A review by amanda_shelflove
Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs

adventurous informative reflective fast-paced

3.5

This was an interesting and thought provoking book about the ethics of archaeology. Throughout the book, Childs shares his dilemma of how we handle artifacts of the past. Do we dig them up and keep them? Do we donate them to a museum? Do we give them to the ancestors of who made them? Or do we let them lie? Childs admittedly doesn’t have the answer himself or rather, it’s complicated. 

It seems most archaeologists have their own moral standards they abide by which varies person to person. This book serves as an ethical prompt to the reader to decide what their moral standard is for digging up the past. 

This book is filled with conundrums which I fully appreciated. It’s definitely something to ponder on. Childs brings up colonialism and its effects on ancient and modern cultures. He argues that we already have too many artifacts in museums and storage and to take items from their burial site is to take away their context. This book made me think a lot and made me interested in this kind of topic. 

Some quotes from the book that I liked: 

“We got what we came for. Evidence of the past that we could get up close to and surround with our senses.”

“You wouldn’t go and dig up a graveyard. And that’s what this is, a giant graveyard.” 

“What is legal, allowable, or even ethical changes very quickly.”