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A review by trogdor19
Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs
4.0
I was eager to snatch up Child’s latest book, because he’s spent even more time wandering around to backcountry ruins than I have, and I was ecstatic to see that this book dealt with the questions that have always circled in my head when I visited these lonely sites.
It seems to me that pothunters and archaeologists are just two spots on a long spectrum the inevitably destroys the evidence of history. Childs deals with this issue beautifully, showing the pros and cons of both ways. He talks about meticulously detailed provenances (though we all know how paperwork can get lost and software can crash), about good pothunters and bad, about the gut-wrenching idea of sacred artifacts soaked in poisons to preserve them and then repatriated to their home Indian tribes to be dealt with, about museum storerooms stuffed full with artifacts that the public will never get to see, that have been taken from their places in fields or wilderness or under the ground that anyone with a pair of hiking boots and half a day could have visited.
With his gift for writing, you can see the allure of untouched history, unstudied and undisturbed, the excitement of preserved and well-displayed artistry in gardens and museums, and the casual humanity of history as a continuum, a seven-hundred year old jar re-painted and used as a vase on the kitchen table. The last should appear as blasphemy, but in some ways, it also feels the most right.
On the desert study plots where I work, a can two days old is trash and a can sixty years old is an arch site and they don’t look a whole lot different. And while I despise the careless grave robbing of pothunters, I remember fondly visiting Rome and walking up marble stairs worn uneven by feet, through streets lined with buildings of every age. The windows in their museums were open to the air, not hermetically sealed. I stood in front of a six hundred year old church that had been torn down to reveal the twelve hundred year old building beneath, both outdating any European structures in my own country. They stood next to a shop that sold printer paper and ink cartridges.
When in Rome, I remember thinking that the blending of past and present was the most natural, the least contrived and the most beautiful way to handle antiquities. But there are too many of us now, so that unprotected history gets broken and thrown on trash heaps and taken far from where it was made. I don’t want to see pre-Columbian vessels treated the same as McDonald’s cups, but like Childs, I don’t see any perfect places to draw hard and fast lines that find some behavior acceptable and some illegal.
In the book, Childs describes a tree root that had grown into an archeology site and had twined its fingers around a jar. It was a very vivid image and I thought: there. That is beautiful, that is what I want for the past. The world goes on, the present touches the past and they both are already shaping the future. But still, when they dug it up, the root had crushed the jar to pieces.
In this book, Childs peeks respectfully in on every argument, visits all the deserts and board rooms and kitchens where decisions about the past are made. He doesn’t place his own opinion in bold type, but sketches it in the dagger point of an arrowhead, untaken, and whispers that to study the past is to change the past. And then it isn’t the past at all.
But we love it just the same.
It seems to me that pothunters and archaeologists are just two spots on a long spectrum the inevitably destroys the evidence of history. Childs deals with this issue beautifully, showing the pros and cons of both ways. He talks about meticulously detailed provenances (though we all know how paperwork can get lost and software can crash), about good pothunters and bad, about the gut-wrenching idea of sacred artifacts soaked in poisons to preserve them and then repatriated to their home Indian tribes to be dealt with, about museum storerooms stuffed full with artifacts that the public will never get to see, that have been taken from their places in fields or wilderness or under the ground that anyone with a pair of hiking boots and half a day could have visited.
With his gift for writing, you can see the allure of untouched history, unstudied and undisturbed, the excitement of preserved and well-displayed artistry in gardens and museums, and the casual humanity of history as a continuum, a seven-hundred year old jar re-painted and used as a vase on the kitchen table. The last should appear as blasphemy, but in some ways, it also feels the most right.
On the desert study plots where I work, a can two days old is trash and a can sixty years old is an arch site and they don’t look a whole lot different. And while I despise the careless grave robbing of pothunters, I remember fondly visiting Rome and walking up marble stairs worn uneven by feet, through streets lined with buildings of every age. The windows in their museums were open to the air, not hermetically sealed. I stood in front of a six hundred year old church that had been torn down to reveal the twelve hundred year old building beneath, both outdating any European structures in my own country. They stood next to a shop that sold printer paper and ink cartridges.
When in Rome, I remember thinking that the blending of past and present was the most natural, the least contrived and the most beautiful way to handle antiquities. But there are too many of us now, so that unprotected history gets broken and thrown on trash heaps and taken far from where it was made. I don’t want to see pre-Columbian vessels treated the same as McDonald’s cups, but like Childs, I don’t see any perfect places to draw hard and fast lines that find some behavior acceptable and some illegal.
In the book, Childs describes a tree root that had grown into an archeology site and had twined its fingers around a jar. It was a very vivid image and I thought: there. That is beautiful, that is what I want for the past. The world goes on, the present touches the past and they both are already shaping the future. But still, when they dug it up, the root had crushed the jar to pieces.
In this book, Childs peeks respectfully in on every argument, visits all the deserts and board rooms and kitchens where decisions about the past are made. He doesn’t place his own opinion in bold type, but sketches it in the dagger point of an arrowhead, untaken, and whispers that to study the past is to change the past. And then it isn’t the past at all.
But we love it just the same.