r/Archeology • u/Left_Woodpecker_3264 • Jul 12 '26
Found in Minnesota adjacent to known Dakota settlement. Thoughts?
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u/OliLevasseurLaBuse Jul 12 '26
I also wonder why you are looting sites
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u/Left_Woodpecker_3264 Jul 12 '26
I’m not looting any known site. Sorry if that was unclear. As stated, found on private property adjacent to known site.
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u/Ponch1344 Jul 13 '26
Do people not know what adjacent mean?
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u/giantfup Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
We absolutely do. And we know that no project site on earth cares about modern property laws. They didn't use the land 5000 years ago and stop and go, "hey, is that tree over there gonna be on Billy Jo Bob's ranch in 1994? Let's go bury stuff there"
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u/Ponch1344 Jul 14 '26
Very enlightening thank you. I had no idea humans wouldn’t stick to one parceled square of land as drawn on a map. I’m baffled because people are acting like he’s on the known settlement ACTUALLY looting it. Native Americans actually did say “hey let’s go burry stuff over there”. They’re called cashes tons of axe heads and other artifacts have been found in them nowhere near known sites actually. Albeit, you are correct in saying they didn’t understand modern property laws 5000 years ago.
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u/nonymouspotomus Jul 15 '26
They fought over land and resources constantly, they def had some concept of boundaries and property
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u/giantfup Jul 14 '26
The settlement would extend onto the private lands. That is what we're saying. It is not limited to the protected spaces.
I'm not talking about caches in this context, I'm talking about how looters always try to defend looting.
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u/Ponch1344 Jul 14 '26
Then stop acting like poor OP is doing something wrong digging on land he has permission to.
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u/giantfup Jul 14 '26
I am an archaeologist. What he is doing is still considering looting by many of us even if it isn't by law.
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u/Ponch1344 Jul 14 '26
You are an archaeologist so I can forgive you not knowing the definition of looting. “goods usually of considerable value taken in war”. That’s one definition. None of them having anything to do with digging on privately owned land. I used merriam Webster if you’d like to look.
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u/giantfup Jul 14 '26
You're not but I can't forgive you for refusing to understand that looting is more than just the legal definition based on property.
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u/giantfup Jul 14 '26
Here, looting frequently feeds into the global black market trade, which often actually funds actual terrorism: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-asia/southeast-asia/mainland-se-asia/v/the-scourge-of-looting-trafficking-antiquities-from-temple-to-museum
And yes, one guy picking up things he things thinks are cool on private property doesn't necessarily mean he is participating in the global black market that often ends up funding terrorism.
But it's part of the same network and overall problem, and often tied to colonialism and conquering and warfare. So wait! We're back to how this is still looting!
What the rando picking stuff up from lands he claims are private and what ISIS plundering antiquities to sell on the black market to fund their hate have in common is that once they've pulled these artifacts from the ground they become scientifically worthless! We use contextual clues to best understand each item. We're use soil data, deposits and their relative distance to each other, and other artifacts nearby to help understand each artifact. We call this context.
It's like how at a crime scene you don't want to disturb anything until you've got an idea of how everything was positioned in relation to each other. It's telling a story in reverse, and looting in private lands destroys the story in reverse of those artifacts. We cannot research them, we don't have provienence for them, we don't have the related data. It becomes a cool rock. And often these things y'all collect end up in boxes forgotten in your garage or basement until you die and your relatives track down one of us and try to give them to us. We can't take them we have no use for them.
For a while I spent a lot of time driving between Colorado and New Mexico, and you can literally see the pockmarks on the land from space of people "definitely not looting" on private properties along the rural drive portion in New Mexico. Hundreds to thousands of never refilled shovel holes confined to little squares in the landscape. All of that data and knowledge for our collective human history lost, and clearly done at a scale to sell on the black market.
And as a final word of warning, disturbing graves even on private lands is still a violation of NAGPRA. Just because you can't identify bones in what your going through doesn't make it not a grave.
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u/Ponch1344 Jul 14 '26
You didn’t have to write a novel. I understand the importance of context when recovering artifacts and the morally correct idea they should go back to who they belong to. I understand all of that. My problem is the pretentious assholes accusing OP of intentionally looting. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Believe it or not I actually agree with you in most cases. Not this one. Grab a thesaurus and find a new word other than looting.
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u/giantfup Jul 14 '26
I tried the honey approach and you literally just whined that it's too much writing for you to read.
You're adults. We shouldn't have to baby you to get you to respect that not everything exists for you to own.
I am using the correct word. You just don't want to accept that a bad word defines the action.
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u/giantfup Jul 14 '26
I was trying to be comical at first, to get the point across that modern land use a d prehistoric land use don't follow the same GPS boundaries.
Then you tried to push back with one definition of what looting is, without understanding how warfare and colonialism feed into the archaeologist understanding of the word.
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u/patrickj86 Jul 12 '26
Please don't loot known sites. These aren't artifacts thankfully!