"Citizen Archaeology"

[Unorthodox]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2016/01/13/florida-archaeologists-condemn-proposed-citizen-archaeology-permit/#2715e4857a0b2379395558fc

A recently proposed bill in Florida is making news this week for the outcry it has generated among archaeologists. House Bill 803 has been put forth to change the cultural resource laws in the state. For the cost of a $100 permit, anyone would be able to dig by hand or use a trowel to excavate an artifact, take it home to display it, or sell it to the highest bidder, as long as they report the location where they found it. While the state legislature feels “citizen archaeology” is a valid concern, professional archaeologists tasked with protecting the state’s past are furious.

The most relevant legal protection for ancient artifacts in the U.S. is the National Historic Preservation Act, signed in 1966, but attempts to get around this law – often by collectors and antiquities dealers — have been ongoing over the years. In Florida, there has been substantial discussion since the 1990s about so-called “citizen archaeology permits,” or the idea that a citizen can take an artifact from protected state property if they provide the location information to land managers. For more than a decade, Florida had a permit program called Isolated Finds. Similar to the new proposal, in the Isolated Finds Program, the state charged a $100 application fee and required reporting of the location of the find.

The Isolated Finds Program was discontinued in 2005 and considered by many to be a total failure. The program cost the state more money than it brought in through application fees. It also failed to produce a list of sites reported by those collecting artifacts. Even when land managers directly observed people collecting artifacts, only 20% of the collectors followed through by reporting site location. It further confused the distinction between where collecting was legal on state land and where it was illegal by federal law or local ordinance protection.

Since the Isolated Finds Program was discontinued, a proposal for a similar program has resurfaced in some form or another nearly every year. This year’s bill, however, has the substantial financial and lobbying backing of the Tri State Archaeological Society, one of the largest purveyors of artifacts and price guides in the southeast. And this has archaeologists worried.

“These bills are not about children innocently picking up an artifact at the park,” archaeologist Sarah Miller of the Florida Public Archaeology Network says. “They are about criminal mining of state resources.” The commercial demand for artifacts is the most significant threat to archaeological sites around the world. Many people perceive of artifacts as “free” to collect and then sell them, making tidy profits. Miller notes, though, that artifacts on state lands are not free. “The people of Florida already own them, and they are not for sale.”

Archaeologist Tanya Peres at Florida State University agrees. “While on the surface HB803 seems like a harmless initiative by a bunch of artifact enthusiasts, in reality it is a way to plunder public lands,” she told me. The fact that HB803 deals with public land is particularly galling to state archaeologists. Peres notes that “tax dollars from Florida citizens are being used to support the very lands that are being looted for profit by a few individuals.”

Both Miller and Peres emphasize that one of the goals of archaeology is to foster public understanding and interest in archaeology, but that HB803 is not the way to do this. Florida already boasts a state-wide public outreach program in the form of the Florida Public Archaeology Network. Many FPAN locations and archaeological sites around the state allow for volunteers, and the public is taught to leave artifacts in place and alert a land manager so that the material and the site can be properly protected.

William Lees, executive director of the FPAN state-wide and past president of the Society for Historical Archaeology, wrote in an open letter to Florida state representative Charlie Stone that “stealing artifacts from Florida waters for private, personal gain through sale is a significant problem.” By looting sites and taking artifacts out of the ground or the water, people are depriving archaeologists of additional information about past peoples. For archaeologists, artifacts are only the beginning of the story. A huge chunk of the information they can gather about a past people comes from the context of the artifacts – where they are buried, and with what else. Carl Halbirt, archaeologist for the city of St. Augustine, puts it succinctly: “If you have people going out there and looking for artifacts and removing them out of context, it’s a bad idea. Archaeology is about understanding context.”

House Bill 803 was introduced on Tuesday and is currently in committee, along with its companion, Senate Bill 1054. These will come up for vote as early as the end of the month. In response, legislators in the city of St. Augustine adopted a resolution this week demonstrating their opposition to the bills and their continued support of the National Historic Preservation Act.

“Florida has always been a leader in state-level historic and archaeological preservation,” Lees notes. “The program described in HB803 represents a retreat from this position of leadership and will threaten rather than strengthen protection of our public lands.” For Floridians who agree with these archaeologists, Miller and Lees encourage them to take action by calling, emailing, or writing to their local legislators or state representative Charlie Stone directly to put into a collective voice their opposition to HB803.

The National Historic Preservation Act turns 50 this year, and archaeologists continue their attempts to protect it – and to protect our non-renewable prehistoric and historic resources – while learning and sharing all the information they can about the past of Florida and all 49 other states.

This post was co-written with Sarah Miller of the Florida Public Archaeology Network.  Full disclosure: FPAN is a program of the University of West Florida, where I teach in the Department of Anthropology.

[Unorthodox]

Little bit torn to be honest.  I think there's a place for allowing people to take artifacts.  I also recognize a lot of people will abuse the hell out of that permission. 

[gwillybj]

Little bit torn to be honest.  I think there's a place for allowing people to take artifacts.  I also recognize a lot of people will abuse the hell out of that permission. 

As you said.
I think $100 is pretty cheap; needs to be higher, and legal locations will need to be very well-defined, with stiff penalties for encroachment.

[Valka]

Can anyone say "state-sanctioned looting"? That's what this amounts to, even if it's just a pottery shard.

Artifacts, if removed before they can be documented in situ, become basically worthless as far as their archaeological value. And if the artifact is something that needs to be carbon-dated, it will be hopelessly contaminated.

I realize that the public wants the chance to dig up stuff. But they can apply to join digs where the public are allowed to help out, under the supervision of qualified archaeologists. Digging on their own should not be allowed.

[vonbach]

Just what we need the government telling people who can dig up history. The government has enough control over things already.

[Valka]

You're not getting it. An artifact is valuable to historical study if the trained archaeologists/anthropologists can document it in situ (exactly where it was found) before anyone removes it for further study or display.

Take Schliemann or Lord Carnarvon's efforts to find Troy or King Tut's tomb, for example. Yeah, they found what they were searching for. But they also looted artifacts before they could be properly documented... and so for historical purposes, these items are much less valuable than they would have been otherwise. We could have learned so much more if they'd left the stuff where it was and made proper records - sketches, taken pictures of everything before touching it, written descriptions of what they found.

Instead, they just strolled in, saw the loot, grabbed it, played with it, and claimed it. No attempts at documentation or study. It was all about $$$$$$$$.

[vonbach]

Oh I get it all right. I along with a lot of Americans are just plain sick of the Feds telling us what to do with our lives.
We fought a revolution over conditions far less than what we are living under now.

[Valka]

 

Not much of my social studies curriculum had to do with either your war of independence or your Civil War, but even I know they had nothing to do with peoples' freedom to loot historical artifacts!

[vonbach]

Nice try. Sorry I don't want the government deciding who gets to do research. We have enough
of that type of government interference already. You already have non elected government
organizations like the EPA and the BLM deciding what people can and cant do.
Get rid of the nanny state.

[Valka]

 

Looting archaeological sites is not "research." It's just looting.

[Rusty Edge]

It all comes down to public vs. private.

The public shouldn't get to decide how an individual uses their own land, and a private person doesn't get to decide what to do with public lands. No different than any city park, really. You're not entitled to log it, graze it, mine it, or turn the parking area into a used car lot. It's not there so that somebody can compete with taxpaying landowners.  It's there for recreation and preservation.

[Unorthodox]

I live in a state where fossils are prolific and readily available, and you're free to pick *SOME* up from public lands.  (Trilobite, yes.  Raptor Skeleton, no.)  Some areas got pilfered too hard, so now you can take a "reasonable amount".  But I presume enforcing that is a nightmare.  There are companies that own land with rich beds of these, and others that provide a 'guide' service to take you out to find them. 


(I recall finding what appeared to be a tooth in the backyard as a kid.  Turned out to be some weird shellfish, we dug down and found coral and other fossils as well.)

[Valka]

The area where I live is rich in dinosaur-era fossils. If anyone here ever visits the province of Alberta, Canada, make sure you go to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. It's a world-class museum/research facility near Drumheller. I've been there twice.