This admonition forms part of a chapter entitled ‘Trying to make money from buried and other treasures is not a natural way of making a living’, in Ibn Khaldun's famous sociological treatise al-Muqaddima (The Prolegomenon). There is no mistaking Ibn Khaldun's disdain for the superstitious practices of treasure hunters. Although his own reconstruction of the past relied upon texts – chronicles, biographies, geographical encyclopaedias, religious and legal scholarship, and archival sources – he was not insensitive to the material world around him and to the ways in which the human environment had shaped the course of history. Thus he interests himself in the diverse characteristics of settlements, the rise and fall of civilisations, and the crafts practised by the inhabitants of urban and rural areas. Given the extraordinary range of his interests, it is tempting to speculate upon how he might have viewed the activities of modern archaeologists. Would he have judged archaeology to be a legitimate avenue of research into earlier centuries, or would he have dismissed it as little more than treasure hunting conducted by the ‘weak-minded’?