"Collectors' Rights Win in Wisconsin " (sic). How many collectors of portable antiquities in the United States of America outside the Republicans of Wisconsin see this kind of statement as the foundation of their "collectors' rights"?
Native Indian pot-collectors presumably note that it says their "common collectable" items should be exempt from ANY cultural property laws (it does not state "foreign" ones). Maybe the Republican party of Wisconsin is going to stand up for the rights of the Blanding pot diggers? What "rights" does it mean that US collectors of archaeological artefacts imagine they have over the archaeological record of all the countries of the world containing evidence of the unwritten history of the world which is the common heritage of us all? What a fiasco, just who do these people think they are?
Art?
ReplyDeleteSo what isn't covered by that exactly?
Well, I guess the charred seeds, pollen samples, charcoal, mortar samples, tile fragments, waste flint flakes, greyware, brownware, redware and whiteware bodysherds and just about 90% of what a modern excavation retrieves from the ground and processes and archives. I expect they'd be happy to see that stay in the hands of museums and archaeologists. They do not actually want all the things that tell us about the past, they only want the bits that look nice in a case, the rest of it gets dug up and discarded by the artefact hunters.
ReplyDelete