And for a minute I felt like I was surrounded by a pack of energy hungry wolves.
But on the mangy side,
they got it into their heads that I knew where I knew where to find the gold that had been buried and left by the Armenians back in 1915,
the time of the great opening and not the massacre of the Armenians.
So instead. He goes on, it's a wonder that they can believe that anybody with them, with a map to a chest of gold buried in the middle of nowhere,
would cool their heels for a hundred years before deciding to dig it out and take it home.
This being 2018, they pulled out smartphones with pictures of stones and crosses, traces of Armenian writing,
or even just hollowed out sections that could easily have served as my ancestors toilets.
Not just that, but they even showed me the picture of what looks like a fossilised turtle.
Underneath which somebody in possession of the necessary secrets might uncover untold riches.
Well, it's tragic, comical and everything in between to see these people in the last year of their own lives,
shamelessly striving to wheedle a treasure map from a descendant of the people their parents
massacred and the unrealised hopes of getting their hands on all that coal before the end of earth.
So that email message for the college struck me as kind of my type of topic.
And then my title is Traditions in Greece, and I'm not talking about Eastern Turkey and Armenia,
but these are kind of like post Ottoman or the formerly Ottoman post Ottoman places.
And this story about the Armenian gold is confirmed if you needed a confirmation.
I had had inklings that this was this story, this very real ongoing tradition.
And there this article by Alex von Duberstein, which, if you like, is a very highly theorised anthropology of tragedy in the Armenian area.
And I'll tell you a little bit about her story in a minute.
But just on the slide, these are some images from her article.
These are the treasure maps mentioned in that email already.
And that is those are the ruins of an ancient Armenian monastery with so fresh earth right there where the local inhabitants,
who are mainly Kurds, have been digging because that's an Armenian site.
And, you know, the likelihood of being there is better than better than just in the world of us in both.
And so these stories in Armenia point to a consistency with good stories.
In the post world, which includes Greece and much of the Balkans and Middle East have these kinds of traditions.
There. They were already familiar to me because the field athletes who came to Greece
in the early 1800s before even were thought by the local inhabitants of Greece,
Ottomans, to be in possession of special knowledge of where treasures lay.
And they thought that the Flemings knew that because the Hellenes could read the inscriptions
on the stones until things were very interested in the remains of the ancient Greeks.
That's what this early photograph is meant to show.
I mean, nobody can see it, but there is a man with probably a sketchpad or something doing doing a rub or some kind of,
you know, early archaeological activity.
Those were the sorts of characters that the denizens of Greece circa 1800, some some might have been a muslim.
Some might have been Orthodox Christians, might have been Greeks, people smoking Albanians, because.
But that was one of the generalised ideas similar to what was seen in the Armenian case.
Is that the feelings? By their interest in the ruins and the knowledge of the inscriptions.
We're interpreting indications the word treasure the.
They were able to read the signs and the books and texts and.
Pieces of inscription that they came with were the maps to have in the opening credits.
The Kurds pester Armenian visitors for maps such as law in Pompeii.
Precise illustration. Do you have a map that's been given to you from him?
And they have developed ideas that turtles, as that article mentioned.
Or chickens might be animals that lead you to where treasure might be.
So if you follow a turtle, I'd take you to a treasure.
They do have some they do have some limits to Curtis.
But Treasury secrets, they won't dig up Armenian graves, and supposedly they won't dig in churches either.
But you've seen them in the monastery, so I'm not sure how true that is.
Since I've introduced article, I should follow through and tell you,
because this is a proper contemporary anthropologist trained at Cambridge with Gail Navarro and sort of highly theorised article,
which is, I think just interesting. But to take a little bit description, to get a theory of treasure hunting,
because I feel that before you go into it, it's not a one size fits all theory.
I mean, theories about treasures will vary according to the place where they you know,
where they take where the treasures are found and who's involved, who's digging up, whose treasure from how far apart.
So bear in mind that eastern turkey in the Armenian areas is a very particular case.
So one person talks to the Kurds about, you know, what's going on here and what do you think you're doing?
And a Kurdish woman. Tell us what this absolutely deplorable what happened to the Armenians.
This should never happen to anybody to be massacred and run out, you know, and to be deported, to basically exterminated like they were.
But it happened in the past and now, you know, we didn't support what happened there at all.
But there are these treasures that we're doing about to try to find.
And furthermore, to say, well, we can't make common cause.
We are victims of the state in Turkey just as much as the Armenians.
And if you follow developments in Turkey, you know that Kurdish mothers demonstrate, I think every Saturday in Istanbul about the disappeared,
children disappeared, sons maiming and fighting in eastern Turkey, and rapidly they expanded their cause.
It's one of those things where they've expanded to embrace other oppressed minorities in Turkey and they've welcomed in Armenia.
Fellow demonstrators with the Armenians without any common cause just happened to be some presence here.
Colombia's time goes on to say that treasure hunting in Turkey is formally illegal.
You cannot you cannot dig things up and you can treasure hunt if you have permission from the state, which still presumably gives you.
But no one's ever tried to get it. Everyone thinks illegally. So the condition is that.
Everyone who digs and possibly stood back to her side.
Everyone is digging in places like that. Is doing so surreptitiously and illegally.
And any Kurd who might find something will probably rapidly knowing the politics of small communities
throughout the world and possibly denounce to the police because people in the community go to want to see,
you know, don't want to see them getting ahead, don't like them like, you know, there's always kind of repeats in these places.
So by something the state made it by by this kind of serendipity of it being illegal,
but people do and being possibly legal, but people choosing to do it illegally.
The state has even stronger routes of control and surveillance over what's actually happening at the local level,
much better than if they just declared it illegal or just just as good as they just declared illegal.
So. So searching for treasure in Armenia, according to John McLaughlin, just reinforces your subjection to the state in subjection to informers.
There is furthermore this element following an analysis of denial.
The Kurds, we know, were deeply involved in the massacre of government units and the deportation of white.
So this is a massive missed recognition to say, oh, there were a lot of people, they would go to a wonderful level of civilisation and so on.
Nothing to do with us, you know that they got other people to exterminate or started to.
So her analysis is that in this, you know, I don't necessarily follow all of this,
but it's quite interesting to me that very stimulating for your imagination dollars for how to analyse
Treasurys is that the Armenian Armenians have to be forgotten completely in this kind of Darwinian analysis.
So the they're the material culture, they're valuable, such as they are,
and the Earth can be appropriated and taken as as gifts, as free gifts to them.
So the Armenians have to be. The indifference to the.
It is part of the erasure of the Armenians.
Somebody into 4 billion people whose wealth such as can be found is less than transferable liquid boys treasures.
But this is all impossible to do because at some level they never did have a hand in the genocide of the Armenians.
So the Armenians are constantly returning and these treasures are our burdens and they're haunted.
And if you dig one up and forget it, you can be denounced and thrown in jail.
People get bankrupted by the metal detectors and the equipment to dig them up and not finding them.
So the Armenians are curse on the treasure hunters who are very good people and very poor, who are further bankrupted by the Armenians.
Of the past. Okay.
Well, you know, to do the anthropology or or the kind of social science study, what the humanistic study addresses,
you've got to have an idea of what a treasure, what that would mean to to you, to us.
When we write a paper, I think we're going to use the word treasure. So that means a lot using the rich spectrum.
Interestingly, the modern Greeks are using a word that's cognate to study.
So what's our definition of treasure? I wish I had a wide, but of course this is anthropological.
The definition of treasure is precious metals, which let's common all of those things, all of these or common accumulated wealth.
So that's what we understand. Treasure. That's what the OED would tell you.
Treasure is its hoard store of wealth, usually golden jewels of individuals.
So it comes from old French trace oil, and it's related to the ancient Greek word, the source.
Right. So that's our word for a. Treasury of language, a dictionary of synonyms.
But the source is never means a treasure or treasury of words.
Note that very early on, from the time it was made, you know, to come into English, it could mean anything about it.
So it was already even though it meant technically, it means gold or jewels.
It's it immediately means anything that you consider to be more of a metaphor.
But it's a very valuable. Um, in I was just thinking across to German I mean we don't in German are very common in term of endearment send mine shots.
It's a very common we don't quite how that works in English but you get the idea of metaphorical expansion, you get metaphorical expansion,
you talk of the national treasures or which can be buildings or objects or paintings,
and you get a verbal form to treasure, which further semantically extends.
The the field of treasure wanted to treasure your freedom.
To treasure our memories. Then you get this great term treasure trove, which comes right up my street because of its paradoxical kind of temporality.
I mean, that word literally means it's from the past of Trouvé Trouvé to a treasure that's found that literally mean.
When we say treasure trove, it means something that's waiting there to be found, or that is being in the process of being found to have been found.
But when we haven't, we use the word it means something, it means treasure found.
But of course it's frozen semantically in English to the point we can just call it Trove.
I'm looking for a trove. It's kind of temporary, paradoxical, something that's talk about found.
So that paradoxical temporality in the treasure trove idea.
Well, I'm giving you the kind of the OED general definition of the population,
but his typical legal definition from the 1996 treasurer has passed in Parliament,
where really it's specifying that treasure is mainly coins of a certain percentage of valuable met home funds goal of a sovereign above 10%.
I think that's over 300 years of a really technical definition of.
So when you write your paper about treasure, this could be some of the things that people had in mind and you might even have it in mind yourself.
And you do. Well, I think we don't do well as researchers, but anthropologists do kind of.
Set your assumptions out on the table, interrogate your assumptions, and where you might be getting your assumptions for the.
So by and large, valuable, valuable metals that have been work shaped into coins, not just gold or his accomplice treasure, but this focus stuff.
So we've got to look at various definitions and then you can really begin to think about treasures.
And you wouldn't expect me to come here, and Nick wouldn't expect me to be here without some ancient Greek in the bargain.
It's one of my go to texts with Sean Shane's dictionary.
Etymological homework. This is how I read French actually in first place as classicist reading dictionaries like this.
So it's really important to realise that the word in Greek for treasure thesaurus they sold was in treasure.
It meant storehouse. It's meant Treasury.
So that was I skipped over that a lot myself.
And so by following my former teachers correct, it means a lot to realise this place.
This is a storehouse such as you would have at Delphi, where all the all the different city states brought riches and offerings and,
and pieces of the wealth to give to the Delphic oracle,
which was put on display and it fits a rose in Delphi probably belongs to you at these treasures.
What I want to say about this are roots. So it's it's a word the word for treasure in Greek and extension words, the R word, too, which means objects.
It has undergone a mountain and it telescoping it's gone from meaning the place with valuable points in it to mean valuable coins themselves.
And modern Greek is the same word, which means what our word treasure means.
Which means the objects. That's the the part.
The it's not used so much as treasure place and it's pronounced p stavros in modern
is so piece across and modern and it's our roads if you ask me implementation.
I did want to say I have missed one little thing that I want to go back and say about the the U.K. Act of 1996 and.
Theoretically treasurers of these loads of coins which people buried because they were in their banks or because they were 100,
they wanted to hide it, but they wanted to keep possession of it.
So in principle, treasuries are stored away with, in the spirit of getting them back, turning what's really bad them.
That's the big concern since they were the things that are in your possession.
They were technically in somebody's possession, but that person somehow couldn't find their way back to them.
Maybe they were killed. Maybe they went away and never came back.
So there's a break in personal ownership, something wanted to take that money back.
Who was asserting this were ownership of them gets separated from there or it's and therefore the treasure this these
treasured treasures in the U.K. for example or are collections of wealth coins of coins where ownership has been disrupted.
They would have been retained. They would have been transferred as inheritance or something like that.
But the chain of transmission has been broken.
And those who find them.
Some help break in to the nexus of possession and ownership that should have the transmission that should have happened is finally ruptured for good.
When the treasure hunter takes things it over.
And the last bit of something just to say you would have thought that you could break a
cross into two component routes because the first part looks so much from time to place.
But it's a short chain. Can't figure it out. He says, you know, this is the there's no satisfactory solution beyond the statistics on this.
You can't you can't etymology it. So I thought, that's quite interesting.
I think that you probably can, but some trains serve.
But whenever a 1950s or sixties didn't didn't do it.
But I won't going to be able to do the treasure.
It's not resolvable into smaller bits. Okay.
In some of them. From what I've got to, um.
Where wealth can be held in forms like precious metals or jewels which do not disintegrate when buried in the earth.
Treasuries are a distinct possibility. And obviously stories about treasuries are a distinct possibility.
So this includes just about everywhere on earth. And then there are all those metaphorical or alternative forms of treasure.
In my case, all the icons linked to my material entries were people dug up valuable icons.
Missing lottery tickets, which you can buy again with a lottery ticket, especially a winning ticket is as good as treasure.
It's a metaphorical variation on it.
Winning the winning lottery numbers disclosed in a dream or vision.
These are all extensions of the semantics of treasure. I want to say a little bit about treasuries as stories.
It's a combination. Well.
A lot of these. Themes and conceits about treasures pointed in stories point to certain consistent interpretations.
So to tell story about treasure is no doubt entertaining.
People are fascinated and attracted to wonder in wonderment about the idea of getting rich.
And so, as a theme in the story, it emphasises a real attraction to the imagination.
Here's how somebody got rich. And by extension, and listening to these stories like these are meetings.
In the beginning, you can get clues how you might get rich,
because they did it by looking at maps and using metal detectors similar to the entertainment stories.
But they can also become practical how to stories.
They can nurture a lot of ideas. I mean, it's not just treasures, but stories about them.
Accounts of Churchill entertain well, supplying this information about how to go about recovering them.
And that information includes details of where people found treasure somewhere in your local environment.
Which which, you know, where do people search for them?
Which gods are saints were needed to reveal really treasured ones.
Who is what would st help somebody? Maybe I can appeal to that st should you?
How do you even appeal to a saint? And if you do appeal to them talking about Greece, Orthodox Christian, Greece.
Now if you do appeal to a saint, how do you get the saints to disclose information you want?
And what should you do if you could find a treasure or even if you just find out about the treasure?
These are all massive storage traditions in Greece.
Each one of those little steps is called numbers of stories about it's a rough and competitive world in the Greek village,
as I mentioned, in a Kurdish village filled with secrets.
People. People have heard something. People know something going on in the dark of night to try to find it.
It's a world in which there are technological devices, such as metal detectors, sophisticated.
But for much of the time in the village, like where I work, where I'm going, which I'll come up to shortly.
The prospect of buried treasures resides entirely in reveries, fantasies, dreams and stories.
This things circulates much, much more than any treasure trove ever found.
There is could easily imagine a case for this multiplicity of treasure stories and modes of getting them don't have actually found,
but except in stories that say they found them. But rarely could anyone point to the amount,
the gold or the statues or the translation into wealth in the form of a new house or a new car or anything like that.
So people imagine themselves finding treasure much more often than they do find treasure.
And I ask you because I'm always this is what my anthropologist is like through the study of our own terms.
Treasury is giving you to think about how you feel about these things.
Who amongst you whose mind has not ventured on the possibility of winning the lottery and has not ventured on it before,
during and after plunking down £2 to buy the ticket?
So the contradictory temporality that we already saw in Treasure Trove comes back again.
We are winners are losers, and we are winners again in our own minds, even before we win.
And my one of my ethnographic themes has been the study of hope and the future of something that
they've written about recently written about hope for the future and its connections to the past,
because will come through these treasures of things that are sediments into the earth and located back into them graphically.
There's a kind of nascent anthropology of hope and the future that a system proposes that Miyazaki, who talks about Fijians on in New Zealand,
who are trying to claim back their ancestral land and they just go through the motions every day or every week of showing
up at the court and in Auckland and putting in the kind of formal going through the motions that claiming their land,
even though they haven't got it for so many years.
Mean he calls me that because the methodology of of just venturing out hope just hoping against hope as we would say and I would say that
as well for my villagers matchless that they also had a methodology of a boat and that the idea that treasures rested in closed boxes,
which were never recovered, actually gave them more dynamism and more dynamic and more continuing purchase on the mind and venturing.
Hope that if they were actually discovered as Gus on Bachelard says, there's always more things in a closed box than.
I'm going to the theme of secrecy as a little one of those story things.
And you know, it's real treasure was ever about being discovered this necessarily that you're into the actual events do not tell anyone.
Okay. If you have been told where treasure is and certainly if you have found one, do not tell anybody,
as the concedes know, for how how this knowledge gets you in privacy in the first place.
Treasures are often disclosed to in revelations of dreams, climate, visions, so that you are, in the first instance, the sole owner of that knowledge.
Then it's up to you to make the mistake of telling anybody else about it.
Um, the Greek tradition is pretty consistent in saying that if you tell somebody that
you've had a dream of treasure before going out and trying to dig it up yourself,
it will turn to old coal or to rusted iron when you go and actually dig it up in the place.
If you told them. It's you, as we've seen in your opinion.
In some case, it's illegal in Greece to dig up antiquities.
We've got to be very careful in Greece if you've seen digging at all,
because it could be thought the state might even think it would be difficult for an ancient Greek sanctuary or something,
some complex Greek antiquity.
You have to get permission. Obviously, this whole tangle of should I tell somebody, you know,
tell somebody it's illegal to dig on somebody else's land without securing the permission, of course, to be able to live on public land.
And it's basically illegal to dig on your own land, too, without securing permission.
And there's all these laws.
And in Greece, as in the UK, of sharing the income, if you were to find a treasure in the UK according to the Treasure Act,
by the way, there was another act in 1997 called the Portable Antiquities Act, which covered everything that wasn't treasure.
So if you would find the statue or something like that, you have to declare it and offer it to museum, to purchase.
So it's insured. Treasure hunting is fundamentally anti-social.
It's a kind of limited world. If I get the treasure, you didn't get treasure.
It creates inequality. It's in a world where it's thought that there's a zero sum game.
Like, I'm getting ahead. You're falling behind. Which is one of the reasons why you would probably get informed upon, as I said earlier, why?
Why would a poor Kurdish villager inform on another form of Kurdish religion?
In Mexico, we're treasures of what this anthropologist George Foster, has written about treasured traditions.
He was a kind of classic, functionalist anthropologist, and he noticed this idea of kind of a static, zero sum economy.
He said, Well, the only way you could get rich in Mexico was if you had found a treasure.
Because in my case, it didn't come at anybody's expense.
So you could if you said to everybody, I found a very treasure, you would.
And it goes against what I've just said. But in that case, that's his argument that you still you can still be inside of the zero sum logic.
I didn't take it from anybody. It's a windfall from outside and take it from you.
I'm rich. Good for me and everyone else. And say good for you too.
Doesn't work like that in Greece. If you want to get that kind of windfall, you would still be subject to the jealousy of your cousins indigenous.
So it's not even allowed to find it by luck because it's invidious and sexual partners.
A demonic. So that's so much more secrecy.
Um. I mentioned that the Armenian pressures on some Kurds in a way often have increased,
and that's another element of treasure stories, is that in order to grab to get them, you must have made a pact with the devil.
And that's a very old theme in in western, western, western popular traditions.
It's kind of made crystallised in ghosts in Europe as opposed to the idea of the devil to commit yourself.
And so the first legend was just one variation of the ways in which I think that people use violence.
It's pretty good to easily choose money as well.
So. Treasurys might be have been the possession of people who buried them and put
a curse on them that no one else could retrieve the equipment that they did.
The safety deposit box, you know, without the kind of metal at the key.
It's just constant pressure and nobody will pick it up.
That that they got that the person who handed this guy the misfortune of not buying treasures that are in the earth.
And so they come a little bit under the jurisdiction of these comic deities and sort of gods,
you know, from ancient Greeks like pound and so on, and nature of spirits.
And as you get into modern Greece, this the figure of the Dracula's, which definitely is an ogre, that's women.
But in earlier Greek, in fact, if you go back to ancient Greek, it meant serpent or snake,
as in although the word dragons doesn't figure in that passage.
And Luke gives you the idea that these snakes will kind of follow can demonise spike in Christianity.
But what was interesting to me is that in Early Dream books and I'm looking at our time Dawson's a dream book from.
In the second century A.D. He says that if it's a dream book which gives you symbol and meaning.
So if you see an apple and you don't see it, you know, if you see a your mother is why she see a snake,
which the word is the marquis in the second century A.D. Greek.
It means that you'll find a treasure because. Snakes, God, treasures.
And in my material in the island of Naxos to Salt and throughout Greece, there's proliferating traditions about to demonic figures,
the moor or the Arab glamorous ideas about which might refer to Saracen pirates who forced,
in a way, the burial of wealth because its pirates were going to storm the island.
You buried your money quickly, so they were not responsible for the entering of treasure.
But they also this kind of method mimicry became associated with being guardians of it.
You know, I can't explain to you why it's one of those things semantically that come the guardians,
and you have to negotiate with them, with the models and the ideas to get the treasure from them.
And there's there's proliferating traditions of all kinds of treasures.
So what I'm doing and what where I want to take all this in the direction of anthropology and history, so I get to do my own personal advertisment.
Now, this is a book series that I've just started with my colleagues stuff from here at the University of Chicago.
And my as, as you said, introducing me,
my idea about this treasures is that they indicate there they are an avenue for understanding local people's relationship to the past.
And that's what we're calling for an anthropologist history for alternative histories, cities, different media, different modes.
Aside from that of standard Western history, historicism historiography in which people retrieve the past,
interact with the understand it on a clinical, ongoing basis.
So already and from Bolivar Stein's article, you get the idea that this is some very complicated relationship between modern day Kurds and Armenians.
And in Greece as well, especially in my study of Naxos, the islanders are relating to their past,
to their to what they think went on with past ideas that they are producing outside of historicism.
Outside of enlightenment. Historicism altogether.
Archaeology is another is an allied discipline in the anthropology of history.
When you think about digging treasure, but that's the stuff of archaeology.
They hate it when you call them treasure hunters, however.
But archaeologists are doing what they are on the side of standard post-Enlightenment historical practice.
They they look at artefacts, objects that come out of the earth, and they try to fit them in a chronological timeline.
They try to reconstruct the plausible world in which those artefacts were used.
So that's quite you know, that's a that's a perfectly great endeavour.
And it's entirely consistent with what Western academic sources.
But archaeologists have also come to recognise that local people have their own ideas about these things,
just like crude stuff like this Fulham treasure and Greeks have ideas about icons buried in the ground.
So they're not just about. Incorporating the finest archaeological finds into Western the idea of Western history, but also doing the concerted,
aggressive research among people who lived in vicinity of these sites and to find out what they think about the sites, what's going on.
Trekkers, for the most part, are the secretions of the parts, the things that the past is secreted,
secrets like into the earth, an archaeologist, academic discipline,
excellence for studying them as indexes of past and habitation of sounds and establishing history,
incorporating this and widening the historical record.
My book about dreaming and historical consciousness increase is about while acknowledging that, you know, historicism is is fine,
but that other people do things differently and you have a choice than to sell them that wrong or to listen to what they're doing,
but discover in their point of view. So as an anthropologist, that's what we're in the business of doing.
So not not ruling them out of court, calling what they're doing, myth or line or false,
but trying to extend the coherence of it and its integration with them there within their life, within their society.
My work on treasures in Greece situates the stories and encounters with these buried objects hidden objects,
occult and objects as possible within local social practices, within local cultural ideas, and contextualised by local historical developments.
And their relationship to these treasures reveals an emotionally affective spiritual relationship to the past.
And it's bound up for the local people with relationships of kinship, proprietorship and knowledge.
So that raises the question are treasures in a place like Naxos secretions of history at all?
Or maybe the march. And I think there's a fine line between between this and this and this, because,
like I said, there's a lot of stories and not that many kind of tragedies.
So there's a fine line between stories and evidence of factuality, and there's a fine line between imagination and conscious encounter with presence.
And much of my work has had to do with dreaming and the bridges between imagination and reality.
Let's just take you to Greece.
I worked on the island of Naxos, which is right down. Give you an idea and this is an interesting map because the darkness,
the the part of the church, white and black, is the original Greek state of 1832.
And so it's a country with the manifest destiny. It's spread and exploded.
It became the Greece that we know today only after World War One.
There's Naxos itself. With this spine of mountains in the centre to the east.
And I did first field research there for my doctorate.
And then I did this research on Dreaming in the Village of Clones.
And just to give you the best resolution that's coming up to the island of Port Talbot, you can see the towering mountains in the centre.
And that's the village where I did my research and of course, the high mountain village.
And that's the that's the island road running above it.
Late into my fieldwork, I. I got the.
The dream notebooks of this man, Marcus capillaries.
And I studied them in the book and he was somebody who was visited.
He came to write the powers of prophecy and of a special kind of vision,
the spiritual visionary, and that he could see what he called earthly tragedies.
Since I have the power to do this, Saint Daniel gave to me to see these earthly treasures.
These are big cities, peace and greater points. He says he can also see heavenly treasures.
So treasures. And what's that all about?
So an icon buried in the ground with a picture of sin.
And on it it's also reference in stand up in the heavens. So it's both an earthly treasure that you could recover the wooden pendant icon.
And yet also I have made it in this awesome heaven.
And so maybe seven stones, given the heavens looks good.
2 to 4 bones of saints who buried or both remains in the ground, but also have been assumed up to heaven.
So it's a complicated relationship that's involved the actual earthly reality of treasures, and they're kind of hyperspace.
I love transcendent systems. And the question is whether the you know, the stories about these kinds of tragedies,
so much stories, some extremes, whether they can be viewed as history at all.
And here you are face to face with the past chocolate parties writing about prevention in Europe and
expanding beyond the boundaries of historicism and asking the question of whether God can come into history.
Like he talks about the Santal rebellion in India in the South, how leader was told that he should revolt because the attacker would be with him.
And you. When your ministers last night said he believed that God was with all that, who was with him?
So that's why challenges our assumptions about what could qualify as proper, proper historical cause and effect.
I'm. How am I doing on time? So since it's over.
Not sure what's some sort, but I should finish, like, 10 minutes.
So, um. Okay.
So do the ethnography of treasures in a place like Columbus.
I thought, there's so much going on with so many different things buried in the earth.
It's not just gold coins or things that are immediately valuable and super valuable in small quantities like jewels.
So to do the ethnography of this involved contextualising and complete the treasures in the context of Hey, what is?
What's even the word for treasure? It's not necessarily established in the village.
I'll come to that. It's pressing on the set of Put.
Emery is one thing buried in the ground. So they are miners of a heavy mineral stone.
Emery Which is ground down into a powder. And it's used in filing.
That's out. It's a grinding agent. It's used in weapons manufacture and grinding steel.
So you can see them mining in the village and you can see the installation of a whole emery infrastructure
by the late 1920s to transport the huge volumes of Emery that they were exporting and making a living off.
So every person in every family in the village of Cortlandt practically was supported by digging stuff out of the ground.
And it was Emery. What else is in the ground?
You have classical statues. You have the classical period of Naxos.
This is a cross. That was left in a marble quarry.
There's at least two major known marble cores, both of which got enormous statues.
But as it's 5 to 7 statue still lying on the earth,
and that that's an index of what how much and the potential of the marble below what's marble there?
And an awareness archaeologists have been there of the value of classical antiquities.
So the stuff that's even more valuable,
which are these cycladic figurines which date from even earlier third century B.C. and I know these are really valuable.
These took on huge value when modernist artists like Picasso, Rembrandt,
Lucy started using them as inspirations and as points of reference in their art.
And I remember reading an article about how one that changed hands for about $3 million.
And whenever I have a news article from the 1780s, maybe I said, let's just check on what the story is now.
And so I went on the site for I think Christie's and Price realised for that Cycladic statue,
which is probably only about that by 16 million, almost $17 million worth much more than its weight in gold.
Right. So you've got antiquities of various sorts.
You've got water. It's a very friendly dry island.
So if you can find water, something is is a material element that's water valuable in certain places once looted.
Furthermore, there are prophecies talked about holy water springs of holding water gusting up from the ground.
So water was had also a spiritualised value that would ordain, you know,
would be a marker of the holiness of their excavations for icons because they were told in dreams that there was an icon,
which is this tiny little bit in the centre, nevermind all of the silver and golden framing of it.
That's the acknowledgement that the community is really valuable. You can see that like that.
That's really valuable. Icon. So donors in the community have contributed gold and silver to frame it,
which is part of the wealth of the community and of the church that I call Antinous was found
a neighbouring island was opened in 1823 and on the basis of that they built a pilgrimage.
Church opened around 1830, 1832, which is the main pilgrimage church in Greece.
So in neighbouring Ireland, in Naxos, not to be outdone. And finally the logic of a vendee.
They had their own dreams. It's cynical on my part that they had in my book chronicles all of the dreams they
had in the 1830 until they found this tiny five centimetre by five centimetre icon,
executed them within with wax and mustard. And live for icons too long a story for me to go on and to direct.
And suffice it to say that very icons.
Our only values as indexes of the spiritual indicators are the spirituality of grace,
the blessedness of the community that's been as good picked out by the saints.
And these places become in this post also in Your Corners, has become a major pilgrimage site.
So if you like, money flows from that as well because pilgrims from that, they buy lunch and they leave money in the community in addition to those.
So several things in the earth already.
There's also gold coins, classic treasure buried in the face of pirate incursions or the stuff of local, you know, savings and loot.
And the banks people get their money in the ground when walls.
And then there's money itself, you know, sometimes, which is not so much buried,
but it's the instant convertibility of these different objects into cash.
So I've been some suggestions that I've been looking at dreams and I have looked at a lot of dream notebooks.
Q Composed by a girl named Marina, who was 13 years old at the time.
So but 50 notebooks like this feels quite interesting as well.
She was dreaming and five other schoolchildren were dreaming at the same time.
More buried icons and buried icons like that.
One could be found. It would signal like this millenarian redemption of the village where a long, big monastery would be built.
And as people said all around us, will become like parrots, floating unicorns, etc.
So the search for icons interspersed with properties about memory discoveries as well.
So while the Saints are telling sainthood is coming to Marina and dreams and saying, You can find my island buried, buried in this mountain here.
All of these reminders go on side with Marina and the dreaming sportswoman of very well how to dig.
So they're digging away. And this I'm supposed to say, well, you know, why are you digging for that?
My icon. You can find a lot of them right here and right there and say that also says you can find other
treasures like an all gold statue of Ariadne and the word for treasures for all of these.
That's them.
All the same verissimo from the Greek word Prisco to find ancient Greek word peyote skull famous through our was Archimedes famously said Eureka.
I found that same verb when he was studying this.
I've got this. So you got Asimo from the word from the verb.
To find means find a place.
So there were really bits linking all of these genres, all of these different artists together, but it's more findable, which is like treasure trove.
Haven't found it yet, but to find it. And I just want to read you a little quote from one of Marina's stream books.
And here it is. Ben Affleck says, if you kiss a woman who's with the dreaming children.
Come have the kisses to the Virgin Mary.
Come tell us about our mind and the panic.
Yet Virgin Mary says. What can we tell you? Your mind will become the best one.
And the most thousands that will come out of the minds will come out of your mind.
And one more thing. Yours is a sturdy mind, and it has no need of anything.
And for us, what's more, that verissimo, that treasure in your mind, is the best of all.
So in this complex voicing of the parmigiana in Marina Stream, you need to know what she's actually talking about.
The most thousands will come out of your mind. Must thousands of tons and thousands of drachmas.
Yet the various items are all kind of collapsed from cross predicated on each other.
And this will be my final point.
Also, I did have I have this.
Is that the various treasurers take on their quality as treasurer by compressing together, infusing $0.03 of value across the three sectors of value.
Because, as identified by David Graeber, his logical selling value is a moral values,
inclusive of human religion, secularisation and recognition by the saints.
Moral value, economic value, the value, the exchange value of these objects and finally value in the society and sense of a place within a system.
And the very fact that there's about eight different kinds of wrestling.
My treasure indicates that we work on a systematic relationship from the Grammar of Treasury substitute one or the other into the sentence.
And the. So just to close this off is what I've done to you.
The anthropology of treasure on the local ethnographic context done very, very quickly.
You know, what are their ideas of value? Hidden valuables of their religion and cosmology of economics?
And for me, what's so interesting is the transfer of past genius,
how stories about statues can interleave and switch back and forth with stories about hidden icons,
cross predication, this general fusion of in local culture and in this whole cosmology of find what's.
There's a famous article, a book in anthropology called The Social Life of Things.
Treasures have a very different social life because they're out of circulation for a long time since Treasuries
as well is that they come right from the past because they've been buried in our social circulation.
They haven't been eroded by contact and transaction. They come right to you from the parts that particular social life not subject to decay.
I've gone and touched on the reflexivity part. What do we think, Treasurer?
It is semantics, semantic semantics in Greece. Our own practices, which I think are very salutary to think, you know, really get into the old subject.
You've got to be thinking, you know, about how these things might play out in my culture.
And Nick was so good at teaching that to me when I was a diploma student and I still remember
many of the things he told me because they took me by surprise that we have to think,
and I've always helped me to think whether we have to always help me to think about how these things might play out here.
And so this is a story I got from the newspaper in The Guardian in 1998 about this this chap here in Glastonbury,
I believe, who went to the local council and said,
Don't if I had left a treasure for man's buried near this mailbox and he was making a nuisance of himself with the council said, okay, you can do it.
And they said, Well, we thought you would just go out with a spade and get tired and scream and kind of [INAUDIBLE] off after a while.
But he hired a mechanical digger and dug up the whole traffic island.
And there he is right there. And that interesting TV series, Detectorists, is off to something to kind of think about a little bit.
But it's the impulse that drives people on to go detecting and the kind of image that the the TV
series has been finding some like jewelled sceptre from medieval times of Anglo-Saxon times.
And my question again is also about what this can do for understanding history.
And my goal isn't to upend academic history.
That'll be a big focus of me. I accept and understand academic history and what it does.
The fact is that these examples from Naxos and Armenia and on show you that people have very emotional affective spiritualised,
kin based, you know, relationship genealogical based relationships in the past which are not part of academic historiography and yet.
Being aware of those dimensions can't hurt.
I maintain I submit the practice of Western history and its heartland because
that's really what people want to a large degree outside of academia history.
People want history that they can feel they can feel themselves in.
That captures the imagination. And that's why historical novels, reenactments, historical movies are making.
You know, in fact, you can hardly have a movie nowadays that's not, quote, based on a true story, unquote.
So I think that says a lot about the way in which people want to know the past.
And I don't believe historians can deliver it, but they might need to do the anthropology of their own discipline to get there.
And the last picture. Is a book that came out to teach you how to interpret your dreams to win the lottery.
And very much.