The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries
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.
The post The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries appeared first on Reason.com.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
VCs use this 'power law' to decide whether to invest in startups: We want 'outsized-outcome potential'
As pitches from founders come flooding in, one investor has revealed how VCs use a historic "law" to identify the best investments. "The power law in venture capital basically means that a small number of investments generate the vast majority of returns. So essentially, one or two massive winners outweigh all other investments combined," Peter Specht, general partner at European VC firm Creandum, told CNBC Make It in an interview. He described it as "significant in decision-making for VCs." The power law originates from the work of late-19th-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. He noticed that 20% of the pea pods in his garden produced 80% of the peas, and applied this observation to economic conditions and wealth disparity. Specht explained that, as VCs often finance ideas that are risky and innovative, they know that some of these startups will fail. But the returns from the companies that succeed can become "massive winners," which "outweigh all other losses or smaller exits," he said. "From a return perspective, you want to really hit the outliers. We want the Spotifys, the Revoluts, the Klarnas," he said. "Outcomes at that size, or that scale, return more capital to investors and founders than five, billion-dollar exits. A $50 billion exit is way bigger than five $1 billion exits." Although the route to securing venture capital in Europe is improving, there's still some way to go, according to Atomico's State of European Tech Report 2024. In fact, the average seed round — the first official round of fundraising — in Europe was $1.4 million last year, compared to $3 million in the U.S., Atomico found. It's even harder at the growth stage, with American startups twice as likely to raise funding rounds of more than $15 million. Some 60% of respondents told Atomico in 2024 that it was harder to raise external finance compared to the previous year. Specht said one key way to convince VCs that you're building the next Spotify or Revolut is to show that your company has "outsized-outcome potential." "You need to pitch why it can become so big, why it can become a category-defining company," he said. This includes explaining how you're tackling the market and how the product can expand over time. At the seed stage, having an early product or pilot users with positive feedback can help. If you don't have the product yet, there needs to be evidence that the product is filling a gap in the market and is offering a genuine solution to customers. VCs also look for "exceptionally strong and ambitious founders," Specht said, adding that he wants to understand their motivation and drive. "One thing we obviously ... like to see is if founders have a spike in a particular area, or a skill, and shown excellence in that," he said. This could be work-related, such as having technical or leadership capabilities, or even excelling in sports or studies. Given the gap between fundraising in Europe and the U.S., Harry Stebbings, the founder of 20VC, identified a difference in the way founders pitch. American founders tend to be more bold and ambitious, Stebbings said, compared to their counterparts across the Atlantic. "I don't think Europeans are as good fundraisers [as Americans]. We need to tell better stories. We need to market ourselves better. We are too self-deprecating," he told CNBC Make It. Some founders have even been "badly" advised to include "exit slides" in their pitches, Stebbings added. "That makes me feel sick, like I'm planning my divorce when I get married." While Specht disagrees that European founders lack ambition, he thinks that startups in the region could tell better stories. "We have people and founders that dream really big and want to build massive companies," he said. "In the general culture between Europe and the U.S., I think U.S. founders and Americans are pretty good in storytelling and also pretty good salespeople." "There, we can focus on being even more bold, having an even more refined and visionary storytelling," Specht added.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Yahoo
It's a girl — again! And again! Why a baby's sex isn't random.
A baby's sex may not be up to mere chance. A study published Friday in the journal Science Advances describes the odds of having a boy or girl as flipping a weighted coin, unique to each family. It found evidence that an infant's birth sex is associated with maternal age and specific genes. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. The findings challenge assumptions that birth sex is random. They mirror the results of similar studies in Europe that have also found that birth sex does not follow a simple 50-50 distribution. Scientists have long documented a global imbalance in which slightly more boys are born than girls. The new study examined the murkier patterns of birth sex within individual families. To do so, researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed data from more than 146,000 pregnancies from 58,000 nurses in the United States between 1956 and 2015. They found that some families were more likely to have children of the same sex than would be expected if each baby had an equal chance of being a boy or a girl. Moms with three or more kids were more likely to have all boys or all girls than expected by chance. The study suggests that sex at birth follows a weighted probability and that biological influences may sway the sex of the child. 'If you've had two girls or three girls and you're trying for a boy, you should know your odds are not 50-50,' said Jorge Chavarro, the study's senior author. 'You're more likely than not to have another girl.' Researchers estimated that families with three girls had a 58 percent chance of having another girl, while families with three boys had a 61 percent chance of having a fourth boy. Maternal age is a key factor. Women who started having children after age 28 were slightly more likely to have only boys or only girls. Chavarro said this could reflect age-related biological changes that influence the survival of the Y chromosome carried by boys, such as increased vaginal acidity. Paternal factors could also play a role because maternal and paternal ages are often closely linked. But the study did not include data on fathers, which was noted as a limitation. Researchers also identified two genes associated with giving birth to only boys or only girls. 'We don't know why these genes would be associated with sex at birth, but they are, and that opens up new questions,' Chavarro, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology, said. Iain Mathieson, a professor of genetics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, said the genetic associations should be viewed cautiously. He said the study's genetic analysis was based on a relatively small sample and may be influenced by other factors, making the results more speculative until confirmed by further research. 'I don't find the genetic factors identified here particularly convincing,' Mathieson said in an email. The researchers also found that parents were more likely to have one boy and one girl than would be expected by chance, a pattern they believe reflects a tendency to stop having children once both sexes are represented. To reduce bias from such family planning decisions, they analyzed data after removing each woman's final child. They also excluded women who had experienced miscarriages or stillbirths to test whether pregnancy loss changed the results. They still found the same pattern: The odds of birth sex did not follow mere chance. The study suggests it may not have been so improbable for the fictional parents in the TV sitcom 'Malcolm in the Middle' to have five sons or for the Bennet family in 'Pride and Prejudice' to have five daughters. Even in history, patterns like this have drawn attention. King Louis VII of France, for example, remarried after his first two wives each gave birth to daughters, depriving him of a male heir. Chavarro said it might take years to fully understand why some families consistently have children of one sex, but this research is an important place to start. His team said future studies should explore how lifestyle, nutrition and exposure to environmental chemicals might affect these patterns. Certain factors such as race, natural hair color, blood type, body mass index and height were not associated with having children of only one sex. But the study sample was 95 percent White and made up entirely of nurses, a group that may have different occupational exposures or health patterns compared with the general population. David A. Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study, said it offers evidence that the probability of a baby's sex varies by family. 'Different families are flipping different coins with different biases,' Haig said. 'It speaks to something very intuitive and personal, even if the underlying biology is complex.' Related Content Family adopts a shelter dog — then learns he's the father of their late dog Can the Fed stay independent? Trump-era adviser may put it to the test. The Hubble telescope zooms in on the galaxy next door Solve the daily Crossword
American Military News
a day ago
- American Military News
1,600-year-old settlement discovered with Roman military artifacts
A Roman-era settlement estimated to be roughly 1,600 years old was recently discovered by archaeologists in Delbrück, Germany. The archeological discovery included the remains of at least two buildings and hundreds of ancient artifacts. According to Fox News, the Roman-era settlement was recently discovered as part of an excavation by the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL) at Schafbreite, which is located in Delbrück, Germany. In a statement obtained by Fox News, the LWL confirmed that hundreds of ancient artifacts were discovered at the Schafbreite location, with most of the artifacts traced back to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. Fox News reported that archaeologists uncovered two 'clearly identifiable' buildings, two wells, two pit houses, a cremation grave, and hundreds of artifacts as part of the excavation. The LWL stated, 'Seven hundred and fifty individual finds were recovered from the ancient cultural layer preserved under a thick ash soil, 600 of which were metal.' According to Fox News, LWL archaeologists noted that the site of the excavation appears to have been 'settled at different times, making it a multi-period settlement site.' 'The finds from various periods also show that the inhabitants had access to Roman material culture,' archaeologists added. READ MORE: Captain Cook's lost ship found off Rhode Island coast Fox News reported that Sven Spiong, one of the lead archaeologists for LWL, suggested that the mysterious excavation provides insight into the Migration Period, which took place from 300 to 600 A.D. Spiong explained, 'Sites like these help us better understand how the people of the region lived and worked during the arrival of the Romans and in the following centuries, what interregional contacts and connections they had, and how the settlement structure changed during the Migration Period.' LWL confirmed that an 'isolated cremation grave' was discovered during the excavation and that archaeologists discovered that a person was buried with a spearhead, a broken bone comb, two garment clasps, a fire steel, and an animal head buckle. 'Experts date this buckle to the 4th or 5th century based on its shape,' LWL stated. 'It further confirms the settlers' contact with the Roman cultural sphere, as it belonged to the Roman military belt.' According to Fox News, while researchers were not able to identify the burial, the archaeological organization suggested that the individual could have been a Germanic mercenary who served in the Roman military. '[It's] a special find, as it is the first burial in East Westphalia where parts of a Roman military belt have been detected, previously only known from surface finds in other regions,' the LWL said.
