When I was touring Mexico last year, my family stayed at a virtually vacant hotel on a vast estate. The hospitable staff, with little to do thanks to Covid, gave us a grand tour of the grounds. Along the way, they pointed out a bunch of minor Mayan artifacts. And in hushed tones, they asked us not to alert the authorities. If the government of Mexico knew they had artifacts, they might be legally seized. Or worse.
Nor is Mexico especially harsh. Around the world, governments claim ownership of archeological finds on private property. And the result is predictable: Archaeology lives in chains. People have little incentive – or even a negative incentive – to hunt for artifacts. As a result, the glorious patrimony of humanity stays in the ground.
Admittedly, there is a black market, but it’s tiny compared to what could have been. After all, one of the main reasons to buy artifacts is to publicly display them – and it’s dangerous to publicly display evidence of criminal complicity.
Wouldn’t legalizing the market lead to trespassing and theft? Almost surely. If you let people make money selling corn, this encourages people to sneak onto cornfields and steal corn. Yet at the same time, it encourages people to protect their cornfields. Compared to the gains of private property rights, the costs of trespassing and theft is a rounding error.
The main problem with my proposal is that the government has already seized a lot of the most archaeologically promising land. So just respecting private property rights isn’t enough. Instead, governments need to privatize this land forthwith. Have some big auctions and pay down their national debt.
Wouldn’t foreigners swoop in and win the auctions? To a large extent, yes. And that’s good. It’s called foreign investment, and it’s the best-known way to spread prosperity from the First World to the Third. Because foreign investment is not just know-how, and it’s not just technology. It’s leadership.
Wouldn’t this be a return to the bad old days of colonialism? Well, colonial powers did many bad things, but allowing a largely free market in antiquities was not one of them. The 19th-century was a golden age of archaeology. If modern laws had been enforced back then, much – perhaps most – of the best stuff in modern museums would remain undiscovered. The idea that artifacts rightfully belong to “the nation as a whole” is classic flowery socialist rhetoric, with classic dismal socialist results.
In any case, even if you cling to the ideal of collective property, there is a keyhole solution: Instead of banning the sale of artifacts, just tax it. This allows “the nation as a whole” (i.e. the government) to capture much of the surplus, without crippling the industry.
Is any country rich in archeological treasure likely to take this free-market route? As usual, no. Though perhaps my friends in Guatemala could manage to make something good happen. Right now, Guatemala is full of barely-excavated Mayan sites; they don’t have the funds to do much more than maintain what they’ve already got. Legalizing the market – and auctioning off government-owned sites to the highest bidder – really could transform the Guatemalan economy – and bring riches to many of their poorest communities.
Yes, let Disney buy Tikal. Only nationalist and socialist demagoguery stands in the way.
P.S. While we’re at it, we still need to privatize Lenin.
READER COMMENTS
Capt. J Parker
Dec 13 2021 at 12:18pm
Academic archaeology involves spending a huge amounts of time and resources documenting the precise locations of artifacts recovered so they can be dated, classified and their cultural significance to the societies that created them can be reconstructed. Academic archaeology spends this amount of time and resources on artefacts that may be of very little interest for display or collection purposes but are of importance for the study of ancient groups and civilizations.
It seems to me that the market is likely to price the knowledge gained by academic archaeology at lower value and display worthy artifacts at a much higher value so private archaeologists seeking to maximize a return on invested capital will devote few resources to knowledge extraction and more resources to display worthy artefact recovery.
Maybe private archaeology will still lead to a net increase in academic archaeology knowledge extraction because private archaeology will increase the resources available for both types of archaeology. But it is also possible that knowledge extraction will decrease as sites are mostly used for display worthy artifact mining. If this happens you could argue this is just the result of society valuing artifacts over knowledge and that resources are now more appropriately allocated. But you could also argue that academia’s government sanctioned monopoly on archaeology is society’s answer to an externality of the market for artifacts, that being that artifact collection destroys the ability to do knowledge extraction and knowledge is poorly priced because it is a public good.
PS The movie The Dig makes raises a lot of relevant points about this topic. Among them:
Academic archeologists can be self interested and motivated out of a desire to simply exclude those not as credentialed as themselves from working on knowledge and artefact recovery.
UK law granted ownership of the recovered Sutton Hoo artifacts landowner Edith Pretty. Ms. Pretty was motivated by a desire for knowledge. So, perhaps the situation Dr. Caplan describes in Mexico is due to something other than governments desire to protect archaeology sites.
Peter Gerdes
Dec 13 2021 at 3:29pm
I’ve long thought that it’s a big waste that archaeological and paleontological artifacts just rot in giant university storage banks. Use digital tech to scan them and then sell them to fund research under an agreement that allows them to be requested to be returned to allow further sampling.
Most importantly if you let the artifacts be sold provided they are gathered in an appropriate scientific fashion would induce fossil/artifact hunters to collaborate with the scientists and recover all the info.
That info is what matters not the physical remanent.
Yaakov Schatz
Dec 13 2021 at 4:00pm
In addition to the comment of Capt. J Parker which I agree with, I note that the value of land for construction in Israel is probably much higher than its value for archeology, maybe even by a factor of a thousnd. So the result may just be that the treasures stay in the ground covered by concrete.
greenlander
Dec 14 2021 at 4:25am
Here’s an interesting topic for debate. Did this guy add or subtract from the field of archaeology?
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/10/how-the-fbi-discovered-a-real-life-indiana-jones-in-indiana
He collected hundreds of thousands of artifacts, but his effort was very disorganized and it’s not clear where many of the items came from. It’s said that he also vandalized some of his own specimens, for instance putting an arrowhead through a skull to make it appear as if that person died in a way that didn’t happen.
It’s not clear to me that his actions were a net positive or not for society.
nobody.really
Dec 14 2021 at 7:01am
1: Capt. J Parker makes the relevant argument, but to elaborate:
Not the strongest analogy. Yes, letting people sell corn encourages people to protect their corn fields. And this is productive … why?
As far as I can tell, it isn’t. What IS productive is inducing people to GROW corn. Analogously, I expect privatizing archeology might induce people to manufacture artifacts. And that would be productive … why?
In short, Caplan has not offered an argument for privatizing archeology. Rather, he has offered an argument for privatizing antiquities mining, and he does not distinguish between mining and archeology.
2: Still, Caplan’s post provokes the question, what policy SHOULD govern archeology?
As Capt. J Parker points out, archeology is not merely a quest for status objects to hang on the wall; it’s an effort to learn something about the past. Antiquities minders (“tomb raiders”) impede these efforts. Caplan’s analysis fails to recognize or accord any value to the knowledge gained through archeology, or the cost that facilitating tomb-raiding would cause–and thus the analysis is incomplete.
Still, once we acknowledge these trade-offs, the optimal policy remains illusive.
As Caplan alludes, many ancient objects have market value. In contrast, the market for archeological information is … less obvious. While the Holy Lands have enjoyed enormous archeological attention, Latin America has been left begging. In short, I share Caplan’s suspicion that there’s wealth buried throughout Latin America–and few concrete archeological projects to go find it.
How would we identify an optimal policy? Step 1: Estimate the market value of antiquities we might find if we privatized antiquity-mining, and a time-frame for acquiring such antiquities. That would be hard–but not as hard as Step 2: Estimate the value of archeological insights we might achieve through some future study, and a time-frame for acquiring these insights. Step 3: Calculate the net present value of both options, and compare the two. Realize that the value of the archeological insights will be more heavily discounted because we should expect those benefits to accrue later than the benefit of permitting antiquities mining.
The point of this exercise is to illustrate that, conceptually, we could conclude that antiquities-mining is the better alternative. This outcome strikes me as absurd, but mainly because I place high value on the idea of future knowledge (and low value on hypothetical status objects). I must acknowledge that my perspective privileges the interests of armchair philosophers–while real people (and governments) with immediate needs are left wanting. I feel no special chagrin in this because I can hide behind the fact that there are no actual numbers in this calculation. But still, this seems like a wimpy (quasi-)conclusion on my part.
Cheyenne R Sage
Dec 14 2021 at 10:54am
Privatization always ALWAYS ALWAYS results in net negative for actual life. For rich white guys it always benefits themselves, and for everyone else it causes problems. Look at toll roads. Look at buildings, look at the formerly public airwaves, or even utilities. Privatization always leads to shoddy results and skyrocketing costs. Enron.
Benjamin Wolfe
Dec 14 2021 at 11:24pm
After reading it, I want believe that Mr Caplan’s essay was intended as exquisite satire. The sincere reactions of readers to his proposals, for and against, and the general orientation of this website have caused me to question my initial interpretation… If Mr Caplan would define what he believes archeology is, this might clarify whether human civilization should take his assertions seriously, and whether supporters of his position consider there to be purpose and value in human understanding beyond simple avarice. If those who think “privatizing archeology” will be a boon to the poor, we have centuries of privatized archeology in practice to show that this fresh idea is actually stale and corrupt. Indiana Jones was the exception, and the caricature Caplan lays out for us here has been a large share of business as usual, leaving cultures wuth neither claim to sovereignty nor their own history.
Capt. J Parker
Dec 15 2021 at 1:03pm
Mr. Wolfe
Whatever Mr. Caplan’s intentions were, the idea that strong landowner property rights would lead to a more optimal archeological economy is worth taking seriously.
No one doubts there is value to human understanding but, assigning a price to that understanding is important. If you can’t properly price that understanding you allocate resources inefficiently and arbitrarily.
As for helping the poor – I think history has shown that having a vibrant economy that allocates resources efficiently and minimizes arbitrary prohibitions on economic activity helps the poor the most.
The situation Mr. Caplan observed is one where there are weak landowner rights, a presumption by government that academic archeologists should price archeological knowledge (with the predictable result that they price it extremely high or “priceless”) and a resultant dearth of economic activity in artifact extraction. This status quo possibly benefits academic archeologists the most, is of debatable benefit for many of us depending our marginal utility for academic knowledge vs direct experience with extracted artifacts and benefits the poor who might otherwise have jobs in the extraction industry not at all.
I don’t intend to negate anything I said in my original post. I think the key question that needs to be answered to judge Mr. Caplan’s proposal is what price should be applied to academic knowledge. Across first world economies and across academic disciplines, pricing knowledge is predominantly a centrally planned exercise. Why would we think this is the best state of affairs?
Gary Vines
Dec 17 2021 at 4:56am
Absolute for.
Private archaeology, the way you describe It, is just grave robbing. The value of antiquities on an open market has nothing to do with archaeology but only the rarity value of an object and the perceived status of the possessor. Archaeology is about the context of a cultural deposit and how it can reveal stories of the past. What you are talking about is just consumer capitalism.
A better idea is to privatise the military. Let individuals pay mercenaries to protect them from other mercenaries and let armies fund themselves through punitive raids of their enemies. In fact let civilisations crumble into violent anarchy.
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