Treasure Hunting Is More Than 'Fortune & Glory'

The professional treasure hunter seems like one of those jobs that the movies made us think was a viable career instead of a strange fantasy. Of course, there have been real 'adventurers', soldiers-of-fortune, wanderers, gold-miners, but the person who makes their livelihood out of bagging rare goodies from antiquity, you don't hear much about that these days, probably because it's largely illegal -- traveling to another country and stealing their swag is a quick way to a prison sentence, which is why I suppose that Indiana Jones is an academic affiliated with the American state department -- 'it belongs in a museum!', sure, but these guys aren't always swiping artefacts away from Nazi-types or death-cultists.

That cultural appropriation side of things has been well-handled by others, and it's fairly obvious to anyone around today -- what interests me more is the notion of 'treasure' itself. Firstly, to make any money off of ancient irreplaceable items, you already need to be affiliated with a black market of some kind that can shuttle them off to private collectors -- where these markets are, if they in fact exist, I couldn't tell you. Secondly, if you're just taking them for your own appeasement, a desire to collect, then you already have to possess some considerable cash to fund these global expeditions of yours, it is the equivalent of the 'gentleman thief' who takes for the sheer thrill of it, another figment of the popular imagination. Thirdly, where and when do you find out about this stuff in the first place? You've got to be a professor who combs through archives to know where X marks the spot, or a secular citizen with inexplicable access to the vast range of mysteries and the key to solving them.

I say all of this not with the banal intent to say that being Indiana Jones is 'unrealistic', but rather that this fictional space where treasure hunters preside speaks to a yearning that isn't satisfied outside of the cinema. I look into modern 'treasure hunting' on YouTube, and what I encounter is a gaggle of nice-enough men with high-powered magnets and metal detectors, chucking their wiles into rivers and lakes to see what might be down there -- sure, it's not exactly romantic, but they do find many items:

What I started to consider was that treasure hunting might have more in common with casual life than the action/adventure genre can permit itself to show. After all, how many more unplumbed pyramids are out there? If there are lost ruins that are rediscovered, it's not these guys making the most out of that opportunity, it's universities who then begin the arduous task of sifting through soil and preserving whatever they can of the site -- the point is not the little trinkets one may abscond away with, but the social dimensions and historical meanings behind the revelation of what is found. If the lost city of El Dorado was stumbled across by someone tomorrow, whatever 'gold' exists there seems paltry compared to the existence of the city itself -- sure, you can melt it down if you want to be vulgar, but there's probably more money to be made in academic publishing with these expensive specialty books about El Dorado research.

The definition of 'treasure' is dependent on the observer: my library of books might seem worthless to someone who doesn't care about weird fiction or continental philosophy, but for me it is a repository of the ideas and feelings that I love. So when Indiana Jones is competing with Beloc and the Nazis for the Ark of the Covenant, it's because both sides were conditioned to take the historicity of the Bible with seriousness, and they want that mythic power to stay out of the domain of what they consider a malign influence in the geopolitical sphere. If some random person had stumbled across that temple (and somehow not died from snakebites), they might not have the context for what the Ark is, it would just seem like a gold box with sand in it.

So what we treasure doesn't exist in a vacuum, it shapes us and is shaped by us, we create stories around these items and they in-turn create the archetypal space we inhabit -- was King Arthur's sword Excalbur granted that legendary power before it was written about, or did the writing about it give it that ability through the belief of those who recounted it? How and why something is 'valued' is never a simple question: gold, sapphires, platinum, and other precious minerals only really matter to us because of their rarity and because of the effort it takes to mine them out of the Earth. If you had the Midas touch, gold would be the most worthless thing to you, you would place value in other things way more.

When I was an aspiring 'archeologist' as a child, what I really wanted to do was find buried treasure -- I'd dig up my backyard, the local parks, driveways, etc. -- but that treasure only had importance in the value that I had already conceived of in my head and in my labor that went into the search. I was looking for dinosaur bones, but that was because I was enchanted by the dinosaurs that I had seen in books and movies -- for thousands of years, humanity had no concept of a dinosaur, and no interest in scientific research, so there wasn't the value in excavating for these bones. When you're debating a materialist vs. an idealist conception of reality, it is not easy to separate the chicken from its egg -- we alter our realities on a daily level to where the unimportant material strata of today takes on magnificence in a hundred years, and vice versa. When the historians of the 32nd century -- if there are any -- look back on the 21st century, will they find interest in what we're currently interested in? Or will they mostly be compelled by what 21st century treasures mean in the context of their own time? Every few decades, there are these reevaluations of historical figures -- some are painted as 'actually progressive' for their time, others are smeared as 'evil bastards'. Then a hundred years later, the inverse occurs, and the 'actually progressive' figure is decried as a hypocrite, while the 'evil bastards' are said to be misunderstood. So whatever is 'true' ends up saying more about the needs of the present than the facticity of the past.

So in that case, maybe the problem I'm facing with looking for treasure hunters is that they do still exist, but their appearance has changed -- instead of questing for Mayan relics or Russian diamonds, the treasure hunter we can easily find today is the haunter of book stores, on the lookout for certain authors, or they're a photographer trying to take photos of unseen caves, or maybe it can just be a guy, his dog, and a metal detector on an overcast beach, seeing what comes their way.

Instead of hoping to find a 'big score', it's probably better if we conextualize what we value by our own standards, not the standards of the big screen -- seen that way, it's not a fantasy at all, but a career that anyone can take joy in practicing. What is of value to the searchers of the past only matters to those who live in the speculative future -- we're better off caring for what we have right now, because that's only going to come once, and our appreciation of it might help those to come after know what they can value themselves.