedition back in the 80's, at least half a dozen English kings in the last few decades, etc... etc...
 
 

Time after time, from the Incas, the Mayas, the Egyptians, American Indians, etc. entire cities or societies worked for a generation to ensure that their royalty, leaders, or god-kings could rest forever undisturbed.

if you believe that only non-white get their bones disturbed - you are quite mistaken.