Random amateurs digging stuff up is next to useless from an archaeological perspective - once you've disturbed the earth and taken stuff out of the ground you've already destroyed so much contextual information.

Even professional trained archaeologists intentionally only excavate parts of sites when they know there's more to find because we expect there to be much better technology in the future.

Amateurs digging for artifacts are destroying knowledge, not discovering it.

I mean, this incident should call your assumptions about this into question.

Yes, some might be lost by random digging. But if it would not otherwise ever be found then nothing has been lost.

If something's been in the ground for hundreds of years, it'll still be there for a few hundred more. There's little reason to want to maximize the amount you're excavating right now. Unless your goal is to find treasure and profit somehow.

I think the greater concern for artifact loss is someone doing earthworks, finding something, and then not reporting it because they don't want to wait for archaeologists to check out the site.

So much will never be looted or destroyed because of this law. As an Irish person who has spent some time working as an archaeological grunt (basically, I dig then as soon as I spot something, pass it over to a real archaeologist) - this is a hugely important law. Because, for large developers, the immediate response on finding something is to hide/destroy it so that they don't lose money while an archaeological survey is carried out. And for landowners, I wager a majority are likely to keep it as a curio if it doesn't look valuable.

The fact is that owning a piece of farmland doesn't give you ownership of our country's heritage. Nor should it. You get to raise cows on the land. You don't get to mine it (without permission), you don't get to turn it into a housing development (without permission), and you don't get to turn it into an archaeological dig site (without permission).

In response to "our country's heritage": Ireland is not a person so the concept is entirely political.

And provided you don't cause any negative externalities, you should have the default right to do whatever you want on your land.

> Ireland is not a person so the concept is entirely political.

Of course. Is that some kind of gotcha?

> provided you don't cause any negative externalities, you should have the default right to do whatever you want on your land.

Destroying our chances to understand history is the externality.

But here is the thing, if you are an Irish citizen you are free to advocate for a change in law. If you convince enough of your peers that it should be changed it will be changed. Isn’t that great?

Generally, the later we excavate something, the greater the amount of historical information we'll be able to get from that excavation.

Of course, this has to be balanced with some amount of excavation to actually improve those methods, and with enough information being gleaned today to keep us interested in actually funding the practice of archaeology for tomorrow.

Templo Mayor. Mexico. They discovered it recently next to the big famous Cathedral.

They flattened a few city blocks to excavate it.

But they will never flatten the cathedral, or other large famous buildings in the vicinity.

Point is: the longer we wait to excavate, the more the likelihood that something's been constructed on top.

For one thing, you can require an archeological survey before starting the build, as part of the normal permitting process. And this is especially important (and easy to enforce) if the building requires excavation anyway.

But secondly, as long as the building doesn't destroy the site (say, the ruins/remains are buried deep enough), then there is no problem, and the logic still applies: it will be found some few decades or centuries later, so chances are there will be more that can be gleaned from it then.