Feb 25 2009
New SCUBA Diving Laws in Greece - Archaeologists Fear SCUBA-Looters!
Attention SCUBA-certified Treasure Hunters: A new law has opened Greece’s coastline to SCUBA diving!
Unfortunately it has also opened archaeologist’s concern for treasures that await in shipwrecks yet undiscovered.
In 1902 the study of the ancient world was forever changed when a corroded mechanism was recovered by sponge divers from a sunken Greek wreck.
It was the Antikythera Mechanism - a system of bronze gears from the 2nd century BC used to calculate the date of the Olympic Games based on the summer solstice. Its mechanical complexity was unequaled for 1,000 years - until the cathedral clocks of the Middle Ages.
Archaeologists believe hundreds more wrecks lie beneath the eastern Mediterranean sea and may contain treasures and now those treasures can be explored by almost any SCUBA diver. Marine archaeologists Harry Tzalas says “the future of archaeology in this part of the world is in the sea. This law is very dangerous, it opens the way to the looting of antiquities from the seabed which we don’t even know exist.”
In 1932 Greece’s antiquities law said all artifacts on land and in the sea belong to the state, but it does not regulate SCUBA diving which was developed in the 1940s by Frenchman Jacques Cousteau.
A new law implemented in 2007 and designed to promote tourism opens most of Greece’s 9,400 mile coastline to SCUBA divers, except for about 100 known archaeological sites. Greece’s archaeologists’ union and two ecological societies have appealed for the law to be rescinded. Meanwhile, some tour companies are luring tourists with the promise of ancient artifacts. “SCUBA diving in Greece is permitted everywhere…Ideal for today’s treasure hunter.”
Greece offers handsome rewards to prevent relics falling into private hands. It paid 440,000 euros ($553,300) to a fisherman for a female torso off the island of Kalymnos in 2005.
Archaeologists know of many treasures still lost at sea. About 5,000 pieces from the collection of Luigi Palma di Cesnola — who helped found New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — disappeared in a Mediterranean shipwreck in the 1870s.
For more information, read the rest of this three page article at: Sunken Greek Treasures at Risk from SCUBA Looters hosted by Reuters U.K.
I would love to know and learn more about lost and sunken treasure in greece,i beleive it must all be found and returned to the greeks,or to mueseums ,i hunt for treasure around australia,im living in england now but will return to my mother land greece rhodes this summer,i would love to help the proper authoritys of greece to hunt down illegal treasure hunters and theifs and would love to help the greek Archaeoligy to find more,thank you for your time