Government Archaeologists

The Northern Virginia Relic Hunters Association (NVRHA) (see the website) maintains a video archive (DVDs) of talks given by club members. I recall one good interaction where members of our club helped the National Park Service at the Antietam (Sharpsburg) battlefield perform rescue archeology before they bulldozed for a parking lot, allowing a controlled metal detector survey with club operators placing flags for archeologists to dig and record. It can happen amicably. But for the most part archeologists despise treasure hunters as looters. That is unfortunate for America.

By contrast in England the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) is a marvel of cooperation that has become the accepted norm in most of Great Britain. Any artifact of gold or silver or relics over three hundred years old need to be reported, documented, and offered to museums first. Those they do not acquire may be returned to the finder and land owner to split. Those special items that have significant historic meaning are purchased at fair market value and the finder acknowledged for contributing to the archeological record in a meaningful way. The public is supercharged to report everything they spade up in the garden. English history belongs to its citizens under the spirit of public enthusiasm and sharing.

American history seems the province of credentialed professionals, not to be trifled with, thank you please. Only a trained member of the brotherhood should be allowed to hold and study an artifact, so why should the American public care about relics or history?

Search for "rescue archeology" for a different slant. Very little U.S. land is protected, with the vast majority in private hands, with builders eager to bulldoze with abandon. Those who might holdup construction recovering artifacts are a bother and look out for the schedule if they claim to find a grave. Best not let anyone mess with private construction. Metal detector operators have learned to walk behind the bulldozer.

With regard to the information gathered in the name of archeology try to obtain field reports with artifact images of coins from typical archeological digs in America and you will find the information generally unobtainable, disorganized, unsearchable, and not of any general use. Coins are utterly incidental but welcome time markers of strata, but not always well understood from a numismatic standpoint, especially back-dated contemporary counterfeits. Most of the artifact listings are pigeonholed into the back appendices of site reports and lack the value of the Portable Antiquities Scheme search capability, database, and image files. Just try and physically locate artifacts depicted in an archeological report for further study. The artifacts tend to gather in poorly funded repositories lacking in inventory control. I expect a majority have gone missing. As a result I think we know more about the bronze coins used in Roman "Londinium" than we do about copper coins from "modern" American colonial settlements established during the reign of King Charles I, which if found in England, would be too new for mandatory reporting under the PAS.

What was the most common type of silver coin used in daily commerce in colonial Virginia prior to the English Civil War? Would it be the same type of coin used in New York, New Orleans, Massachusetts Bay or Florida? Where did they come from? Don't mistake written exchange rates for various coins in colonial cities at various times with what the citizens used daily, just as today looking at the Wall Street Journal we would find exchange rates for Yen, Shekels, Dollars and Drachmas, but not all of those drive commerce or have ever been possessed by the average American. Our colonial archeological record seems broken into little bits, none of which can play a tune.