12 - The future of shipwreck archaeology

Summary

The most serious challenge to shipwreck and underwater archaeology today is counteracting the effects of treasure-hunting. These effects are both direct and indirect. The direct ones have to do with the destruction of submerged archaeological sites, and the indirect ones arise from the confusion created by the appropriation of the techniques of underwater archaeology for profit instead of preservation.

Author Peter Benchley (1989: 74) celebrates the joys of finding and taking objects from shipwrecks in Bermuda as follows:

Have you ever lain on the bottom in a sand hole, surrounded by ancient timbers, let some seawater trickle past your mouthpiece and tasted something wondrous and exotic and suddenly realized that what you were tasting was 300-year-old cedar? It is a taste so rich, so redolent of yore, that you can imagine yourself standing on the quarterdeck, can feel the roll of the sea beneath your feet, can hear the slap of canvas and the thunder of cannon.

However romantically phrased, the approach advocated by Benchley and others is entreprenurial, aimed at increasing the sale value of artifacts recovered from shipwrecks whenever possible. Behar (1986) and Wilkinson (1991) warn investors to regard treasure-hunting schemes as high-risk ventures with little likelihood of profit, pointing to a tendency for otherwise rational people to make irrational decisions when it comes to investments of this kind. The best litmus test for distinguishing treasure-hunting from archaeology is to see what happens to the materials after they are recovered.