Philip Levy wrote:
>
> I know a guy who bought a pipe. It was not a big deal--one of the 18th c.
> type that are common on sites and can be found in any antique mall. The
> seller told him it was dug somewhere in the 1950s. It had been in
> circulation for some time and this guy, an honest and respectable fellow who
> likes to collect old stuff could not really see why his archaeologist
> friends winced at his story.
>
> I explained that any sale of objects fuels the further sale of objects which
> in turn threatens all sites by creating a financial incentive to loot them
> and rob them of their contributive potential. I think we all agree with that
> simple position. I offered to take the guy to any number of nice Civil War
> sites nearby that have been torn apart by pothunters to demonstrate the
> damage. Furthermore I heard that the UN is getting interested in
> international laws restricting the trade in objects--others are concerned
> too.
>
> The chat with this guy brought some issues back up for me. The fact is that
> we don't control the world. Park sites obviously have their own enforced
> rules, but farmers' fields do not. In America property rights are a very
> powerful force and it is hard to mount a truly transcendent argument against
> legal pothunting. So often our arguments against pothunting sound like a
> territory squabble and we are caught in a contradiction--we want people to
> respect and take interest in the material past, but we also want to control
> or deny their access to it for their own uses and appreciation. Pothunters
> in their writings point out that there are countless thousands of artifacts
> packed away in archaeological warehouses that will never see the light of
> day. They see this as meanspirited elitist hoarding. Obviously, this view
> stems from a narrow and uninformed view of archaeology, but we still have to
> engage with critiques like these. Is there a powerful antipothuntng argument
> that is better than the one I outlined in the second paragraph? I know that
> there are lots of strong feelings here, but I would be interested if anyone
> has mounted a persuasive and effective argument against pothunting that
> pothunters can recognize.
>
> Phil Levy

What I'd like to see sometime in my lifetime is an initiative to
quantify the total yearly acreage affected by pothunting versus economic
development and/or erosion. I wonder sometimes if efforts against the
collectors community shouldn't be lodged where the real threats are. We
seem to put disproportionate energy into a battle based upon more
emotion than fact.
Dan Thompson