The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries
Italy is full of treasures from the ancient world, but its government is discouraging their discovery.
Thanks to the creative application of new technologies, the 2020s are quietly shaping up to be a golden age of archaeology.
In 2023, then-21-year-old Luke Farritor (now with the Department of Government Efficiency) combined machine‑learning pattern recognition with high‑resolution CT scans to decipher the first word from the Herculaneum scrolls—a Roman library charred by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Fully decrypting the library could ultimately double the surviving corpus of Ancient Greek and Roman literature—an unprecedented bonanza for classical scholarship.
Analysis of ancient DNA has resolved long-debated questions about human migrations. After sequencing hundreds of Bronze Age human genomes, David Reich's research team at Harvard positively identified southwest Russia as the geographical origin of the Indo-European languages, while other genomic work has dated Homo sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding to 47,000 years ago, several millennia prior to earlier best guesses.
Fossilized human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, have been conclusively dated to about 23,000 years ago—proof that people were in North America during the last Ice Age and forcing scholars to rethink when and how humans first crossed into the New World.
Lidar has recently revealed massive ancient cities under jungle canopies, from the Mayan platform of Aguada Fénix in Mexico—larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza—to mysterious urban centers in the ancient Amazon.
These developments—whether driven by artificial intelligence, the decryption of ancient genomics, or airborne lasers—promise to momentously expand society's understanding of humanity's past. Notably absent from this bounty, however, are the fruits of traditional, physical, Indiana Jones-style archaeology. The world of bits, as has often been the case these days, is leaving the world of atoms in the dust.
While the storied bits over atoms problem is a complicated one, legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery.
The case of Italian antiquities policy is paradigmatic. Since the 1930s, Italy—along with Greece, Turkey, and Egypt—has vested ownership of all antiquities in the state. Commerce in freshly unearthed artifacts is outlawed, and unauthorized excavation is punishable by hefty fines and sometimes prison time. Even using a metal detector requires a permit.
Edward Luttwak, a historian and author of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, explains that in Italy, "if you find something, you report it to the authorities. The authorities take it, goodbye. Most often, what they take from you, they put in a depot, a basement, a warehouse, and it never even gets shown."
This is the unfortunate lot of the fortunate discoverer of an Italian artifact. Report a Roman coin? It'll be confiscated. Find an Etruscan urn while planting olives? Your land will be turned into an archaeological site the government may never have time to excavate.
It's unsurprising, then, that Italians frequently don't report their findings to the government. Many artifacts end up on the black market (in 2023, Italy's Carabinieri Art Squad seized nearly 70,000 illegally excavated artifacts), or are even simply destroyed or hidden away.
Private hoarding is an especially pernicious problem: When "illegally excavated" (read: most) Italian artifacts are privately held in people's houses, they are lost both to scholarship and public view. "You could fill twice the museums that exist in Italy from what people have hidden in their houses," says Luttwak, "which they wouldn't hide if you could report [them] to the authorities like they do in England."
The British model provides a striking contrast. Since the 1996 Treasure Act, British law has required that significant archaeological finds be reported. Instead of simply seizing them, if the state wishes to retain an item, it must compensate the finder and landowner at its full market value.
To capture the far larger universe of objects that fall outside the law's narrow legal definition of "treasure," the state-sponsored Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) established a voluntary nationwide program through which average Britons can log any find, whether or not the state intends to acquire it, into an open scientific database.
As of 2020, over 1 million objects have been logged in PAS. According to Michael Lewis, head of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, over 90 percent of PAS-recorded items are found by metal detectorists on cultivated land, indicating how the scheme has turned what was once seen as a threat into a fountainhead of archaeological data.
Thanks to these policies, Britain has been increasingly outpacing Italy in Roman archaeology despite its relatively modest classical history, as seen in this viral map of the provenance of hoards of Roman coins. Notice the sheer quantity of Roman coin discoveries reported in the U.K., far surpassing those in Italy. This disparity isn't explained by Roman Britain being richer than Roman Italy (quite the opposite), but by modern Britain recognizing and leveraging incentives to bring history out of occultation.
The Great Stagnation of physical archaeology is a choice. The failure of policymakers to get the basics right—to make physical archaeology worth anyone's time—renders the richest landscapes fallow.
Luttwak's attention is on one such landscape: the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers on the edge of Cosenza, Calabria. Contemporary accounts record that in 410 A.D. the Visigoth chieftain Alaric—fresh from sacking Rome—was buried beneath the temporarily diverted river along with the treasures of the Eternal City.
"Alaric's treasure is located in the southern part of the city of Cosenza," says Luttwak. "It was documented by an eyewitness." Alaric took "gold and silver objects…statues, and all kinds of things—possibly even the Temple menorah….When Alaric died in Cosenza, he got as the king one third of the treasure [to be] buried with him."
"It could be found," explains Luttwak, "with hovering metal detectors, because he was buried with his weapons, too."
Alaric's hoard—and maybe Judaism's most iconic physical symbol—should be discoverable today with an aerial anomaly survey and some clever hydraulics. The technology is ready; the incentives are not.
Change the rules, and the payoff could be extraordinary.
