Re: Archaeologists see treasure looting taking all of the shipwrecks

In article <1181488948.697988.178210@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
jacklinthicum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
On Jun 10, 11:07 am, Mark Borgerson <mborger...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1181474326.726894.313...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx says...



On Jun 9, 11:41 pm, "Matt Wiser" <MattWiser...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mark Borgerson <mborger...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Whatever happened to "finders keepers?" And just what is it with the Spanish, anyway?
They still think that whatever treasure they got from their New World colonies is theirs,
even if it's in a wreck of an English, French, or Dutch ship, it seems. What the
archaeologists don't seem to realize is that the deep-sea wreck hunters have the tech and
financial backing to do their exploration, and without that, no one would be studying anything
on the bottom in water that deep.

Here is a discussion of that point from what would be Odyssey's "local
newspaper"

Scrutiny of the bounty

Treasure ship's half-billion-dollar question: Who owns the past?

By MICHAEL A. MOHAMMED
Published June 10, 2007

Pounded by a storm on the last leg of a five-week journey, the
Merchant Royal limped through the sea on Sept. 23, 1641, weighed down
by tons of gold, silver and jewels.

They lost me right there! "weighed down by tons..." I doubt that
the gold and jewels were more than ten percent of the working load
of the vessel (cited as 700 tons displacement later).



I also think that if the UN starts messing with the laws of salvage as
they apply to wrecks, it could have a negative impact on salvage
laws as applied to vessels still afloat. That could have impacts
ranging down to having fewer private vessels willing to come to the aid
of a vessel in distress. If we go to the point of reductio-ad-absurdum,
you will have no one willing to pump the leaking fuel from a 40-year-old
sunken fishing boat for fear of running afoul of the archeological laws.
After all, who knows what me might learn about the construction
techniques of the 1950s---you know, back before all marine design
records were kept in digital form!

Personally, I think it's a bit of ROV-envy on the part of archeologists
who can convince their sponsors to provide them with the same equipment
used by the treasure hunters.

Mark Borgerson

Yeah, but there is that moment when the ROV crushes the last remaining
timbers of a ship to find the sonar object is a cookpot and not the
chest of gold supposedly on this ship. Instead it is a Phoenician
merchant or Roman warship from the second or third century. In
Guanabara Bay.

That's a problem, certainly. The first ROV on the site should be one
belonging to an archeologist, if the value of the archeological data is
higher than the commercial value of the find. Now all you have to do
is convince some person or organization that the archeological value
is higher. Good luck on that!

Possibly the greatest find, archaeologically speaking, is the
Antikythera Mechanism, recovered as a block of concretion because it
was on the same ship as a bunch of statues. An ROV would kick that
aside as it probably would any ceramics that would identify the origin
of the ship.

One ship has yielded a pair of wooden "note books" that were used to
write on a wax surface in the 13th Century BC. The ROV wouldn't even
perceive the next one, this time with Linear A or B written on it.


And your point is??? If it can't be found by an ROV that is looking
for it, and it is too deep for diving, will that archeological treasure
EVER be found?

What you probably need is someone willing to pay the treasure hunters
with the equipment enough money to cover their time, their investor's
profits, and compensate them for any goods taken by the archeologists.
Oh, and you need to do so in a way that maintains the security of the
site.

When the archeologists are willing to pay as much as the coin
collectors, you'll soon have more sites than scientists. I think the
archeologists need to follow the Nature Conservancy model: If
something is worth saving, buy it and preserve it. It works well
in third world rainforests, no reason it shouldn't work at sea.


Mark Borgerson



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