Company Says It’s Found 1744 Wreck of Famed British Warship – NYTimes.com
New York Times article on the OMEX discovery of HMS Victory:
Company Says It’s Found 1744 Wreck of Famed British Warship – NYTimes.com.
I blogged a strong opinion piece on the media coverage of treasure hunting and shipwreck salvage companies yesterday over at LostRemote and received a barrage of negative comments and flames in my e-mail.
I stick to my guns. Treasure hunting is ethically incompatable with archaeology. Archaeologists do not sell recovered artifacts. Period. End of story. Odyssey is trying to work with governments and investors and strike a new business model and Gregg Stemm is out working on “ethical models” and standards for shipwreck salvors, but this simple, clear point cannot be worked around.
I call all major media to recognize the similarities between driving a bulldozer into an Indian mound and looting the artifacts to propwashing a shipwreck and selling the coins. Just because the wreck lies underwater, there is no difference: an archaeologically significant site is a site, wet or dry. Treasure hunting is illegal on land in every civilized country in the world. The same standards must apply to underwater cultural heritage.
As keepers and disseminators of information, it is our job to show this controversy in every piece of coverage objectively regardless of personal viewpoints – such as my very strong bias. There should be no article written or show broadcast about treasure hunters that does not address this massive issue.
Glorifying treasure hunting in media is the status quo, and readers and viewers are completely unaware of the destruction inherent in the process and how it impacts them. Instead, they think that treasure hunting is credible archaeology and that if they pursued a career in the field, they too could get rich one day if they hit the mother lode.
