American Digger: Former Pro Wrestler Unearths Buried Treasure in American Backyards

When it came to the squared-circle "Heavy Metal" Ric Savage could never quite equal the heights achieved by that other Savage we all know and love. Sure, he wrestled for well-known promotions like ECW and WCW, but he admits it wasn't really his true passion. "I was big and I could talk well, so I was able to get some little pushes here and there, but I never really made it that far. I wasn't a superstar or anything."

Good thing too, because eventually the road took its toll and after various concussions, reconstructive knee surgery and three back surgeries, it was time to find something else to do. Enter Savage's true passion, American history. "My dream was to be a college history professor," says Savage. Instead, he began collecting relics and meeting people who metal detect and do the same.

"No matter how you slice it, it's treasure hunting," says Savage. "There's really nothing like getting your hands dirty, digging down and seeing what you've got. You get hooked, and once you get hooked on it, that's it."

Now, he runs the top artifact recovery company in the country -- American Savage -- leading a team that includes recovery expert Rue Shumate, battlefield historian Bob Buttafuso, Savage's wife Rita (who manages the business and sources leads for digging) and their 25-year-old son Giuseppe (who is their resident tech expert and acts as the muscle for the operation). They tour neighbourhoods known to be built on former battlefields or towns of the old west and go door-to-door asking residents permission to dig on their private property in hopes of finding valuable relics that they can sell and then split the proceeds with the landowner.

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"The hardest part of the job is finding enough artifacts to make that dig profitable. The TV only shows our best digs, but we don't find valuable stuff every time we go out." This is why he says he can't split the profits 50-50 with the homeowner. There's a certain minimum threshold he has to hit in order to break even per dig. He can sometimes do 60-40 if his back-end expenses are lower, but in those cases, he's gambling that what he'll find will be profitable. For the most part, it's those dud sites you don't see that eat up expenses.

"We keep expenses to a minimum. But we can't control gas, food, airfare, hotels, and equipment. I try to source things as cost effective as possible but to lower existing expenses I lose some of the quality of what I use," he says.

Homeowners don't have to accept the split Savage proposes and often they don't. Sometimes he has to knock on doors 50 times before one person says, "What the heck, why not?" "It's difficult to convince somebody that if they let me bring in a backhoe and dig up part of their yard, maybe they'll make money." Thing is, usually they do, ending up with as much as a few thousand dollars, which is much more than they had before Savage knocked on the door.

"The landowner is out nothing if I don't find relics and stands to make free money if I do. Yes they own the land...but without me the opportunity isn't there. It is simple. They let us dig or they don't. If they say, 'No,' I move on," he says. "We seal it with a handshake and yes we do paperwork due to the filming of the TV show. We are fully insured against injury and there is no worry for the property owner, just like any other contractor."

Once the homeowner agrees, the dig begins, but on rare occasions Savage's team will realize someone else has beat them to it. "We have an expression in digging when an area has been 'Beat to Death,'" says Savage. "The diggers that dig stuff will never tell you where they dig or what property they dig on. They keep it to themselves, they're usually loners and they'll do their research, ask the right people, dig and find stuff. The key to finding artifacts, is digging in spots that haven't been touched by every dig between now and the 1950s."

Sometimes, even areas that have been called beat still may have some treasure within if you're patient. In those areas, the layers of trash may discourage you, but if you persevere and take your time, you can find good stuff, especially if you use a ground penetrating radar unit like Savage does. "Maybe I can find that artillery shell that's seven or eight feet down that you're never going to get with your metal detector because it won't go down that far," he says. Plus, we use high-end metal detectors too. People don't realize that a good metal detector can cost you close to a thousand bucks."

It's also important to stay safe on the dig site, which is sometimes easier said than done. Though Savage is insured and has first aid equipment in his truck, things do happen and they've even been captured on camera, like the time his recovery expert Rue Shumate cracked his head open while diving for a civil war gun in a cave.

"Rue is one of those guys that anytime there's a cave, anytime there's a hole, anytime there's a well, anytime there's a tree to climb, he wants to be the guy to do it. He likes being G.I. Joe, that's his thing, and I always let him know, 'It's your choice," says Savage. "We always put safety first. There's always a chance of injury when you're working with tools and heavy machinery, but we try to minimize that by keeping an eye on my crew, even when I'm detecting. It's like any other job. You can't prevent everything, but if you stress safety, people keep it in the back of their mind."

Once the dig is done, it's time to find a buyer and when you've been doing this for 14 years, like Savage has, you know most of the major Civil War artifact buyers in America and when you don't, it comes down to a lot of Google searches and sometimes Savage and his team will scout out the dealer ahead of time, just to make sure they deal in the type of relics Savage has dug up.

"The key to it is, Antique dealers have pickers scouring neighbourhoods for them and that's where they get a lot of their inventory, so their used to people coming in off the street. What I do is not uncommon at all, especially when you have people coming into your store daily with a bag in their hand wondering how much they can get for what's in it."

That's a good question, how much can you get for it and how do you know when you've gotten a good price?

" Every time I go into a dig, I already have a figure in my head of what I need to break even and what I need to make profit. I study antiques, I study artifacts and I live and breathe this, so I always have a pretty good idea in my head of what a relic is worth when it comes out of the ground," says Savage. "I'm not limited to just military -- though, that's my favourite -- I study everything. I know how much I can sell silverware for, or china or a carbide lamp. You just try to have a plethora of knowledge about artifacts and I try to study them before I go in."

The devil is in the details and the research that you don't see on the back-end, which includes hours in front of a computer screen and reading reference books just so you have a chance at getting a fair price for this stuff. Don't think that just because it's old and dirty, it isn't more valuable than the well persevered antique you find in your attic.

"That depends on two things, what it is and the collector," says Savage. "There are collectors out there that only want dug stuff and they only want it because they know for a fact that it was used, they can kind of put into the era it's from and there's a provenance behind it. If I find an artifact in an attic, even it's not dug and it looks great, I don't know anything about it and it's just an item. A dug item has a context and history behind it that gives it a provenance. Some only want dug, some only want non-dug and some want both, but there will always be a market for both kinds of artifacts. If I find a dug confederate button, even if it's just a jacket button, I can make anywhere between $1200 and $30,000 depending on how rare it is."

The rarity of these items has Savage and his crew drawing the ire of professional associations in the archaeological community who allege that shows like American Digger encourage looting and make no effort to document the item they are taking and from what site.

"Two hundred years ago, archeology was a treasure hunt, finding fabulous things for museum collections," says Steve Lekson, a University of Colorado archaeologist, in a letter to Science Insider. "But we learned long ago that archaeological sites were really books to be read, pages of history. We can learn a great deal about pasts we would otherwise never know, by studying sites themselves and artifacts (simple or spectacular) in their original contexts at sites. When treasure hunters loot sites, ripping artifacts out of the ground, we lose any chance of understanding context, what was with what, its date, how it was used, what it can tell us about history, all so somebody can have a trinket on their mantelpiece."

The community has sent boycotts and petitions to Spike TV and National Geographic Channel, which airs a similar show called Diggers. For its part, Spike TV has not responded, except to reiterate the legality of what Savage and his team at American Savage are doing. After all, they are not digging at national parks or historical sites, but on private property with the owner's permission. The owners can do whatever they want with artifacts found on their land.

Our show is shot on private property," says Shana Tepper, Spike TV's spokesperson. "They're getting artifacts that are otherwise rotting in the ground."

One thing the criticizing archaeologists don't seem to understand is Savage's passion and utter reverence for the history behind the artifacts he discovers.

"Believe it or not, I'm like a big kid," he says. "I like to go out and relic dig, I like to go find treasure and I like to hold history. I can read about history and I can watch it on TV, but there is nothing like going to a spot where something happened and finding something that was there. That's as close to going back in time as you could ever get because the last person that touched it was the person that dropped it. So to me, that's what's more important. The money just allows me to do what I love to do for a living. How many people can say they dig for a living? The profit is great, but it's not my driving force."

American Digger Premieres March 21 at 10 p.m. EST/PST on Spike TV.

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