Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
I just ran across a web site that you need to see. It is described as follows: "This website is intended for people fighting treasure hunters all over the world. It is the website I wish I had when I was fighting the treasure hunting legislation passed in Portugal in 1993 and repealed in 1995, fortunately before the government could issue any salvage permits. I hope you enjoy it."
The same web page leads with the following quotes. "Treasure Hunting! Always shallow, no matter how low treasure hunters sink." and, "You can say Expert Treasure-Hunter instead of Burglar if you like. Some of them do. Its all the same to us."
(See http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/index_treasurehunters.htm.)
A lot of different things are all the same to them. They seem incapable or unwilling to make important distinctions.
The web site does not generally make clear what they consider a treasure hunter to be other than evil. They do acknowledge two categories of treasure hunter. They say, "There is a small, silent minority who really finds and rescues precious cargoes, and that goes largely unnoticed by the general public." They describe the other group as, "The large, noisy majority who advertises its activity in the press, on the internet, and through PR agencies in search of ignorant investors rarely rewards its investors." Overall, their simple-minded cartoonish characterizations are more suited to propaganda than education, even though the web page is published on a state university site.
Definitions are critical for clear communication. Here is a Merriam-Webster definition of "treasure" that I found on the internet.
Definition of treasure
1a (1) : wealth (such as money, jewels, or precious metals) stored up or hoarded
- buried treasure
(2) : wealth of any kind or in any form : riches
2: something of great worth or value; also : a person esteemed as rare or precious
: a collection of precious things
I'm sure there are detectorists that would consider their activities to be a type of treasure hunting, and there are treasure hunters that do not hunt artifacts at all, such as gold miners and nugget shooters. Maybe I don't really know what a treasure hunter is, but they definitely do not use the term the same way I do. For them it seems to boil down to treasure hunting is not what they do and is evil.
You'll find the link to the page I'm talking about below, and I highly recommend that you take a look at it. I'll summarize a number of their statements in this post, but I'll give you the link and hope you check it out for yourself.
First, the author says that treasure hunters can not "do archaeology with high standards." He says that treasure hunting companies depend on investor money and can not follow good standards and make enough money to survive. That would be no problem if treasure hunters were funded by the tax-payers like these academicians. They would have plenty of time to sit around drinking coffee in the faculty lounge and still have time to linger over each and every grain of sand when they feel like wandering out to the site. I spent years in academia myself and know the torrid pace.
Second, he says that archaeologists and treasure hunters can not work together. Basically he says that treasure hunters have no ethical code and sell artifacts for profit, while archaeologists have an ethical code, and I assume, perfectly adhere to it without exception. Of course I disagree with both of those propositions. The common view is that treasure hunters are motivated by greed and profit, while archaeologists don't care at all about fame or fortune. It sounds like archaeologists donate all of their time, would not advance their career by taking credit for discoveries and make all of their findings freely available to the public, who they claim to serve. I'm appalled by the tax-payer funded projects that are only published in expensive books instead of freely on the internet.
He says that archaeology can be conducted by private organizations and give one example of such an organization. Their primary virtue of that company is that they never sold one artifact. I wonder if those artifacts that went unsold were ever seen by the public or if they are sitting in an office or dusty basement.
He then gives four reasons that archaeology collections should be kept together. I won't disagree with any of those, but I will say that museums sell artifacts and artifacts are deaccessed. This actually raises some good questions that deserve to be explored in more detail some other time.
I'll skip to his last two points now.
He says that treasure hunting is not a profitable investment. He would have us believe that treasure hunting is done only for greed and profit, but that treasure hunting is not profitable. I guess that is why treasure hunters have to cheat investors.
Is there a future for treasure hunting? Here is his answer. No. More and more countries are forbidding this activity in their national waters. Also, most museums have adopted a ban on the purchase of items salvaged from shipwrecks.
Here is the link if you want to read the rest of that page.
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/treasurehunters_04faqs.htm
Here is the link for the profile of the author.
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/academic/FACULTY/castro.shtml
It was difficult for me to not go on at length in response to each and every item, but that would take forever. I will perhaps address some of it more in the future.
I have never believed that universities should hire their own students as instructors. That type of academic incest results in the kind of simplistic and extreme thinking you will see when you visit these web sites.
As part of the public for whom archaeology claims to be working, and as tax-payers, who support public universities and archaeology, and being among those most actively interested in the our past, I hope you will take a look at these web sites and judge for yourself. If this type of thinking goes unchallenged by good common sense, there will be no more treasure hunting or anything closely resembling treasure hunting. That means the end to the metal detecting hobby.
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Before ending today, I want to express my deepest sorrow to the families, friends and acquaintances of those killed or injured in the recent school shootings.
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Appreciate the important things in life,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
