Dear list,

I have thought about this issue a littlle bit since seeing the article in the Times, though I missed the previous thread.  There is no denying the problem of inadevertantly encourging the looting of sites.  A very similar event happened while I was in New Orleans when a pothunter used pottery sherds recovered from French Quarter privies to decorate picture frames which he sold at the New Orleans Jazz and _Heritage_ Festival.

However, the problem for me is not about site protection.  I have always been uncomfortable treating archaeoogical sites as endangered species and apealling to a common sense undertsanding in the public to our plight.    This leaves the archaeologist unmarked in the debate and therefore off guard.

The problem for me here is that this sort of artistic work builds on the key activity of archaeology and perhaps makes a mockery of it for better or worse.  This is the the activity of excavation and presentation.  What we add as archaeoogists is context. The rest of what we we do is the same as these artists except that we assert the stability of the archaeological context regardless of when and by who it is determined.

I think this work should stir the community, but it should not bring outrage as much as reflection. Certainly seeing the artifacts inspriing awe in the public is worth the trouble, but perhaps we can get the public to also have wonder at the process by which these things get meaning.  In fact, this is what Dion has done: he has taken seriously the context of interpretation, the basis to any artistic attempt to re-write our experience in graphic form.  He has aksed us (as viewers) to consider why these things matter and in what ways.  To think he is just telling us, is to miss the point entirely.

Until we see the context of interpretation being as important the context of discovery, we will continue to suffer the insecurtity that such threats as artists using artifacts can bring.

To add to this polemic I encourage you  to look at a project called Incavation that came over the Arch-theory list last fall.
http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/ch264/incavation1.html

chris matthews