"The Southwest's good ol' artifact boys"

Craig Childs has an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times called The Southwest's good ol' artifact boys (June 15th 2009) concerning last week's "Operation Cerberus" illicit antiquities bust which makes interesting reading. Childs points out that the people concerned were ordinary citizens:

You might have an imaginary picture of the pot hunters and collectors who live there, a crew of dirty, well-armed black-market privateers roving the desert (in the case of many Western pot hunters, you'd be right). But the scenario becomes more complicated when you look closely at who is actually named. The federal action laid bare a little known culture of ordinary citizens who collect and sell human history. [...] Half of those indicted are in their 60s and 70s, people who grew up pot hunting when it was not even thought of as unethical, much less illegal. The federal action, a lot of locals think, was akin to busting a bunch of good ol' boys with a backwoods still. They don't give much thought to how illegal digging in the Four Corners has decimated one of the richest archaeological regions in the country, putting thousands of years of human history into private hands. Pulling artifacts from the land without documentation and adding them to private collections is a form of archaeological genocide, erasing the record of a people from a place. Yet for many in the Four Corners area, it is like collecting seashells. Sunday picnics used to include shovels. An old-timer once told me that there were so many pots they were like pumpkins on the ground, and few saw anything wrong with digging and collecting. [...] Perhaps last week's raid of so many ordinary citizens was a necessary step in pushing pot hunting further from the realm of what is acceptable.

I guess nobody really paused to think why those pots are no longer "like pumpkins on the ground" and where those pots are now and whether they can ever be traced back to the assemblages dismantled by artefact hunters.

An interesting feature of the article is that the arguments reported as being offered here in support of the excavation of artefacts in the States are almost the same as those used by the pro-collecting lobby in connection with artefact hunting and collecting in the UK. US no-questions-asked collectors of antiquities imported from the Old World (many of whom are more likely than not looted) have recently been verty loudly advocating that the latter is "not their fault" because these source countries "should" introduce laws and systems like those of portable antiquity Topsyturveyland, England and Wales. I say, let them first advocate that such systems are applied across the board in the US. Let them first lobby their own lawmakers and public opinion to make artefact hunting a free for all on public lands as it is in Britain.

Collectors' rights activist Peter Tompa on his blog is, I think I am right in saying, the only person in the whole collectors' rights blogosphere to date to note the Utah raids. The rest are maintaining an embarrassed siilence, pretending it is not in any way connected with their "collectors' rights" battles with their own government and the world as a whole.* Tompa notes "while various archaeological blogs applaud the government's prosecutions of pot hunters, public opinion amongst the locals out West may not be so approving" (Heavy-handed Feds ) and quotes some outraged "locals" stating that "some contend artifacts are not hard to find, as easy as looking down on the ground". I have no doubt that artefacts can be found on the ground on both private and public land. The speciofic artefacts however at the centre of this case were one assumes not the sort of thing that is (any longer) lying on the ground in the region for the taking, otherwise nobody would be asking or paying thousands of dollars for them.

Were the federal authorities "heavy handed" in carrying out this operation? I must say that I have spent some time reading through the comments made by locals on the Salt Lake Tribune website. From this I conclude that, "ordinary citizens" or not, it would be a rash officer who sent two or three unprotected men in without any kind of support to knock on the doors of these locals and announce that they were going to confiscate property (illicit artefacts) worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from each collector - potentially a gun owner (if they have illegal artefacts, then why not illegal guns?). The media report that several of the people arrested in fact had already had a brush with the law earlier on a variety of counts. A federal officer who did not provide adequate support for the men under his command (and it would appear from the search warrants civilian experts accompanying the search teams) in a potentially explosive situation like this would clearly be failing in his duty.

* It is interesting to note that the word often used to describe the surrendering of Native American artefacts to representatives of modern tribes is the one hated by portable antiquity collectors: "repatriation".