Grave robbing yay or nay?
- Thread starter Necros
- Start date
TheShepard256
Well-Known Member
Nay. Archaeology, on the other hand....
Its just recycling, both practical and ecologically-friendly.
TheShepard256
Well-Known Member
While that is true, it can also be seen as disrespectful to the dead and/or their culture, especially because it's usually done for selfish reasons i.e. profit. Archaeology is less problematic because it's done for selfless reasons i.e. to try gaining a greater knowledge/understanding of the dead and/or their culture.
There's already enough of wealth disparity with few living folks hoarding bulk of the available goods. No need to aggravate it with letting them keep hoarding that shit even after death.
When it's a choice between "respectful" and "starving" or "dead because couldn't afford good gear to survive against bandits and demons running rampart" then don't count on respect winning very often.
When it's a choice between "respectful" and "starving" or "dead because couldn't afford good gear to survive against bandits and demons running rampart" then don't count on respect winning very often.
I mean you technically rob a "grave" if you want a fox wife, so as long as it's just you go ahead.
Precisely why I role play as an early British explorer, arriving in a distant, shameless and foreign land like Scotland or Ireland
Its not like people were using them, after all artifacts were rotting away in a crypt.
Sure. The acropolis was taken apart by the british for knowledge/understanding and safekeeping. No other reason.
None.
Not a single one.
All purely selfless. As the brits were known for.
I for one embrace the grave robbing tradition. As long as my champ can get lewd with any potential vengeful spirit. Tbh, Ryn's grandparents quest kinda called my behaviour out. Which was weird, but also funny.
If you want immorality-free graverobbing, create completely extinct cultures that no one is related to AND create no powerful government benign enough that it could conceivably seek the well-being of large numbers of people by preserving ancient locations as archeological research sites. At that point grave robbing's moral character is officially "No One Cares."
Any other circumstance and you're the British Royal Museum -- a piece of shit. And yeah, that means Indiana Jones was actually kinda shit (even if we're ignoring/interpreting away his likely statutory problem) despite his good stance on nazis.
Though that first paragraph seems like a lot, it's actually the likely default in any cliched or kitchen-sink fantasy setting. Such cliched settings are usually post-Apocalyptic and all existing countries are relatively petty, even if they are influential, and not terribly benign. That applies to CoC2 aptly.
Also, we're ignoring any personal moral qualms from graverobbing as those will vary from person to person.
Waitaminute, why are we talking about this?
Any other circumstance and you're the British Royal Museum -- a piece of shit. And yeah, that means Indiana Jones was actually kinda shit (even if we're ignoring/interpreting away his likely statutory problem) despite his good stance on nazis.
Though that first paragraph seems like a lot, it's actually the likely default in any cliched or kitchen-sink fantasy setting. Such cliched settings are usually post-Apocalyptic and all existing countries are relatively petty, even if they are influential, and not terribly benign. That applies to CoC2 aptly.
Also, we're ignoring any personal moral qualms from graverobbing as those will vary from person to person.
Waitaminute, why are we talking about this?
except for academics who get absolutely screwed over by the refusal to preserve items in the context in which they were found, dramatically reducing the information that historians and archaeologists can glean from an examination of the site and artifacts
destroying potentially valuable information about the past is still immoral imo
If there is no government with the benign tendencies outlined above, such academics do. not. exist. There is no one to preserve the relics for. That's the point of the original position. Indeed, there wouldn't even be a cultural concept that would hold that such preservation would even be valuable because there's no way to transmit the significance and value of the preserved areas to a greater culture at large, in the same way that a caveman discovering uranium hasn't found a treasure-trove of industrial material, but a bunch of worthless rocks that will make her sick. There is no archaelogy if there are no archaeologists, and there are no archaeologists without patrons and appropriate infrastructure.
Bleeding the sick so they'll get better is immoral as hell but many of our milennia-old ancestors lacked this information. An ancient physician doing so could legitimately think they're helping and would be crushed if you popped out of a time portal and corrected him. Our decendants would likely be capable of doing the same to us, if we hadn't come up with the clever public and foreign policy of ending humanity so that won't ever happen. We dodged a bullet there, I tell 'ya.
You don't need benign governments for individuals to be interested in history. If anything, attitude of "benign governments" only stems from existence of such people in the first place, either as part of the government or as groups/individuals with enough clout their interests are taken into account.
You need that government for infrastructure. Interest is cheap, a necessary but never sufficient element. I'm interested in everyone having free medical care, as are a majority of people, locally and otherwise. Doesn't make it policy.
It also doesn't make it instant. Disparate groups of people can be interested in a road network to facilitate trade and travel, but until there's organization concerned with their interests, those roads don't get built or maintained and it takes time to build them. Even if archaeology could exist, it would still take time to develop.
I am absolutely certain there were people interested in preserving the cultural heritage of many ancient abandoned Middle-Eastern cities. And there were a lot more who were interested in cheap building materials for their homes and businesses, so those cities were literally taken apart brick by brick for milennia until local governments formed with enough farsightedness (and the luxury of administrative and technological sophistication) to stop the practice.
Right now there are peasants and corporations clearing rainforest that all of humanity needs. Even the peasants don't want to do it. But the states aren't interested in that disparate desire so the forests burn.
Dark fantasy is actually less heavy than the real world. If I'm in a bronze-age world of sorcery and a magic sword in an ancient temple lets me kill the dangerous monster that threatens my couple-a-dozen villagemates and drawing that sword brings the temple down, that temple is toast no matter how much I love ancient history and my contemporaries would think me mad for hesitating.
It also doesn't make it instant. Disparate groups of people can be interested in a road network to facilitate trade and travel, but until there's organization concerned with their interests, those roads don't get built or maintained and it takes time to build them. Even if archaeology could exist, it would still take time to develop.
I am absolutely certain there were people interested in preserving the cultural heritage of many ancient abandoned Middle-Eastern cities. And there were a lot more who were interested in cheap building materials for their homes and businesses, so those cities were literally taken apart brick by brick for milennia until local governments formed with enough farsightedness (and the luxury of administrative and technological sophistication) to stop the practice.
Right now there are peasants and corporations clearing rainforest that all of humanity needs. Even the peasants don't want to do it. But the states aren't interested in that disparate desire so the forests burn.
Dark fantasy is actually less heavy than the real world. If I'm in a bronze-age world of sorcery and a magic sword in an ancient temple lets me kill the dangerous monster that threatens my couple-a-dozen villagemates and drawing that sword brings the temple down, that temple is toast no matter how much I love ancient history and my contemporaries would think me mad for hesitating.
I'm not questioning that infrastructure is needed. I've objected to the claim it's the government involvement that's necessary for the interest to be present and that without it the interest and people holding it "do. not. exist."
And your interest does make the policy -- once a group with given interest is significant enough in terms of numbers and/or other kind of influence, that it becomes obvious to either the government or people trying to become one, it's beneficial for their interests to make supporting your interest the policy. Or once the interested people get in positions of power themselves.
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You've misidentified the people and have stripped away their names, professions, and experience, thus creating a strawman. Scroll up and look at the part of my text that you carefully did not copy and paste: those people were not merely interested. Those people were archaelogists. An archaeologist has a cachet that is very different than someone who is merely "interested." Archaeology is also not a craft that pops up in the historical timeline before concepts of history and historical analysis do.
That's just completely false. I mean, the world is worse for it, but that's just false. Majorities in the U.S. want Medicare For All, but rightwing leadership in both parties hate it so it dies hard. Majorities in both parties want some gun reform that keeps guns out of the hands of schitzophrenics (yes, both parties) and no bill like that can make it five feet before being killed. Majorities poll big numbers on dozens of issues that won't be considered or pass. Majorities are against plenty of stuff that does pass -- like the second Iraq war. And all that is an ostensible "democracy" -- how much more ludicrous is that position in a monarchy. Interest doesn't even remotely make policy.
(Hell, the Taliban blew up a bunch of ancient statues precisely because there was interest in preserving them -- in other words, the interest created the relic's destruction. A lack of interest would have saved those cultural artifacts. In anti-democratic governments, spite may well have a stronger hand in public policy than public interest.)
And history bears this out. Remember my example of those cities taken apart, brick by brick? How could that have happened, over and over, for several thousand years if mere "interest" prevents it? Where were the spontaneous archaeologists that made thousands of years of repurposing, tomb robbing, and imperialistic theft impossible? For every villager that wanted to preserve ancient structures, there was another that needed to build a nursery for their kid and they weren't going to shlep all the way to some quarry to get the bricks, so ancient history can suck it.
But there are academics in the CoC2 setting, which is a thing you conspicuously don't discuss in any specifics in any of your posts in this thread. The fact that they don't have godlike powers to visit wrath and ruin on the people who make their lives harder doesn't mean that they won't care about it when people do. That's what I was responding to - the "No. One. Cares." comment, the part of your post that I quoted. They do care. And, in the memey all-lowercase voice people on the Internet use when they're definitely being completely serious, I went on to suggest that making historians' lives harder is immoral, which is one of those things that is slightly true but also facially silly.
Everything else y'all are talking about is soapboxing about things that are at best irrelevant and at worst off-topic.
Actually, I do and I think you missed it. The entire point here is that the moral impact of interference with an ancient site depends upon a lack of infrastructure but I never said that CoC2 doesn't have it. I said that if you're going to erase that moral complication, you have to erase the kind of scholarship, information distribution, and cultural concern that would make that moral complication inevitable and you have to do it at the outset of the setting's development. I think you may have gotten mixed-up and pulled things from that topic -- at least, from my perspective -- but my opening comment holds that CoC2 has the same exact problem as Indiana Jones: the graverobbers aren't complete good guys even when they punch nazis. I will note that the exact level of technological sophistication in CoC2 isn't unambiguous, but it still seemed to lean towards "archaeology exists."
Edit: It may well be that we agree for differing reasons and/or talked past one another.