Talked to a retired archaeologist at a diner and he flipped my whole view on looted artifacts

I was grabbing breakfast in Santa Fe last Tuesday and this old guy at the counter noticed my field book sticking out of my bag. Turns out he spent 40 years working digs in the Southwest and he told me something that really stuck. He said most museums in the US are full of items that were basically stolen, just dug up before laws existed or bought from looters who knew better. He pointed to a pot in a display case across the street and said that piece probably came from a grave dug up in the 1930s with no documentation. It hit different because I always thought of museums as safe places for history, but he made me realize they're sometimes just holding cells for stuff that should be in the ground or with descendant communities. Now I'm wondering how many of those artifacts we study actually have a clean story behind them. Has anyone else had their view on museum collections shift after talking to someone who worked in the field?

2 comments

2 Comments

michael88011d ago

That whole "should be in the ground" thing doesn't make much sense to me. If we left everything buried, we'd know nothing about the people who came before us, and most of that stuff would just get destroyed by time or construction anyway. I'd rather have it in a museum where people can actually learn from it than sitting in some looted grave.

max80811d ago

Exactly. It's not like we're digging stuff up just for fun or greed. Without excavation we'd have no idea how people lived, what they believed, what they ate, how they built things. Think about something like Pompeii. If nobody ever dug that up we'd just have a vague story about a volcano and that's it. Instead we've got entire preserved streets, graffiti on walls, food still sitting in bowls. You can't get that from just leaving everything in the dirt. Plus construction crews are going to plow through sites anyway all the time, so it's better to have trained archaeologists getting in there first than just letting backhoes destroy everything. Museums aren't perfect but at least the stuff is documented and studied instead of just sitting there rotting or getting stolen.