I'm an archaeologist and I'm totally cool with them having a few bars. As long as everything removed from collections is weighed, recorded, and ideally photographed it's okay. Of course we should keep a representative sample of lead bars, but there's a lot of material and we can't curate every ingot or every brick. So it's a balance for sure.

It turns out to be more of a gang coperation. A decent number of archeological research projects around the Mediterranean are funded by much larger physics grants. They fund the exploration and the anthropologists and other researchers can keep everything, publish the findings etc, as long as the physics project gets all the lead that they find at the bottom of the ocean.

Sharks and Jets?

Gangs of New York 2: Battle of Lead Alley