It isn’t about having value or not. Some people in the comments are talking about using lidar on the whole world and seeing what agents find. Thats a great way to give looters all over the world the heads up so they can rush over and steal whatever they can. Any archeological site has valuable information on what a slice of humanity’s world used to be. Giving looters a head start means destroying that information often permanently.

A helpful example might be Heinrich Schliemann, a businessman who fancied himself an archaeologist and destroyed much of Troy’s history by digging it up as fast as he could. He was so focused on finding treasure to prove to world he was a great archaeologist he irreparably damaged the real layers that were Troy.

From his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann?wprov=sfti... > His excavations were condemned by later archaeologists as having destroyed the main layers of the real Troy. Kenneth W. Harl, in the Teaching Company's Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor lecture series, sarcastically claimed that Schliemann's excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks could not do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.

Well to be fair archeology as a profession did not really exist at that point, it was mostly rich peoples hobbies, or authoritarian rulers way of legitimizing their rule through an ancestry argument

This actually isn't entirely true and archeologists at his own time said they way he worked was bad and the Ottoman government tried to stop him. At one point he had to flee the site and could only get back by hiring a professional archeologist to help him.