Neal,
I don't think I am angling for a law here. Your Ohio farmer example is just
the kind of thing I am interested in. I can't imagine what basis there could
be for a restrictive law short of revisioning the meanings of American
property rights. But at the same time there is a slippery slope. An innocent
find leads to an innocent sale, which fuels a market which leads to less
innocent finds and greater damage. At some point in the cycle we do have
laws that step in. But how can we stop legal hunting and collecting--or
should we? If our argument is that it is illegal on protected sites and
leave it there, then all we are doing is acting as security guards. Is there
a transcendent moral argument here, or is it a turf fight between pros who
want to control access and amateurs who putatively want to "democratize"
access?

 I started this thread because I found it hard to mount an effective
argument against the legal purchase of a legally (if unfortunately)
pothunted 18c pipe. I was very uncomfortable with the purchase (and Neal I
feel a bit queasy thinking that your contractor might have been stealing the
sites artifacts). But I think that saying that it is wrong to own that pipe
because we archaeologists are supposed to guard the public interest is not
only ineffective but downright pernicious. Are we really saying that we know
the public interest better than the interested public? The argument that the
government has empowered the pros to be stewards is short sighted and weak
too. As I said before we cannot base a moral argument against pothunting on
an easily reversible government mandate. If the government decided that the
free market was the best curator of the public patrimony would we quietly
accept it and stand by it as dogmatically as the current paradigm. I think
not. What I hoped to see here was if there were better arguments that I have
missed or a different moral plain on which to have this debate.

Class cannot explain it all--although it pervades every aspect life in the
West. Certainly some of the most dangerous collectors and pothunters are
those folks buying and selling bits of Ankor Watt or New Orleans funereal
statuary--these people do not fit the nice redneck-with-a-metal-detector vs.
trained pro dichotomy. That's why I think some sort of competition is at the
heart of this unproductive tension. This throws back the question of why we
do what we do.

Do we join forces? (Linda Carnes McNaughton did a wonderful SHA paper on
amateur-pro cooperation in N.C.) License people like in England? Sell off
tiny bits of pearlware as a means of curration--maybe after we have mended
and counted all that is left to an artifact is the emotional appeal for the
general public? I think we need to understand this segment of the
public--they are the ones who are most interested in what we do.

  Phil Levy