ANT200H5 Chapter 1: Introduction (p. 1-24)
Document Summary
A great deal of destruction of native american sites and archaeological sites all over the world, is intentional. Sites are destroyed by looters who churn through the ground in their search for objects that have value everything from souvenirs to treasure that can be sold for thousands of dollars. The slack farm site was one of the largest known mississippian sites to have escaped devastation by looters. All that changed in 1987, when the farm was sold to a small group of looters, pocketing ,000 from the deal. Within 2 months, the looters had transformed this preserved monument of native. Destroyed were the remains, once preserved beneath the ground, that could have told us about the lives of the people who lived there. Neither the slack farm site nor any other archaeological site can tell us about all aspects of an ancient society. Looting takes place because there is a market for illegal antiquities.
