Last month, a Florida-based treasure-hunting company made perhaps the richest undersea score ever.

It discovered, somewhere in the Atlantic, a Colonial-era shipwreck containing more than 5,00,000 silver coins and hundreds of gold coins. Total estimated value, according to one coin marketer: $500 million.

In days of yore, pirates would have swarmed to such a bounty, declaring the treasure their own. Today, it attracts a new breed of raiders who believe just as strongly that the treasure is rightfully theirs.

They are the academics — professors, curators, historians and others who study, archive and preserve historical artifacts. Many of them despise the commercial treasure hunters for, as they see it, rampaging through shipwrecks with little regard for the delicate history at hand.

They claim that because the professional treasure hunter’s first priority is to sell what he finds, artifacts will be rushed from shipwreck to market without being carefully preserved or photographed and cataloged to record their historic value.

They charge that even if the treasure hunter cared to preserve and catalog his discoveries, he couldn’t, because he is not properly trained to do such subtle and delicate work.

One professor recently summed up these arguments by saying, “If these guys went and planted a bunch of dynamite around the Sphinx, or tore up the floor of the Acropolis, they’d be in jail in a minute”.

The same case was made in 1991, when two recreational scuba divers discovered a World War II German U-boat that had sunk just off New Jersey.

No military expert or historian had known of this wreck, its sailors or its story, and so it fell to these two ordinary men to embark on a six-year, fantastically dangerous quest to solve the mystery.

As it happened, there was no treasure aboard this U-boat, but academics made virtually the same accusation: The divers, they said, were going to trample history in their quest to put a name on the warship.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Not for the divers who undertook huge risks to preserve the U-boat. And not for treasure hunters, who have even greater incentives to be careful with their finds.

The treasure hunter’s livelihood depends on keeping his discoveries in pristine condition. He knows that coins and gold and pottery must be handled with exquisite care in order to bring the highest possible price.

He must use a surgeon’s touch with every artifact, because even that last lonely vase has value if it is deftly handled. The roughest and toughest of these treasure hunters have some of the gentlest hands in the world.

Do they know how to handle the rarities they find? The academics scoff at the idea. But many of the finest conservation labs, the most up-to-date equipment and the best-trained archaeologists can be found on just the kind of treasure hunting quest that discovered the recent Colonial-era wreck.

Odyssey Marine Exploration, the company that recovered the treasure, had two archaeologists supervise the effort, and it tested various processes for preserving the coins before choosing the one that was most effective. This preservation work continues.

Some treasure hunters think the academics’ desire to catalog the location of every bent tin of beans is a bit excessive, though that’s not always the word they use.