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Pot Hound or Pot Hunter? 12.11.2002 -- The rockhound is a collector of rocks and minerals; the pot hound is a collector of pots and other prehistoric Indian artifacts. A pot hound is a vandal when he digs in sites only to recover beautiful specimens to sell or to keep in his private collection. The collector who does not dig up artifacts himself encourages vandalism if he buys from those who have excavated solely for financial gain. Amateur archaeologists rightly object to pot hunters, but amateurs are no better than vandals if they dig without keeping careful, complete records of everything they do and find. Once an object is out of the ground it should be cataloged so that it can be located easily in a collection and so that all of the relevant information about it will be at hand. If a collector arranges his artifacts in no order at all, or makes them into outlines of hearts and wheels, he shows a good deal about his own taste but reveals nothing at all about the people who made the artifacts. For storage purposes the great virtue is orderliness, but artifacts can also be arranged to show stages in their manufacture, to show how they lay in relation to each other in the ground, to show how they related historically to other artifacts, or to show how they related to the environment in which they were made and used. In other words, artifacts can be arranged so that they reveal something about people, and this after all is what archaeology is all about.
Franklin Folsom; America's Ancient Treasures; Rand McNally and
Company; New York, NY; 1974.
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