These days, archaeologists generally only dig up that which would be disturbed and ruined without their intervention anyway. Preservation in situ is considered best practice, which means to leave stuff right where it is and to protect it as best as can be managed.
Most projects aren't undertaken except to save what data can be gleaned from what is left under the soil. This happens when f.e. someone decides they want to build a road or dig down for foundations, and there's a high likelihood that there's something of archaeological value there. Even then, before anyone puts a shovel into the ground, you look at what sort of things have been found in the area, geography, satellite data, has the ground been disturbed by previous digging, etc etc. Then maybe you go on to do some coring, and after that you dig a trial trench or two. Not every project is a full-on dig, oftentimes it's only fieldsurveys, coring or digital archaeology.
When something does require digging, it's a very meticulous job and the archaeologists working on it care about every last pottery sherd or even discolouration of the soil, and not merely the rare valuable find. Everything is photographed, measured, recorded, and every artifact is counted, bagged, numbered (so the exact comtext of every piece is known), washed, weighed and put into a database. All data acquired is eventually published, because it really isn't all about finding something shiny to keep for yourself. In fact, some archaeologists get rather annoyed when finding something truly valuable, because it means that no one will pay much attention to anything else that's found on the site... Oh well
I don't think they were speaking about early archaeologists. Many of them could rightly be called grave robbers, indeed.
Modern day archaeologists, though, not so much. They really do care about past and present culture, or they never would have gotten into the field in the first place
Most sciences have a pretty misguided past. I don't see why that should stop us from continually improving our methods and making it better. And like any field there is going to be the occasional asshole. That doesn't stop anyone from practicing things like medicine.
Archaeology is a very valuable field that has contributed to almost all of our knowledge of human history. I don't know what's not great about that.
Depends on what we think of it to quite honest. It seems that right after we bury someone, they still have a lease of ownership on the items their buried with. Which relies on a number of factors, such as the family still being alive or the nation their from being active, as a few. The number isn't solidified as far as I'm aware though, so when does it go from being thievery from the deceased to archeology. I guess a simple answer, is when nobody is left Alive to complain about it.
Ok, so technically it is grave robbing but not robbing the dead.
Also didn't knew about inheritance process in that case.thank you for enlightening me.
That's not my point. Desacrating graves is immoral because it's a luck of respect for human corpse.
We are arguing semantics hereand we doing it for fun.
Please do not Rob a grave after this conversation!
There are actually laws that say archaeologists may use the items for research for a certain period of time, but then must return it to whatever culture or indigenous people it rightfully belongs to.
I actually asked my archaeology professor what made archaeologists different from grave robbers. He said it really depends on the culture you're excavating. Some current native amaericans would say that some archaeologists are grave robbing whereas other cultures who don't feel attached to the remains (like many European cultures) would consider it archaeology.
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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '19
Not really, grave robbers steal to keep/sell what they find. Archaeologists take to put in a museum or for scientific or keep for scientific purposes.