National Geographic has long captured the hearts and imaginations of those interested in far-away cultures, history, and the world in general. The vivid and often striking photographs captured, accompanied by detailed narratives take us around the globe and through time for just a few pennies. Now they have the Cosmos redeaux with Neil deGrass Tyson. It’s easy to have a lot of respect for what they do. NatGeo the channel has perhaps borrowed some of the reputation of it’s parent organization, The National Geographic Society, but it has some of its own as well.
Unfortunately, I think they’re about to piss it away.
First they aired Diggers starting in 2012, which featured a pair of metal detectorists who are “invited by land owners” to haphazardly snatch metal artifacts from the ground. I caught an episode of this while flipping channels recently. This dastardly duo was “assisting” archaeologists in locating a canon before a bulldozer cleared a swatch of land for a highway bridge. They located a canon ball, which they very quickly dug out of the ground -one of them even did somersaults with it in his hand scant seconds after prying it from the dirt. No measurements. No soil profiles recorded. No evaluation of context. Just a haphazard hole dug to the item.
Sure. A bulldozer was coming in the next days or weeks. It might very well have been lost to us altogether anyway. Or it might not have. It was a large field. But the sensationalism behind it was unprofessional and irresponsible and can be argued to promote irresponsible behavior that can destroy sites in ways that context cannot be understood. The NatGeo Diggers website even has a Metal Detecting 101 section. But they also have a section on “responsible metal detecting” that encourages respect for culture and history. Personally, I think it’s an obligatory and superficial response to the overwhelming dismay archaeologists have had for NatGeo and its Diggers show.
Enter the new show: Nazi War Diggers. A recent promotional video that has since been removed from the show’s site, featured three personalities that were very haphazardly removing body parts (one even misidentified a leg bone as that of an arm). They’re apparently targeting Eastern European battlefields and their respect for contextual archaeology is as nearly uninformed as their respect for the dead. The video that shows this was not only removed from their own site, but NatGeo pressured YouTube, where it was being hosted by concerned members, to remove it as well based on copyright.
There is, however, an informative video on YouTube that was not taken down since it complies with Fair Use as a journalistic commentary (link below). Near the end of it, you can see this trio of diggers literally yanking a femur from the ground. It is so clearly a femur even on a video of a video, yet one of them boldly pronounces “that’s his shoulder.” They were perplexed at how the leg was over the dead soldier’s head. And the way they yanked his remains from the ground, we can never have an informed understanding.
Excavation of human remains like has one of two purposes (though they need not be mutually exclusive). Either it’s a scientific endeavor that uses established scientific protocols (bioarchaeological excavation techniques and meticulous recording of the unit stratigraphic layer by stratigraphic layer for instance); or it’s a humanitarian effort in which the dead are intended to be identified and repatriated to their loved ones, decedents, or homelands.
Say what you will about diggers vs. archaeologists. And if you’re a metal detectorist that was pissed about my dismissal of Diggers early in this article I want you to ask yourself this: were this a show on a Vietnamese or Chinese channel that showed a similar level of sensationalist disrespect by Asian metal detectorists, yanking the bones of American MIA’s in Vietnam and Cambodia out of the ground, would you feel it was okay?
Further Reading:
National Geographic are looking into it… under the delete key?
and
urgent ethical and legal questions for National Geographic, ClearStory and their Nazi War Diggers
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