Doyle,

We see things pretty much eye to eye.

I will say, as well, that it equally bothers me that so much of what professional archaeologists do is also lost to the public.

During my time in the field, part of what I did was try to go back twenty or thirty years to reassess material from previous archaeological digs. What I found, sadly, was that quite often notes were not preserved, artifacts were lost and reports were never written. A good friend of mine, who was one of the best field archaeologists I've ever known, died a few years back with twenty years of reports still in his head that he had been intending to write.

You can go to any university or museum in the country and most likely find the same thing. If they will give you access to it that is. For some reason, many professional consider our common heritage to be their exclusive province. I'm not talking about just site locations either, but rather the data gathered from publicly-funded archaeological digs on public property.

I don't mean to convey the impression that all artifact hunters are good or that all archaeologists are bad. These are just some facts to put some balance into the conversation. To me, there is a greater issue out there of so much information being lost because of the animosity between the two sides.

Dale