Bully pulpit time. I’ve been blogging here for 8 years about the television industry doing dumb things. This one makes my blood boil, and it is personal.
This morning, Odyssey Marine Exploration is announcing that they have discovered the wreck of HMS Victory (not Nelson’s famous ship, which is still afloat as a museum, but the predecessor), which sank in the English Channel during the 18th-century with a reputed 4 tons of gold coins aboard worth an estimated $1 billion on today’s market. Cool, huh? Not really, and I will tell you why, but what is completely uncool is that Discovery is documenting and glorifying the whole practice in a series called Treasure Quest.
As a practice, treasure hunting is the equivalent of sanctioned poaching of endangered species. Historical shipwrecks are singular occurrences, they are not just a rare breed, there is only one of each. When treasure hunters get a hold of them and salvage them, they do not archaeologically excavate them. They recover the precious cargo within their profit margin and do the least scientific recording possible. They do not prioritize the very expensive and time consuming total recovery of information that archaeological ethics demand; they do not share the data with the public or scientific community through journals and museums; they do sell the recovered artifacts to the highest bidders and those artifacts disappear. It is exactly like hunting elephants for their tusks, or rhinos for their horns, or tigers for their pelts. Except that we can’t breed baby shipwrecks to try to save them.
You may be suprised to learn that the black market trade in antiquities only takes a back seat to the illegal arms and drugs markets, and it is not a distant back seat. UNESCO is fighting desperately to raise awareness and protect archaeological sites from treasure hunting. Treasure hunting on land is illegal in almost all states and nations around the world. Shipwrecks were not protected by many antiquity laws because the technology to reach them was not commonly accessible, but that is no longer the case.
So the archaeological community black-balls treasure hunters from their publications, but only dusty professors and scholars read those journals. The problem is that Discovery and National Geographic and other major media glorify the practice in their programming and publications, and newspapers love the sexy get rich story and play it like the New York Post this morning: “$hipwreck.”
Archaeology Magazine has come out strongly against this kind of programming, and I am sharing that insight with you in the television and media community. Yes, National Geographic used to publish articles about big game hunting a hundred years ago and changed their tune when times changed. It is time for the times to change again.
Seriously, treasure hunting sucks. It isn’t any cooler than digging up a mummy and grinding it into powder and selling it to gullible buyers as medicine. Because that is exactly what treasure hunters used to do until laws were passed to stop them. Now, who would watch a show of someone doing something like that? More importantly, who would produce and air one?