Landscapers ― how to treat (small) archaeological finds?

[Peter Gomena]

I was camping with a friend at a place littered with flakes from Native American flint-napping. There were thousands of them. I picked up a few and brought them home to show my kids, who were entirely unimpressed. They are waiting for a return trip this spring, when I intend to scatter them among the rest of their mates. I've been haunted by the feeling it is wrong to have them, whether or not anyone else ever sees or touches them.

Peter Gomena

[Kirk Gittings]

exactly!

[Drew Wiley]

I've found a bewildering amount of artifacts over the years, all kinds of places, and can still almost smell them like a bloodhound it seems. But good intentions can sometimes backfire. For one thing, in a lot of rural Calif, if a site is located on or near private property
due for development or ranchland, it might deliberately get dynamited or bulldozed due to the bad blood between public archaeologists and property rights advocates. Same goes for
petroglyphs in parts of Utah. Photograph them, but by all means don't publish the location!

[IanG]

Interesting discussion as I'm both a photographer and an Industrial Archaeologist

On my travels I have acquire a 17th C Iron works door handle (plus part of a rotten door) from the workmens entrance as well as a 4ft lenght of cast iron rail from a colliery railway, and some less important atrefacts. In my case if I hadn't they'd have diassappeared for ever as rubbish andd the objects have been re-photographed and are going to a museum along with my prints, the negatives going to the local authorities archives.

It's as important to make photographs of the objects as you find them as it is to ensure they get preserved.

Ian

[J. Fada]

I guess this all comes down to what you would personally do. If I ever found anything significant (like the bowl for example, amazing!) I think I would take it and make copious notes of its location so the location could be found, and then require a signature and a written description when I handed it over to the appropriate person/entity so it wouldn't get "lost".

Personally, I have never found anything in all my travels around the west. I either don't have the radar for it, or I don't recognize it when I see it.

[goamules]

It depends on the artifact. Pottery, bone, and ivory, seashell, once exposed, will deteriorate very rapidly in the rain and sun. Even stone, like an arrowhead, will patina if exposed for hundreds of years. I've come across many, many sites where there is so much pottery exposed you have to tiptoe around it. I've been to recently exposed sites where there are shell beads scattered on the hardpan. And I've been in deep sand dunes where you discover the tip of a point barely sticking out of the sand. For small artifacts like these, one of three things will happen; 1. It will fade, break by having a cow step on it, or weather to dust. 2. It will have windblown sand recover it, where it will remain buried again for another 1,000 or more years. 3. The next hiker who sees it will say "cool!" and put it in his pocket. Most of the artifacts you dutifully report to "the authorities" disappear into a drawer in some archive, or into the "bona fid" personal collection of the archaeologist who determines it's insignificant. So, you are walking through deep dunes in no man's land out west and find a Clovis point or a shell pendant. What would you do in that case?

[Kirk Gittings]

Some of that pottery (or more) you are picking up may hold important information about trading patterns sources of raw materials and residue of what they were eating. I don't feel like it is my right (and legally it is not unless I am on private land) to destroy that information by removing it from its provenance, because it might decay or someone else might grab it if I don't.

I have worked a number of archeological digs and done aerial and site/artifact documentation on many more. My daughter and I worked a dig for some Canadian archeologists down in south central Chihuahua, Mexico trying to define the southern boundaries of the culture that inhabited Paquime (Casas Grandes). There were 12 pottery shards (from more than 1 pot) found there amongst 150,000 that were Mimbres in origin. Mimbres culture was in southern New Mexico 750 miles away. Those 5 shards were the some of the most important finds of the 5 year dig establishing a network of trade that had not been known before. Three of those shards were on the surface because this was a farm field and the plowing had turned the soil moving them to the surface. Those three shards were what convinced the archeologists to dig that particular site. Anybody could have picked those up (they were graphic and attractive-much more so than the local stuff) and walked off with them and that dig would not have happened. You have no idea what damage you may be doing when you take any kind of artifact away.

Read Craig Childs' (one of my favorite writers about the desert Southwest) Finders Keepers and House of Rain for a thorough and sympathetic look at this issue. If you love ruins like I do read House of Rain first. Its the best book I have ever read on the lure of ruins in the SW. He is a hydrologist by training and his most popular book is the Secret Knowledge of Water about water in the desert-fascinating. Everyone who I have turned on to Childs has been blown away. In Finders Keepers he goes into his own addiction and struggles with collecting artifacts in the field and addresses all the points you mention above.

Your a photographer. Just take a picture and move on. I would rather be known a s the guy who found a Clovis point and turned it in than be the guy who took one home and hid it in a drawer because it was illegal and I can't tell anyone about it. Believe me I have really struggled with these issues too as I have found burials with intact pots and other artifacts, carved beads, complete points, storage cysts with intact baskets etc. In my youth we even lived near an isolated Anasazi ruin.

[Drew Wiley]

It's a bit complicated. Maybe in the Southwest there's a better breed of archaeologist than
here due to the appeal of ruins etc. But some of the salvage archaeologists in this part of
the world are worse than what you folks call "pothunters" (even though we don't have baked pottery except in the lower desert, but carved bowls etc). Then like I implied earlier,
if any formal report is filed relative to private property, someone comes along with dynamite or a bulldozer. Best to keep quiet unless something is in imminent danger of vandalism. I've seen quite a few remarkable sites outright destroyed over the years,
some due to ignorance, some deliberately.

[Kirk Gittings]

Salvage archeology here has been a huge boon to archeology. Read Steve Lekson's History of the Ancient SW on salvage archeology in and around Phoenix. Ever since the Feds started requiring archeological surveys and salvage on anything with Fed money in it far more excavation has taken place out of necessity instead of being bulldozed. It is sometimes Q&D right in front of the bulldozers but that is allot better than ziltch. In areas like the Phoenix Basin, the amount of archeology excavation has expanded 100 fold. The result is a much greater base of knowledge on the Hohokom culture. Prior to that law Hohokom culture was defined by excavations at a couple dozen huge sites, but big sites only tell part of the story. As a result of salvage it is now defined by excavations at thousands of sites big and small.

[BrianShaw]

me

Me too.

This is a significant discussion. I have never been so homored as to find artifacts, and I know if I did I would face temptation. It was hard enough visiting the Pertrified Forest and not pocketing a souvenier.