"Open Season on Virginia's History"

Taft Kiser, an archaeologist, has an op-ed piece in the New York Times worthy of reading (together with the enlightening, though not all enlightened, comments) ”Taft Kiser, 'Open Season on History'", New York Times August 2, 2013. This comes over as a stateside echo of Britain's Heritage Action. Same problems, same causes.

For archaeologists like me, the Flowerdew Hundred Plantation near Williamsburg, Va., is our Woodstock, a sentimental spot where dozens of professionals earned their trowels. The farm’s incredible archaeological wealth ranges from 12,000-year-old Native American tools to a tree that shaded Union soldiers in June 1864. Imagine our dismay, then, when a professed “relic hunter” from Texas named Larry Cissna sold some $60,000 in tickets for his Grand National Relic Shootout — an artifact-hunting competition — at Flowerdew Hundred. The shootout took place in early March, and participants walked away with 8,961 artifacts dating from the Civil War or before.

Virginia has much the same odd antiquity 'protection' (I use the term loosely) laws as in many other US states. So-called "relic hunting" is illegal on public land, but legal on private land with the landowner's permission. Commercial artefact hunting rallies like this have increased in the USA in the last 15 years. Kiser suggests that this is "fuelled by the market for Civil War relics, where a rare button can bring $5,000".

Mr. Cissna has built a small empire using a Web site to organize hunts and sell advertising, a job that became easier in June when the Travel Channel began airing his reality show, “Dig Wars.” Assuming a mean value of $10 an artifact on the relic market, the Flowerdew participants took about $90,000. But the lost history cannot be quantified. Competing to grab objects, the relic hunters shred the ancient matrix, erasing stories that remain written only in the soil.

One of the potentially sensitive artefacts which Kiser says was taken seems to have been a manila (a type of copper bracelet used in the cruel African slave trade) "but its historical context was destroyed when it was ripped from its resting place".

As in the UK, there are those that abuse the system and go onto private land without permission:

“They always have a story,” one 70-year-old landowner said. “They are always professors or writers.” Or so they claim.

To judge from what is said on the forums, this "I is writing a 'istry of the villidge" claim is apparently a common ruse to try and get artefact hunting in Great Britain. The fact that many UK artefact hunters (as Minister Lammy put it "challenged by formal education")  are about as illiterate as they come is seldom seen as casting such a notion into doubt. Kiser even recounts the tale of a commercial artefact hunt with some 170 participants near Fredericksburg, Virginia (Meghann Cotter, 'No action planned over relic hunting' Fredericksburg.com 29th Nov 2006) which reportedly took place without the landowners permission.

As we have seen, US Artefact hunters are very vocal about any attempts to give the buried heritage more protection by changing the laws. I guess like their British counterparts they are not really interested in the conservation of the archaeological record when it gets in the way of them hoiking out collectable and saleable geegaws. "As a result, it’s open season on vast stretches of Virginia’s heritage", says Kiser.

It would seem from this text that the problem is exactly the same on both sides of the Atlantic:

Another problem is the lack of awareness on the part of landowners. Imagine someone offering $5,000 to remove “junk” from your yard. You may not realize that your familiar universe veils a lost world. Relic hunters exploit this. I have heard of organizers paying $40,000 for a year’s access to a farmer’s field. [...] archaeologists, professional or not, do not hunt objects. We hunt lost worlds. Sadly, here in Virginia and elsewhere, those worlds are slipping away under the relic-hunter’s shovel, all for the sake of a few bucks.

Here is a video of the event. As you can see, it is organized as a "competition" between teams representing various metal detector manufacturers. As such, it obviously has precious little to do with any kind of researching history. Note the appearance of Chicago Ron and an African-American detectorist, one of the few you will find on You Tube generally in what seems in many countries a staunchly white-only pursuit (indeed one in which nationalist undercurrents are particularly prominent).

"Relic Hunt in Virginia at the GNRS" posted by ConfederRick

hat-tip to Dorothy King.