A Star-Forged Ruby

UGH Yes, thank you, Reid. If you wanna keep a souvenir of a Backyard Find, get a photo of yourself handing it over to a descendant community, university researcher or museum.

@chaotic-archaeologist is like..

With an emphasis on

with the cultural descendants

Listen, I’m not sure why this person decided to put this in the tags for this post, but I want to make this a teaching moment, not a callout.

I understand that it’s difficult to fully comprehend why keeping stuff that you find is harmful. Let’s look at a case study:

This article is about the Cerberus Collection, which is comprised of many many artifacts that were recovered from private home collections after people had taken them illegally from sites in the American Southwest. They were seized during an FBI sting operation, and there were severe legal repercussions for those involved.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) requires that human remains and artifact associated with human remains be returned to descendant Indigenous communities. The artifacts that were being kept in these peoples’ homes did not belong to them, and their display was both disrespectful and illegal.

Beyond the legal penalties, there’s also the ethics of the situation. Many of these artifacts are grave goods associated with the burials of Indigenous people from the past. Looting these artifacts is an act of grave desecration and deep disrespect for the dead. It is also harmful to current Indigenous groups, who have stated over and over again that they want these graves and sacred sites to remain undisturbed, and that artifacts that are found returned to them for respectful reburial.

Even if whatever you found doesn’t come from an Indigenous or otherwise marginalized group, it’s still unethical to keep them for yourself. We do not own the past, and keeping artifacts in private collections prevents everyone else from learning about and sharing knowledge of the past. This is exactly why the UK created the 1996 Treasure Act. Many other countries have similar legislation. Keeping things that you find can have legal consequences.

TL;DR keeping artifacts that you find is unethical and potentially illegal. The needs of descendant communities must be addressed. No one has a singular claim to the past and everyone should be able to benefit from the material culture of the past.

If you find something cool it is totally understandable to want a memento of that find, but that can’t be keeping the thing! Here’s some other options, but always check with a professional on what may or may not be appropriate for your particular find:

An important thing to understand about archaeological finds is, if you as an untrained individual take anything you are effectively destroying 99% or more of its value.

See, the big thing is context. It’s not “Woo! Gold coins!”

It’s about Where the artifacts were found. With, well, absolute precision. Are they in layers? Were there any fibers between them? What’s on top of what other thing?

For example, in the Cahokia dig, there were some VERY ELABORATE graves. But… those graves we made mostly using woven fibers, wood, and other degradable materials. If you just dug them up, you’d get some Chunkey discs and bones. A formal archaeological dig, however, was able to determine that there was a very involved funerary process, that certain of the bodies were closely related, while others were not, and the different ways those were handled. This gives us a valuable window on the politics and practices of a culture which did not leave any written records. And, of course, the remains could be handled in accordance with NAGPRA.

In the museum where I volunteer, most of the artifacts I’ve cleaned have no monetary value at all. The only reason we care about them is because we know exactly where they were found. Without that information they’re just trash.

While it doesn’t hold the same precious cultural weight as archaeology, the same goes for palaeontology. A fossil belongs in a place where it can be guaranteed to be preserved and always be accessible to study. The place is not in your home, nor is it in the home of the kind of wealthy scum who buy up impressive specimens and deliberately keep them out of the hands of science. 

Scientific findings must always be verifiable and repeatable, and this is not the case when a fossil is held in a private collection that the owner could refuse access to at any time. This is partly why the purchase of STAN the T. rex was such a big deal, the buyer has not revealed themselves and has not made the specimen available for study. This means that all research done on STAN in the past is not no longer repeatable and testable, which is a massive blow because studies on STAN have given us so much information on tyrannosaur biology.

If you ever find a fossil out in the wild, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EXCAVATE IT YOURSELF. You have no idea how much data needs to be collected from the bones, from the soil and rock around the bone, from the landscape and stratigraphy and weather conditions. Contact a museum and follow their directions, take steps to protect the fossil such as with a tarpaulin if there’s a risk the fossil could be damaged by weather before experts can look at it, but please DO NOT touch the fossil. Your find will have so much more value if people who know their stuff can get everything they need from it.

I also strongly advise against buying fossils, even small ones. To be fully transparent, I myself own several small fossils that I bought when I was a kid, and did not understand the ethical issues of the fossil trade or privately held fossils. Those fossils that I do have are now basically scientifically useless because they cannot be traced back to their source location, and it hurts to know that. The fossil trade is full of unethical practices, dangerous working conditions, forced and unpaid labour, illegal smuggling of fossils across borders, destruction of natural landscapes, and destruction of fossils themselves. It is an industry that needs to go extinct, and it is not worth your support in exchange for a pretty trilobite on your shelf.

Fossils are also always the property of the indigenous owners of the lands where the fossil was found. Smuggling is rampant in the fossil trade, and there have been several recent high-profile cases such as the holotype of Ubirajara that was stolen from Brazil, or the Tarbosaurus skeleton that was returned to Mongolia after it was revealed to have been illegally smuggled, leading to the repatriation of many other stolen Mongolian fossils. The sale and private ownership of fossils violates the rights of indigenous people to own the fossils found on their land, and this is something that palaeontology as a field has only just begun to reckon with. 

It’s an infuriating truth that so many fossils studied around the world are stolen from their rightful owners. Though they are not human remains or artefacts they still carry important cultural weight, and their fates must be decided by their true owners. Palaeontology is a field built off the back of colonialism and theft, and there is a lot of difficult work that needs to be done to decouple it from that legacy.