The World Wide Web of Antiquities Archaeologists and law enforcement officials are grappling with the problems of antiquities trading on the Internet.
MAXWELL MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UNM
CARL STEEN
CREDIT
By Elaine Robbins
A
rchaeologist Jonathan Leader jolted out of his reverie and stared at the computer screen, where some items were being offered for sale on eBay. Leader clicked one at a time on the six high-quality photos—a breastplate, buttons to an overcoat, belt buckles, a cartridge box, shoe leather. As he read the descriptions of the items, he suspected that they were looted from a Civil War burial. It wasn’t the first time that Leader, the state archaeologist of South Carolina, found pieces of his state’s heritage for sale on the Internet. In fact, he has followed the Internet’s impact on cultural resources from its beginnings. “When I first came to South Carolina in 1989, there were already ListServes where people were swapping material for sale, discussing where to go dig them up, setting up flea markets,” he says. After watching with growing alarm, he decided to take action. Joining forces with the lead archaeologists from the South Carolina Department of Transportation and the State Historic Preservation Office, he formed a sort of archaeological SWAT team. On weekends the threesome descended on gun shows and flea markets. Whenever they heard a dealer publicly claim that artifacts came from burials or public lands, they filed a complaint. Although they got few convictions in South Carolina, their presence had a chilling effect. “The dealers started shifting to on-line,” he recalls. “So we started monitoring eBay once a week. I would do a search for ‘dug,’ ‘excavated,’ and ‘relic.’ I was finding an average of 300 hits under these key words for South Carolina alone.” american archaeology
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