Well, I hope I am a good one, but since I am not really sure what a good "Archie" is, I guess I have to take my chances and just tell you honestly what I believe.
I'm not a pot-hunter, if that's what you mean... but I am definitely interested in casual finds and the whole idea of lost treasures. I love to look for old things, and have no problem keeping what I find, but I do it in a responsible way -- meaning I would always choose to keep records and proper data on anything that looked important and call in experts as required. I don't think everything belongs in a museum or university (for one thing, I know first hand how corrupt and unimaginative many of those institutions are) but some sites are too valuable -- information-wise -- to not be excavated properly. Quick example...
I once assisted in an emergency excavation of a bluff shelter in NW Arkansas that included a female mummy in remarkably good shape -- with textiles (shoes, clothing, head-dress) in incredible condition, considering the "body" was over 2,000 years old. The site was discovered by two local men digging for whatever they thought they could sell. After digging up a few pots and some broken points here and there, their shovels unearthed a human foot. It was so fresh looking, they thought it was a recent murder victim and got so scared they fled to a local bar to tell the story over some liquid courage.
The bartender happened to be a friend of one of the anthropologists at a nearby university and told him the story. They pieced things together, got permission from the landowner (who had
not given permission to the previous diggers, by the way) to excavate the shelter and we spent a week documenting and excavating the site. It yielded an enormous amount of information about paleo-indians that would have been completely lost if those two had continued to destroy the site. They would never have noticed the plant seeds or studied the pollens we found in pots and strewn around the site, for instance. The mummy clothing revealed some new information about the clothing and lifestyle of the natives living there as well. (The burial was quite interesting too -- she was placed inside a leather bag in a fetal position and buried in a small hole just at the edge of the shelter.) Anyway, my point is that there was nothing there of any real value as far as "sellable" artifacts go, but the information we gleaned in only a few days from things they would have tossed away, was priceless. Had the pot-hunters (illegal trespassers on private property) not been scared away, they would have gained a few pottery shards, some small, broken artifacts from the hillside midden and very little else, but they would have forever destroyed genuinely useful information that we could use to reconstruct the culture and lifestyle of an early people.
Personally, I think governments should
not be allowed to confiscate treasure -- sunken ships to hidden hoards -- as soon as someone else goes to all the time, trouble and expense to recover it. But, I do think, treasure hunters should be above-board and only dig private property
with permission; AND... I think amateur "archaeologists" should have enough awareness of what they are doing to keep good data as they dig and if doubt about the importance of a find comes up, they should be responsible enough to call in the pros BEFORE they destroy something vital. That is
not to say that I believe they should have to relinquish all rights to what they find, only that they should be responsible and allow useful information to be gathered before the context is lost forever. It more or less comes down to this... treasure belongs to whoever finds it, but information belongs to all humankind.
On that same line of reasoning... I think native burials should be treated with the utmost respect. The emergency excavation I used as an example was just that -- an emergency. We removed the body to save it (from pot-hunters and from the elements once it had been exposed). In more normal circumstances, I have participated in excavations of old burial sites where modern descendants of native populations were invited to bless the site, witness the exhumations and give permission for the site and the bodies to be examined BEFORE returning the bodies to their final resting places. That sort of respectful handling of a site allows scientists to study and glean valuable information while respecting the rights of native peoples to preserve the burial places of their ancestors. Pot hunters have respect for neither the information nor the native people.
Okay... am I a good "Archie" or a bad one?
