Go look for the treasure and destroy the common heritage
You might see it in mountains or rural areas, looking for underground footprints with metal detectors. They're detectors or pitchers, they bond to play for treasure. Detectorism has become fashionable and there are youtubers and television series talking about them. This activity is very destructive to heritage and archaeology and is causing irreparable damage in many places.
Archaeology is a discipline that studies the material culture of societies of the past through rigorous and scientific methodology. The archaeological method observes the relationships between the stratigraphic units and the context of the objects found in each of them. Archaeological objects are the ones that provide the most information if they are in their original context. That is, trash with a proper context gives us more information about past societies than the most beautiful decontextualized gems. This methodology can be applied not only to the underground, but also to buildings, landscapes, landfills or others.
Imagine that the underground site is like the layers of a cake. The oldest stratigraphic unit would be at the bottom (chocolate layer), the middle (strawberry) and the most recent or modern the closest to the surface (cream). Archaeologists dig from the top layer to the bottom (first cream, then strawberry and then chocolate) to study in detail all the objects and relationships in that layer. If, on the contrary, a pitcher detected, through his artifact, a small metal object from the last layer and made a hole to pull it out, that whole context would be dismantled and the stratigraphic relationships between them would be completely mixed. That is, all flavors would be mixed, so all the information that could be obtained would be lost forever. As if that were not enough, the objects they find frequently end up in private collections through the black market.
Lately, laws have been tightened to limit detectorism damage and action has begun. However, in some cases it is too late and in many cases sanctions are being ineffective despite the complaint.
This year a discovery surprises the Basque. The Hand of Irulegi has made us illusion and has almost become a national symbol. If a cursed pitcher had passed through the top of Irulegi before Mattin Aiestaran's group, we wouldn't know that beautiful piece that can clarify our past and our history. Don't buy metal detectors, don't be pits.
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stratigraphic units (archaeological layers). M.K.H.Eggert (Wikimedia Commons)
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