[meteorite-list] Hunters and recoverererers
From: Lee <vegas_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Apr 28 12:07:17 2006 Message-ID: <003d01c66a07$711932f0$2f01a8c0_at_vegasprime> Random surface found arrowheads are NOT bound into any type of context, no more than finding a 100 year old silver coin at the beach is! These were made by the BILLIONS, used by the BILLIONS, and lost or broken by the BILLIONS. What difference does it make to you, me, or the Natural History Society of Hooterville that someone found an arrowhead? Even if it is a different style than normally found in the area, it could just as well have been dropped there by a travelling collector 50 years ago, or washed there during any one of hundreds of floods. Did you know they often find ancient Roman and Greek coins when excavating American colonial sites? This doesn't mean that the Romans were here first, it means that some colonists brought over a collection of coins and some ended up being lost. What if we found a whole midden stomping through a field in Iowa? What difference does it make? Do we really need to scientifically study every single item and every single place that anyone has ever cooked a meal or pitched a tent? Does it matter if we confirm for the 500th time that Plains Indians ate bison, small animals,wild berries, and anything else they could find? Who do you suggest pay for this? A "scientist" has just announced, upon examining two tiny partial fossil jaws found in river sediment in Africa, that they are 37 million years old, are ancestors of the primates, and that they PROVE that our ancestral primates originated in Africa. Also, due to one of the teeth having a short root, it PROVES that the animal was nocturnal with large eyes to see in the dark. This is crap! Every time a self-proclaimed expert gives a crackpot opinion to support his preconceived ideas, people line up to ooh and aah, until the next crackpot comes along. For heaven's sake, this is a METEORITE list! Meteorites, with the exception of those rare examples that have been turned into cultural objects by their ancient, original finders, have NO cultural or environmental significance! If you have a 200 kg main mass that you dug up in a field in the middle of Nebraska, it really doesn't matter to the scientific community where or when it fell. It only matters to the meteorite collecting community. Meteorites fall EVERY DAY! What do you expect to find that would in the least but be important in a random pit dug to find meteorites? Maybe farmers should be banned from plowing their fields, they might disturb something that a handful of people think is important. It's funny, I don't see those scientists going out of their way to conserve these areas. How many museums have HUGE collections buried away in a storehouse, rotting away for lack of funds and interest by both the public and themselves. If there is nothing exciting enough for the academic to be able to f urther their career through publication, the artifact is just tossed aside, either at the site or in the basement back at the foundation, never to be seen again. Many things ARE deteriorating at a remarkable rate. Fertilizers, acid rain, and other chemicals are damaging artifacts and specimens still underground at a prodigious rate. 1,500 year old ancient coins & artifacts found in Britain are often much more deteriorated than similar finds made only 25 to 50 years ago, due to contamination in the ground water supply. Lee Cornelius ----- Original Message ----- From: Thaddeus Besedin To: Dave Freeman mjwy Cc: meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 6:45 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Hunters and recoverererers What may seem random to you may not be so. A random arrowhead is typically only seen as isolated because people picking them up do not know that there is in fact a cultural diversity represented in stone tools and fragments of prehistoric industry overlooked. These proximal objects have little, if any, market value. If one has knowledge that this "random" projectile point is surrounded by copious debris, this would certainly soil the practice, would it not? What constitutes your conception of an adequate distance between isolates, that itself determines the identity of an isolate? Things are buried, but they'll live to see another day without your pocket for protection. I can see that your world provides unlocked vaults, dropped wallets, and unclaimed inheritances. Is it not too much for one who can find time to pick up artifacts to have a GPS and a camera? Could you observe microorganisms without a microscope? What does an arrowhead mean without awareness and record of its context and the contexts of arro wheads? Is your sense of self-regulation a law itself? What do you mean by "studied"? Don't you mean "mined"? Understand that you are an amateur for a reason. Just admit it: you are a profiteer with no consistent, internalized scruple. Sure, I have stones, but I don't need a 20 kilo main mass sitting prominently on a shelf. I stopped buying over a year ago when I realized that I not only had enough material for years of personal research, but that my interest was detrimental to certain other areas of research, as well as peripheral sciences that are affected because many suppliers espouse your "treasure hunting" ethos and have expanded their horizons. You have to put your foot down at some point. I should support the "cause" by collecting from your collection. It will just rot sitting there anyway. -thaddeus Besedin Dave Freeman mjwy <dfreeman_at_fascination.com> wrote: BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. What have YOU done to preserve science? And, what do you have in your collection that you shouldn't have (meaning anything that wasn't correctly scientifically removed)? Exactly what are your credentials to be knowledgeable to whine..? It is very easy for those stoic office types to complain about those in the field doing the real WORK. Our western lands are not studied because the amateur is shut out by the scientific lobby in congress so the stuff just sits and gets eroded away by nature. In the CFR, under "artifacts" there is no penalty for collecting random arrowheads on the surface of the ground. So, don't forget that. Don't forget that private land still is private, and what may be collected there is not controlled by blue footed boobies. Poo poo to all those that have an opinion but do nothing to support the cause. I am actually still surprised that anyone can own meteorites or artifacts of any kind with the few bone-heads-for-science that roam our country. There is nothing wrong with good science but letting things erode to nothing in the name of preservation is quite self serving for nothing. I will get of my soap box now. Mr. Dave and Mr. Jim....got me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DAve F. Thaddeus Besedin wrote: They should be recovered, but we should be aware of how our excavation impacts other deposits. I'll let this rest, guys. You know my position by now. The same argument ("it will rot if I do nothing") is advanced by "relic" hunters who search rivers, but there is a major difference between surface hunting and excavation, and especially in the contexts of drainages and areas subject to mass wasting. to protect their "troves," looters typically do not disclose the provenances of their finds when offered for sale, if at all they have been conscientious enough to record a GPS position. Such negligence is irresponsible, and proves that the motive for these activities is itself personal gain. Seriously, the prices that these meteorites yield would be better deserved if all sciences involved with the thin, fragile surface of the earth are considered. This would be the attitude of a professional in any other invasive field. -Thaddeus -------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. 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