For decades, debate has persisted within archaeological and critical heritage discourses concerning the position of collectors and finders of archaeological material. Some see collectors, hobbyists, and other amateurs as inherently destructive and their practices as contrary to knowledge generation and stewardship (e.g., Ascherson et al. Reference Ascherson, McIntosh, Renfrew and Vincent2000; Daubney and Nicholas Reference Daubney and Nicholas2019; Gill and Chippendale Reference Gill and Chippindale1993; Goebel Reference Goebel2015; Lecroere Reference Lecroere2016; Temiño and Valdés Reference Temiño and Valdés2015). Others view them as invaluable partners and sources of data otherwise inaccessible to professionals (e.g., Balco et al. Reference Balco, Worick and Shaw2018; Colwell-Chanthaphonh Reference Colwell-Chanthaphonh2004; Dobat et al. Reference Dobat, Deckers, Heeren, Lewis, Thomas and Wessman2020; Douglass et al. Reference Douglass, Kuhnel, Magnani, Hittner, Chodoronek and Porter2017; Pitblado Reference Pitblado2014a; Shott and Pitblado Reference Shott and Pitblado2015; van der Schriek and van der Schriek Reference van der Schriek and van der Schriek2014).
This collection of articles moves beyond an oversimplified debate to focus instead on how to appropriately foster relationships between heritage professionals and responsible private collectors. We stipulate and do not relitigate that ethical collaborative partnerships are attainable, will improve understanding of the past and protection of the material record, and can (indeed, must) respect all—not some—people with a vested interest in the past.
Our perspective aligns with that of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), a professional organization dedicated to research, interpretation, and protection of the archaeological heritage of the Western hemisphere. Following detailed study of the issue by a task force that included issue coeditors Pitblado and Thomas, along with 11 others (Pitblado et al. 2018), the SAA released a statement encouraging and providing guidance for ethical collaboration between archaeologists and “responsible and responsive stewards.”
The SAA defines “responsible and responsive stewards” as private individuals who legally collect or own artifacts and who share archaeologists’ desire to learn about the past, rather than exploiting the material record for personal gain. The latter point is crucial, because it recognizes that collectors are not a monolithic subculture of evildoers. Rather, they collect for diverse reasons that are not necessarily antithetical to archaeological and even Indigenous goals and values (Foster Reference Foster2016). Conflating and construing all collectors as “looters” is unproductive and fundamentally nonanthropological (Pitblado and Thomas Reference Pitblado and Thomas2020; Thomas and Pitblado Reference Thomas and Pitblado2020).
The SAA statement concludes with the following five concrete recommendations for archaeologists wishing to foster such collaborations within the discipline:
(1) Educate professionals about the importance of privately held collections as data sources and of treating collector-collaborators with respect.
(2) Encourage collectors to assist archaeologists in recording and documenting finds.
(3) Urge professionals to capture, archive, and disseminate data from private collections.
(4) Facilitate appropriate curation of privately owned material.
(5) Connect collectors to organizations and trainings to advance their knowledge.
In our call for articles for a guest-edited Advances in Archaeological Practice (AAP) issue, we asked prospective contributors to share case studies that illustrate productive professional–collector collaboration. We explicitly requested that articles articulate with the above SAA recommendations and that they also report authors' experiences developing and implementing best practices for fostering collaborative partnerships.
The response to the call was robust and intriguingly dichotomous. One group of articles focused principally on United States–based cases and reported best practices at the level of individual interactions among archaeologists and others with interests in ancient material culture. The other comprised articles by archaeologists working internationally and focusing primarily on national and other broader-scale policies intended to foster archaeologist–collector collaborations.
After discussions with AAP editors Sarah Herr, Christina Reith, and Sjoerd van der Linde, we concluded that both sets of case studies provide valuable direction for establishing and nurturing productive and ethical partnerships between archaeologists and responsible artifact collectors in global contexts. Therefore, this AAP issue showcases the US cases and recommendations. A second, distinct collection of articles will present the international ones.
We suspect that there are two principal reasons for the bifurcated US–international response to our call for articles. First, some countries outside the United States long ago moved beyond the debate over “whether” to collaborate with responsible collectors, and they have created infrastructures to systematize data collection from private collections. A well-known example is the “Portable Antiquities Scheme,” which was established in the late 1990s and which, since 2003, has encouraged citizens of England and Wales to report their finds to a centralized database operated by the British Museum.
Second, American archaeology is actively wrestling with a colonial legacy of studying the material record left behind by people whose descendants are alive but who are usually not themselves archaeologists. This has created a tension between the two populations that we believe can only ever be resolved through collaboration between archaeologists and Indigenous people. This means that best collaborative practices between archaeologists and artifact collectors must, by definition and like every other archaeological practice, also include collaboration with the descendants of those who produced the record in the first place. Not all archaeologists agree with this idea, of course, and dialogue should continue, but the five coauthors of this introduction (and editors of this compilation) do believe that the most productive collaborations will involve all three groups whenever feasible.
Toward this end, as we solidified the themes for the two issues of articles, we asked contributors to the US issue to address whether and how they had negotiated collaborations that included Indigenous community members. Reflecting broader archaeological trends, some contributors report deeply meaningful relationships with members of descendant communities. Others were operating under circumstances that made such collaborations difficult or impossible. Most of the latter authors, explicitly and from the outset conceived of their work as laying groundwork necessary for increased collaboration with members of descendant communities. Whatever the particulars, each of our writers engages with the subject as a means of emphasizing that tripartite collaborations involving archaeologists, responsible and responsive collectors, and descendants are—in the 2020s—best practice.
The remainder of this introductory article proceeds in two parts. First, we introduce each of the articles, making explicit which of the SAA's five recommendations for nurturing professional–collector collaborations the contribution most concretely illustrates (often, it is more than one). Second, we distill from the entire set of articles a list of philosophical and practical suggestions for those contemplating initiating, nurturing, or supporting relationships among archaeologists, responsible and responsive collectors, and descendants of those who produced the record.
INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND SAA RECOMMENDATIONS ILLUSTRATED
The first article in the collection (Kelley et al. Reference Kelley, Neller and Chief Gover2021) was written by Alan Kelley (Deputy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska), Carlton Shield Chief Gover (PhD student in archaeology; member, Skiri Band of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma), and Angela Neller (Curator, Wanapum Heritage Center and Kanaka 'Ōiwi scholar). The article, which reports the authors' responses to a series of questions we asked about archaeologist–collector collaboration, is the only one not submitted in direct response to our initial call. Instead, it represents an attempt to welcome Indigenous voices directly and explicitly into the ongoing conversation about collecting best practices.
The thoughts that Kelley, Gover, and Neller share speak most directly to SAA recommendations 1, 3, and 4. They emphasize the desire of some tribes and their members to actively seek out data that can be gleaned from private collections, the importance of respecting collector knowledge, and the need to facilitate appropriate curation of privately held material. Kelley and his colleagues (Reference Kelley, Neller and Chief Gover2021) also argue, as we do in this introductory article, that collaboration should unify the perspectives and knowledge of archaeologists, responsible and responsive collectors, and members of descendant communities.
Gail Wertz (Professor Emerita, University of Virginia School of Medicine; Scholar in Residence, American Indian Resource Center, College of William and Mary) authored the second article in our compilation (Wertz Reference Wertz2021). Like Kelley and colleagues (Reference Kelley, Neller and Chief Gover2021), and in keeping with SAA recommendation 3, Wertz emphasizes the importance to Indigenous communities—in the eastern United States in particular—of locating, recovering, and documenting the information in private-landowner collections. She describes her collaboration with responsive farmers to study lithic collections that proved to be powerful sources of data about Archaic period history for nations such as the Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia.
To ensure that the information she gathered would be as relevant to descendants as possible, Wertz consulted with Rappahannock Tribe Chief Anne Richardson and Council Chair Barbara Williams for their input on research questions important for supplementing the tribe's oral history. Analysis ultimately showed that the sites in the Rappahannock River valley were multicomponent, with clear continuity of use over seven millennia. Tribal consultation enriched and broadened this study, even yielding evidence that members of the Rappahannock Tribe invoked to bolster a challenge to an infrastructure company attempting to shortcut its Section 106 responsibilities.
The third contributor to the issue, Bryon Schroeder (Director, Center for Big Bend Studies, Sul Ross State University), offers a dramatically different case study (Schroeder Reference Schroeder and Nayapiltzin2021), but one that proved personally relevant to one Indigenous man. Schroeder's work near the Texas-Mexico border involved no initial consultation with descendant community members for reasons he explains in his current article (Reference Schroeder and Nayapiltzin2021) and that he first reported in Reference Schroeder2017. The project ended, however, having established a direct genetic link between ancestors torn from their resting places by pothunters and Xoxi Nayapiltzin, a local man who offers his perspective on the situation in his own words as part of Schroeder's (Reference Schroeder and Nayapiltzin2021) larger manuscript.
Efforts to retrieve and repatriate Mr. Nayapiltzin's relatives are underway and would not have been possible without Schroeder's collaboration with responsible collectors who helped reconstruct the history—including illicit and sordid details—of his focal site. Importantly, Schroeder also found that to bring his study to an ethical conclusion, he had to muster the courage to gather crucial puzzle pieces from people who are not responsible collectors, by virtue of their belief that it is acceptable to own and display the remains of Indigenous ancestors.
Schroder's (Reference Schroeder and Nayapiltzin2021) piece reveals the power of SAA recommendations 1–4, in that his work generated otherwise inaccessible new data, involved responsible collectors in data collection, and produced findings that he hopes will lead to the repatriation of plundered human remains. It goes further, however, showcasing the power of archaeologists to mediate between those who—for better and sometimes for much worse—possess the material record and those descended from its creators.
Like Schroeder, our next writer Nikki Mills (Reference Mills2021), who at the time of her research was an undergraduate student at Colorado College, did not initially bring Indigenous partners into her collaboration with a couple who had long collected artifacts in Colorado's San Luis Valley. She explains her reasons in her article, and she also discusses her realization midway through her project that she, her avocational partners, the chipped stone record she sought to understand, and prospective Indigenous collaborators all stood to benefit from a more inclusive approach. This led Mills to reach out to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act coordinators for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which in turn led to important conversations that she hopes will inspire more inclusive collaborative practices in the future. It also prompted her to adopt archaeological ethnography as her principal means of data collection.
Mills's (Reference Mills2021) article also vividly illustrates what can be gained when archaeologists have been educated per SAA recommendation 1: they fully understand both what it means to “respect” collector collaborators and just how much can be lost when that respect falls short. In addition, her work reinforces recommendations 2 and 3 in that her collector partners actively assisted in recording, documenting, and archiving the finds in Colorado's site management system. Mills also highlights the importance of avocational training programs, per SAA recommendation 5.
Like Mills, contributors Jason LaBelle (Professor of Anthropology, Colorado State University), Mike Toft (Independent Researcher, Sterling, Colorado), and Marie Matsuda (Archaeologist, PaleoWest, Lafayette, Colorado) report a Colorado case study that focuses on the state's eastern plains (LaBelle et al. Reference LaBelle, Toft and Matsuda2021). As in the San Luis Valley, that land is mostly in private hands and has been farmed and ranched for more than 100 years. That combination, there as in many other places, has facilitated long-term legal collecting by landowners as surely as it forced Indigenous occupants from their traditional homelands. Ironically, as LaBelle and his colleagues point out, that displacement makes collaboration with descendant communities harder while also making the need for collaboration more acute.
LaBelle, Toft, and Matsuda (Reference LaBelle, Toft and Matsuda2021), like many of our other contributors, emphasize the sorts of information that can be gleaned from responsible and responsive collectors, in keeping with SAA recommendation 1. Their case study is unique, however, in making and illustrating the point that collectors who are fundamentally attuned to landscapes—as farmers and ranchers are—can offer contributions that go well beyond data generated from their artifact collections. In this case, collector-collaborator Toft helped LaBelle and Matsuda understand geoarchaeological principles structuring the eastern Colorado archaeological record. Those lessons had eluded professionals constrained by their limited project scopes and modern property boundaries.
The next writer, Mary Whisenhunt (Research Analyst, Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas at San Antonio; Reference Whisenhunt2021) found herself in a situation reminiscent of that of LaBelle and colleagues (Reference LaBelle, Toft and Matsuda2021) when she began dissertation field work in southeastern Arizona's York-Duncan Valley in 2014. There, too, private land predominates and, at least at the start of the project, relationships between those who created the archaeological record and those who descended from them were unclear. Whisenhunt faced a particular challenge in that the residential archaeological sites that would inform her research had all been previously (and legally) excavated by landowners. Consequently, only outreach to the latter could possibly lead to the generation of new data (SAA recommendations 1, 2, and 3).
In a circumstance unique to Whisenhunt's work but illustrative of the sometimes unexpected benefits of collector partnerships, one of her collaborators shared a photo archive of pottery vessels he had collected from several private properties in Arizona. The archive revealed that sherds now visible on the ground surface represent only a fraction of the ceramic diversity originally present at the sites. Had Whisenhunt drawn conclusions without the landowner's records, she would have fundamentally misinterpreted the occupational history of the York-Duncan Valley—an outcome with material implications for future Indigenous collaboration. Whisenhunt also reports that nurturing long-term relationships with collectors created opportunities for her to encourage the preservation of local sites and to stress the importance of artifact context, per SAA recommendation 4.
Working, like Whisenhunt, in Arizona, issue coeditor and article contributor Matthew Rowe and his coauthors (Reference Rowe, Adams, Clark, Cundiff, Bailey and Soza2021)—E. Charles Adams ([retired] Curator, Arizona State Museum), local collaborators Dan Clark and Ricky Cundiff, and University of Arizona PhD students Kassi Sue Bailey and Danielle R. Soza—partnered with responsible and responsive artifact collectors in the Winslow area. With an already strong foundation of Indigenous collaboration having led to robust interpretations of the Ancestral Hopi Homol'ovi site and associated landscape (reflected recently, for example, in the 2021 volume Becoming Hopi [Bernardini et al. Reference Bernardini, Koyiyumptewa, Schachner and Kuwanwisiwma2021]), Rowe and his colleagues sought to harness the power of another group of collaborators—responsible and responsive artifact collectors—to begin to unravel the earlier Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene records of the region.
Their contribution brings into clear focus why, as articulated by SAA recommendation 2, it can be so important to recruit collectors to assist actively in data collection. Incorporating responsible collectors into survey teams paved the way for those collectors to lead their crews to areas that had previously yielded finds of PaleoIndigenous (sensu Steeves Reference Steeves2021) chipped stone artifacts. From a pragmatic standpoint, the process also facilitated access to private holdings that would not have been granted to teams consisting only of archaeological outsiders.
Importantly, the process of training local collectors to conduct formal archaeological survey, in keeping with and illustrating the importance of SAA recommendation 5, emphasized to Rowe and colleagues' collector partners the importance of artifact context. That educational process and the experience of actively reflecting on data lost through artifact removal have been shown to reduce private collecting (Pitblado Reference Pitblado2014b). That is an outcome we believe all who value the past and its material signatures can embrace.
Our next contributors—Kevin Nolan (Director, Applied Anthropology Laboratories, Ball State University), Michael Shott (Anthropology Professor emeritus, University of Akron), and Eric Olson (Adjunct Faculty Member, Cuyahoga Community College; Nolan et al. Reference Nolan, Shott and Olson2021)—sought to understand evolving land use patterns across deep time in central Ohio. To use their preferred geometric morphometric approach to detect and evaluate changes in chipped stone technologies, they needed very large datasets of chronologically diagnostic projectile points. After determining that 97% of collected specimens from their focal area were in private hands rather than public curation facilities—a function of the predominance of private land ownership in Ohio—they determined that project success required collaboration with those possessing the record.
In addition to again reinforcing the importance of SAA recommendations 1–3, Nolan and colleagues (Reference Nolan, Shott and Olson2021) offer the compelling argument that the National Historic Preservation Act, particularly Section 106 and its regulation 36CFR800 (which is the impetus for most work in their study region and many others) require that archaeologists document the material record to the extent that it is reasonably possible to do so. Given the massive preponderance of the record in private—and yet, as they show, reasonably accessible—hands, they conclude that all compliance archaeology should include explicit outreach to responsible and responsive collectors. We agree wholeheartedly.
The next two contributions to this issue (those by John Doershuk, Warren Davis, and John Palmquist [Reference Doershuk, Davis and Palmquist2021]; and Patrick O'Grady, David Minick, and Daniel Stueber [Reference O'Grady, Minick and Stueber2021]) offer detailed case studies in facilitating appropriate curation of private collections. Both nicely illustrate implementation of SAA recommendation 4.
Doershuk (State Archaeologist and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Iowa), Davis (Project Archaeologist, Office of the State Archaeologist, University of Iowa), and Palmquist (Responsible and Responsive Steward, Iowa Archeological Society) worked with members of Palmquist's family to transfer his meticulously documented southwestern Iowa collections to the Iowa State Repository. Doershuk and colleagues (Reference Doershuk, Davis and Palmquist2021) treat in particularly useful detail a vexing issue that numerous curators (e.g., Childs Reference Childs2015) have raised about the donation of private collections to the public sphere: how to pay for it.
For their part, O'Grady (Staff Archaeologist, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History), Minick (a documentary photographer and photojournalist working in news, sports, and archaeology), and Stueber (lithic technologist, analyst, teacher, and consultant) detail an innovative partnership actively forming between the Oregon Archaeological Society (OAS) and interested members of Oregon's nine federally recognized tribal nations. The goal is for OAS members, under tribal guidance, to facilitate the return of privately held collections either to the tribes themselves or to other appropriate public repositories. OAS members seek to redress an organizational history that encouraged private collecting and artifact ownership by ensuring a future geared toward precisely the reverse ethic. They offer a model for doing so that other state archaeological societies may find inspirational.
In the final and in many ways most powerful article of the collection, Dennis Wright (General Manager, AgriNorthwest) describes his journey from private collector to highly educated avocational archaeologist. Over the course of his narrative, Wright (Reference Wright2021) makes it clear just how important it is that archaeologists act as mentors to responsive collectors, connecting them to opportunities and training that advances their knowledge, as counseled by SAA recommendation 5. Wright's article offers other important lessons to archaeologists as well, one of which is that collector motivations, including his own, may differ markedly from harmful stereotypes some archaeologists continue to harbor.
SUGGESTIONS FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND RESPONSIBLE AND RESPONSIVE COLLECTORS
Taken together, the articles in this issue offer a sweeping array of tips for engaging productively with responsible and responsive collectors. We do not try to capture all those tips in this introduction—primarily because we want you to read the articles. But we do wish to emphasize a few important messages that pervade all the contributions to one degree or another. We group those messages here as philosophical and practical suggestions first for archaeologists and then for collectors contemplating the pursuit of meaningful collaborative relationships.
For Archaeologists
We encourage our professional colleagues to approach every project—whether academic, compliance, or community initiated—with a collaborative spirit that conceives of collaboration as involving, to the extent possible, all voices with intersecting interests in the past and its material record. Embrace the opportunity to act as mediators who can facilitate conversations among people possessing the material record, those whose ancestors created the record, and others with a legitimate interest in the earliest occupations of the Western hemisphere. Relationships among those groups are often fraught, and the only antidote will ever be communication undertaken with humility, empathy, and deep respect.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, please assume that a private collector is responsible or responsive and therefore worthy of respect and partnership. Some archaeologists instead default to the assumption that all collectors are looters. For them, reframing their assumptions may be quite uncomfortable, but we firmly believe it is worthwhile. We recommend using SAA guidelines, the large literature on the subject, inspiration offered by this collection of articles, and the gift of anthropological training to understand the difference between a responsible/responsive collector and a looter. Cultivate partnerships with the former, and consider that it may occasionally behoove anthropological archaeologists to collect data even from the latter (for a fuller discussion of “looters,” see Pitblado Reference Pitblado2014a:389–390).
For those who cannot surmount feelings of discomfort engendered by the prospect of building bridges with responsible collectors, we urge the support of colleagues willing to undertake that work. To one degree or another, we—the coeditors of and many of the contributors to this issue of AAP—have been on the receiving end of personal attacks from a small but venomous minority of archaeologists who categorically oppose collaboration with collectors. Collectors themselves have had it even worse and have understandably erected walls that professionals wishing to collaborate must then surmount. This situation helps no one, and we can do better.
A final point for archaeologists to consider: the articles we will feature in the second of our two compendiums showcase national and other large-scale systems for collecting, archiving, and unifying data from private collections. We do not have such a system in the United States, but one would be valuable. We hope that this collection of articles convinces anyone still on the fence that archaeologist–collector collaboration can be done ethically and inclusively, and that we should consider moving on to developing our own larger-scale data-collection schemes.
For Collectors
Archaeologists, including the five who wrote this article, and the Indigenous people whose relatives created the objects now in private hands will nearly always prefer that private individuals not collect at all. In fact, some Indigenous people, understandably, do not want archaeologists to collect any material at all (see a discussion of this and related points in Shellenberger [Reference Shellenberger2019]). However, most members of both demographics also recognize that whether any of us like it or not, Western legal systems frequently entitle US citizens to own material they find on their private property or had permission to collect from someone else's.
That said, however, we hope that collectors will keep in mind that the past is deep. Laws granting legal title to artifacts found in the United States have only been around for an eyeblink, whereas the personal relationships of Indigenous descendants to the material record are thousands of years strong. Collectors should recognize their extreme privilege as legal stewards of others' material culture and be willing to talk to descendants and to archaeologists (who are also learning this lesson) to figure out together how to best care for and learn from that material.
As we urge archaeologists to do for collectors, we also ask collectors to give archaeologists the benefit of the doubt. Some archaeologists do come across as hostile, even to their own colleagues. We know because we have seen it. But most of us do not (or do not mean to), and we really want to work with responsible collectors. Collectors know things that archaeologists do not—and vice versa. Descendants hold more truths yet. The authors of this collection of articles barely scratch the surface of the sorts of insights we can achieve by working together, and we hope that more archaeologists and collectors will try.
Pragmatically, we ask all collectors to document their finds as thoroughly as possible, as many, in fact, already do. Barring a more detailed collecting method, we minimally encourage using a cell phone app to quickly obtain the exact positions of any find. Take a photograph of the artifact in place and, ideally, leave it there. If artifacts are collected, create a curation system that takes appropriate physical care of all material and that links it to its original provenience. Online guides, local avocational societies, and responsible and responsive archaeologists can facilitate best stewardship practices.
Finally, we urge every collector to contemplate the best possible long-term care for collections. No home setting can provide the protection for artifacts that museums can, so one best-case outcome can be to donate material to a local repository. Another perhaps even better approach is to return material to the descendants of those who crafted it so that they can determine how to best care for it. Archaeologists can help bring about either of those outcomes, as articles in this issue demonstrate.
CONCLUSION
Archaeologists, private artifact collectors, and the descendants of the people who created the archaeological record all have legitimate interests in the disposition and care of that record. Traditionally, archaeologists have viewed their interests as paramount. They are not, of course, and they never should have been. Whether we like it or not, the interests of those three groups sometimes diverge from one another. However, they also intersect, and archaeologists can choose to nurture relationships among the parties at those points of intersection. The articles in this issue add to the corpus of literature showing just how worthwhile that fundamentally collaborative anthropological ethic can be—for the archaeological record and for all the people who care about it.
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge and dedicate this article to the many responsible and responsive artifact collectors who appreciate the stories behind the artifacts they find and are willing to share them with others. We note that no permits were needed to synthesize the research reported in this introduction.
Data Availability Statement
Research for this article did not generate new archaeological datasets.
Open access
