I was a little appalled at this passage from a print-only column from the Archaeological Institute of America President Jodi Magness in Archaeology (January/February 2018):
Recently I returned from Jordan, where I was hosted by Hungarian colleague named Gyõzõ Vörös who directs excavations at Machaerus, a fortified palace of King Herod the Great that overlooks the Dead Sea. It was a Machaerus that Herod’s son Antipas had John the Baptist beheaded. During one of our visits to the site, Gyõzõ pointed to several men illegally excavating on the hill opposite, which we had surveyed the previous day. Another carload of men shadowed us, waiting until we left to begin digging. The latter group, Gyõzõ informed me, was not impoverished locals but affluent individuals who had driven from Amman in their luxury car. The trunk was loaded with hoes and other digging equipment. Both groups, however, shared a common goal: to find gold. My heart broke as we climbed around the pockmarked slopes of Machaerus and the surrounding hillsides.
One of the precepts of archaeology should be the ability to protect the finds made from illegal excavation. Perhaps this is impractical, or perhaps the scientist’s lust for knowledge (their equivalent of gold) is as much power as these local folks who lust for wealth and power, but the results are the same: irreparable damage to the archaeological record.
