Robert Leavitt and fellow HISTARCHers:
I will take the axe from you, student Robert Leavitt, and apply it not
to your neck (so obligingly placed on the block), but turn it on our
non-student colleagues.

We worry a great deal about the depradations of collectors on
archaeological sites, whether the damage they cause is out of ignorance
or greed. Many of us do something about it through public education
programs, publishing in local venues, press conferences, etc. We need to
do more of all of the above and find innovative means for educating and
sharing what we have learned through original research. Unfortunately,
we overlook an important agent in the destruction of archaeological
sites...ourselves.

I don't advocate total preservation of archaeological sites. Afterall,
how can you preserve a site about which you know little or nothing. I do
advocate thorough, prompt reporting of the sites that we test. I have
been a field archaeologist for nearly a quarter of a century, and in
that time I have had to deal with sites--both as a researcher and,
recently, as a government representative--without adequate background
information. Why? Because colleagues who have worked on those sites or
on neighboring sites failed to prepare technical reports in a reasonable
period of time. (Access to collections and notes has never been denied,
but why should I have to write somebody else's report?)

I don't necessarily want to divert this thread from its original
subject, clandestine digging (although I don't see it moving very much
further at this point), but I think we need to clean our own house
first. Our discipline, our professional organizations, need to be very
specific in their respective ethics statements or codes: YOU WILL
PREPARE A THOROUGH TECHNICAL REPORT IN A REASONABLE PERIOD OF TIME. YOU
WILL INCLUDE PLANS FOR PROCESSING, ANALYZING, AND REPORTING WHEN
DEVELOPING A RESEARCH DESIGN.

I apologize for yelling, but sometimes we need to raise our voices to be
heard. The point I want heard is that we need to be a little harder on
ourselves first: perhaps then we can speak to our avocational friends
with a bit more conviction and no hypocrisy.

Jim Gibb
Annapolis, MD
RCL wrote:
>
> (I'm a student, so I may be putting my neck on a block and handing someone
> an ax, but...)
>
> A pot-hunter rips stuff out of the ground, washes the crud off it, and
> hocks it or puts it on a shelf or in a barrel to admire. An archaeologist
> painstakingly excavates a site, uses deionized water to carefully clean the
> artifacts he recovered, and curates everything in a climate-controlled
> warehouse. What's the difference? I would maintain that, at this
> point,  there is none. The difference comes later.  The archaeologist
> analyzes what he has found, carefully describes it, draws conclusions based
> on the material he's recovered and his subsequent research, and publishes
> the whole thing, publicly tossing his skeet up for others to shoot at.
> Whether his conclusions are accepted or refuted, the net result is some
> incremental increase in overall knowledge about the past. The key is the
> PUBLICation  and doing so in a forum that is accessible to as many other
> people - professionals, interested amateurs, students, curiosity seekers,
> anyone - as possible. I'm not convinced that it's possible to consider as
> "publication"  the sending of a single copy of a report to a company, a
> governmental agency, or even a university unless there is some means to get
> at least an abstract widely disseminated and to allow the report itself to
> occasionally emerge from its hidden file.
>          Yes, I realize there are funding problems to be faced, but I
> question if any project, archaeological or otherwise, has ever been really
> "properly" funded. The must-have elements are still completed. Perhaps it's
> time to consider proper publication as a must-have element?
>
> Robert C. Leavitt
> UNR Retread Student
>