GaPA stands for Georgians for Preservation Action. This organization, according to their webpage, “is the statewide coordinating council for historic preservation advocacy.”

Now, GaPA has a blog! Follow this blog keep up with breaking news regarding legislative sessions, budget proposals, etc. by checking this blog. The blog includes information about both state and federal bills, issues, and funding.

GaPA was founded in 1987, and seeks to mobilize grassroots preservation efforts around the state. Since its founding, GaPA has been coordinated by The Georgia Trust. The leadership of the SGA has worked with both The Georgia Trust and GaPA on state legislative issues.

Membership in GaPA is free, although they do seek donations to cover their expenses. You do not have to be a member of GaPA to read their blog!

Archaeological sites contain irreplaceable information. Sites are nonrenewable and finite. They can only be excavated once. There is no second chance to recover the important information concealed in the soil. Our precious hidden heritage is vulnerable to erosion and deliberate destruction. Consider the following—Augusta Archaeological Society President John Arena writes with unfortunate news:

A few years ago the Archaeological Conservancy purchased Stallings Island, filled in looters pits, put goats and donkeys placed on the island to control the vegetation, and put a fence around the mound. The Archaeological Conservancy then approached the Augusta Archaeological Society and asked us if we would be site stewards for Stallings Island. Since then, we have periodically inspected the island to check on the animals and also check for looting. AAS member Bobby Brassell and I recently visited the island and found new evidence of looting. We found a couple of small holes inside the fence and a couple of larger holes outside the fence. This was the first evidence of looting we have found in approximately two years.

Looter pit documented by John Arena and Bobby Brassell in winter 2009/2010 on Stallings Island.

This looting, which is the deliberate destruction of archaeological deposits, is illegal. It is illegal because the private landowner has not given written permission for this ground-disturbing activity.

Private-public partnerships in archaeological stewardship are more common in the US Southwest, where there are vast expanses of public lands, many archaeological sites, and few staff members to oversee the land.

Without doubt, our hidden heritage is difficult to protect. Places that are isolated are particularly at risk to disturbance and destruction. The AAS’s stewardship of Stallings Island is an important undertaking.

Can you think of other practical methods archaeological site stewards can use to discourage looters and be more effective caretakers of our hidden past?

Click here to take a look at Resources at Risk: Defending Georgia’s Hidden Heritage, a special issue of Early Georgia published in May 2001, for more on archaeological stewardship and site destruction.

The Society for American Archaeology, a national organization with over 7000 members, publishes a newsletter five times each year. The SAA offers that newsletter for free via the Internet. Select the issue you want to read by clicking here.

For issues from 2010 on, when you click on an issue name, its pages appear on a reader, and the issue can also be downloaded as a PDF. For issues prior to 2010, your click will initiate a download.

State Archaeologist Dr. David Colin Crass is the new Director of the Historic Preservation Division (HPD) of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the DNR announced on 27 January 2010. Dr. Crass came to Georgia HPD twelve years ago and is a member of the SGA. Dr. Crass succeeds Dr. Ray Luce, who served as Director for ten years, and retired in 2009.

Dr. Crass received his PhD in anthropology from Southern Methodist University, an MA in anthropology from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and a BA Cum Laude with Departmental Honors in anthropology from Wake Forest University. Dr. Crass also serves with the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary.

The DNR press release notes:

During the early years of his career with HPD, Crass established a statewide archaeology education and protection program that emphasized partnerships with local citizens, municipalities, and universities as well as integration of archaeology and historic preservation efforts. As Deputy Director, he spearheaded efforts to make HPD’s business functions more efficient. Crass also established a strong working relationship with the Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns, which works with agencies and individuals to ensure protection and interpretation of American Indian cultural sites.

The SGA looks forward to working with Dr. Crass on goals of preservation, outreach, and education common to both the DNR and the SGA.

Here’s the link to the HPD press release.

Archaeologist Jerald Ledbetter records stratigraphic information to provide context for the looted artifacts and bone.

Burke County State Court Judge Jerry Daniel in January 2010 handed down heavy fines on four east Georgia men who pled guilty to multiple counts related to looting a Late Archaic, Stallings culture shell midden site on the Ogeechee River in southern Burke County, Georgia. The four men were apprehended on private land by Georgia Department of Natural Resources Ranger First Class Jeff Billips and Ranger First Class Grant Matherly in late September of 2009. Two were found on the site with digging tools and fled when approached by the rangers. They were caught and charged with criminal trespass and interfering with the duties of an officer. They initially pled not guilty.

The other two men were arrested the next day when they were observed in the act of digging on the site. They had a number of artifacts in their possession, including a bone tool, several spear points and a shell gorget. One of the latter two men was digging through a human burial when caught. They were charged with criminal trespass, digging on an archeological site without permission and littering, and pled guilty to all counts.

In statements made during the sentencing, Judge Daniel said he knew that important archeological sites in Burke County were being badly harmed by site looters and that he wanted to put a stop to this long-standing activity. He also emphasized that the looters were trespassing on private property, and stealing private property, since archaeological sites (with the exception of burials and associated artifacts) under law belong to the landowner. In an attempt to put an end to destructive site looting the judge levied heavy fines and penalties, which included a $1000 fine for each count, a minimum $7384.00 fine to repair the archeological and physical damage to the site, 12 weekends in jail, community service, three years of probation (which requires a surcharge payment of $52/month) and a ban on attending any type of artifact show. After hearing about this heavy sentence, the first two men then pled guilty to avoid potential harsher sentencing in a trial. The three men who live outside of Burke County (one is from Swainsboro and two are from Metter) were banned from Burke County for three years.

All four men have been digging on sites for many years and one acknowledged that he has dug on many sites on the Ogeechee River acknowledged selling artifacts.

Testifying at the sentencing were State Archaeologist Dr. David Crass and Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns (GCAIC) archaeologist Tom Gresham. Crass requested GCAIC involvement in the case, and Gresham was called to the site in early October to document the site and the extent of the looting. He saw numerous piles of Stallings/Thoms Creek pottery, animal bone and chert artifacts left by the looters, as well as spoil piles containing abundant fresh water shell. After the DNR officers gathered the evidence they needed, Gresham and three colleagues mapped the extent of the looting, calculating that about 290 square meters had been disturbed. They also gathered about 47 pounds of bone, 56 pounds of stone artifacts and 82 pounds of pottery. This material is now being analyzed by Jerald Ledbetter and Lisa O’Steen so that some scientific value can be salvaged from the site. The site dates to the Stallings and Thoms Creek cultures of the Late Archaic period, which spans a critical time in Georgia prehistory, from about 3500 to 4000 years ago. This was a time when Indians in the Southeast were becoming more sedentary and began heavily exploiting freshwater shell fish.

Dr. Crass told Judge Daniel that Burke County contains some of the most important Archaic Period sites in Georgia, and that DNR believes an educated and caring private landowner is often the best protection for such sites. He also pointed out that there is an important distinction to be made between wholesale digging and casual surface collecting, and that DNR (and Georgia code) recognizes this distinction.

The Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns actively supported the efforts of DNR’s Law Enforcement Division to prosecute the case and rectify the damage to the site and to the human burials. Although the Council was disappointed that felony charges of burial disturbance were not brought, it was explained that misdemeanor convictions and appropriate penalties in State Court were a better bet than the uncertain outcome of a felony charge in Superior Court.

Tom Gresham notes that these sentences were largely a result of several actions taken by the archeological community in the past two decades. The principal charge was excavating on a site without written permission of the landowner and without notifying DNR. This law was proposed by archeologists in 1993 to allow prosecution without requiring the landowner to press charges. Additionally, the DNR rangers had been trained and sensitized to the problem of site looting and were very effective in gathering evidence and presenting a strong case. Dr. Crass lauded the two rangers and their colleagues, Sergeant Max Boswell and Captain Thomas Barnard, saying that they handled the case with high professionalism.

Third, it is likely that a long running campaign by archaeologists to inform the public about the harm that site looting does to all Georgians created the atmosphere for harsher sentencing.

Society for Georgia Archaeology President Dennis Blanton observes that

the outcome of this case sends all of the right signals: Georgia’s irreplaceable archaeological sites are under siege and require vigilant protection, there is a broad spectrum of our citizens out there that cares deeply about them, and such sites have a critical story to tell about our human forbears. We can only hope that looters will take note and that others will be alert to illegal digging elsewhere in the state.

Tom Gresham remarked that he had never seen such a wide array of punctated and stab-and-drag motifs on the pottery. One sherd alone has five types of punctation. As noted a decade ago by Ken Sassaman, Stallings-like pottery on the Ogeechee River is mostly sand tempered, with very little fiber. Thus, it is more accurately typed as Thoms Creek pottery. Of the approximately 700 sherds collected from the spoil piles, every one is Thoms Creek/Stallings pottery. The animal bone contains a great deal of deer and turtle bone, and only small amounts of bird and other mammal bone. No fish bone has yet been identified. As mentioned, human bone, probably from two individuals, has also been identified.

Illegal digging on shell middens along the Ogeechee River is a long-standing problem, presumably fed by the antiquities market that highly values bone pins often found in shell middens. Ken Sassaman, Kristin Wilson and Frankie Snow wrote an article in the Spring 1995 issue of Early Georgia citing this problem and documenting two looted sites on the Ogeechee River not far from the recently looted site. It is anticipated that the analysis of the pottery, stone and bone from the present site will be described in an article in Early Georgia.

 

Photo by Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press.

Writes John Tierney in the 16 November 2009 New York Times:

Scientists and curators have generally supported the laws passed in recent decades giving countries ownership of ancient “cultural property” discovered within their borders. But these laws rest on a couple of highly debatable assumptions: that artifacts should remain in whatever country they were found, and that the best way to protect archaeological sites is to restrict the international trade in antiquities.

Tierney’s article is titled “A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’,” and discusses the ownership of artifacts traded on the international art market. Some of these items are very well known, for example, the bust of Nefertiti from what is now Egypt, presently kept in a Berlin Museum.

Obviously each nation involved may have laws that conflict, making the ownership of antiquities a complicated matter, with no obvious, undeniable solutions.

If you own a piece of land in the United States of America, do you own the antiquities on that land? Is the same true if that land is in England?

The Society for American Archaeology continues to monitor legislative actions, especially at the Federal level. In mid-June, the Society submitted a letter to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests regarding S. 409, Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act of 2009, also known as the Apache Leap Conveyance bill.

The letter says that the bill:

would direct the Department of Agriculture to accept certain parcels of non-federal land in five counties in Arizona from Resolution Copper in exchange for federal land in Pinal County, Arizona, including Apache Leap and the Oak Flat Campground area, the latter in which mining activity is prohibited. It is our understanding that under the legislation Resolution Copper could then conduct mineral exploration and “block-cave” extraction activities beneath the surface of the Oak Flat and Apache Leap areas.

These lands include known archaeological sites and resources, as well as places significant to several Native American tribes. Additional, undiscovered sites are also likely to be present.

Block-cave mining is a technique where underground extraction is conducted such that surface materials “fall in” because the materials below them have been removed (essentially creating “sinkholes”). This kind of action would destroy and disturb archaeological remains.

The archaeological resources are now protected by numerous federal statutes, including the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and others. Transferral of the land would remove those protections, and has raised the concern of the SAA.

Thus, SAA recommends increased protections and that tribal stakeholders be allowed to continue traditional acorn gathering unimpeded by mineral extraction and extraction.

S. 409 is sponsored by Senator Jon Kyle of Arizona, and co-sponsored by John McCain, also of Arizona. Both Senators are Republicans.

Download a copy of the SAA’s letter from this webpage. It’s called “SAA Testimony on S. 409, the Apache Leap Conveyance bill,” and is dated June 17, 2009.

The SAA was founded in 1934 and has over 7000 members from all fifty states, and nations around the world.

Information about Subcommittee action on the bill is here. Information on the Senate bill is here. The related House bill is H.R. 2509, with four co-sponsors, all Arizona Representatives. Read about the House bill here.

The National Park Service has an e-newsletter called Heritage News you can subscribe to. It’s published monthly, and delivers timely information on events and activities of interest to the national heritage community.

The July 2009 issue has a short article on the arrests of 24 members of a looting network in July. The arrests happened on June 10th in southeast Utah and were widely reported in the national media. According to Heritage News:

The indictments were the result of a two-year undercover operation by the Bureau of Land Management, the FBI, and the US Attorney for Utah. The archeological investigation was one of the largest ever. The defendants are alleged to have stolen and profited in the sale of 256 Native American artifacts, worth an estimated $335,685, from the Four Corners region of Utah. Among the stolen antiquities were decorated Anasazi pottery, a buffalo headdress, sandals, and ceremonial masks.

Another tidbit from this issue of Heritage News: Ninety properties were listed in the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places in May 2009. One was the Boyd and Sallie Gilleland House, a ca. 1929 Craftsman bungalow in Dawsonville. Boyd Gilleland was a moonshiner during Prohibition, and built his still in his house. Most ’shiners put their stills far from their houses and deep in the woods, because they do emit a notable odor. The article says:

Reportedly, Gilleland brewed upstairs while wife Sallie cooked dinner downstairs to mask the smoke and odor of distilling alcohol. The house’s location on Georgia Highway 9, which heads straight into Atlanta, was ideal for the moonshine’s transportation and sale at local speakeasies. Millions of gallons of illicit whiskey from all over north Georgia were transported into the city during Prohibition (1920-33) and even into the 1940s.

Heritage News also lists grant information and publishes a calendar of activity on national legislation, including committee meetings and actions. Perhaps the most useful, however, is a listing of links to stories reported elsewhere called “Heritage in the News” with recent stories you may find interesting.

Read the newsletter online here.

The National Park Service, which is administered by the Department of the Interior, has gathered together an online listing of Federal laws pertaining to archaeology. As they note:

The laws and regulations that govern the preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage developed over the course of the 20th century, beginning with the protection of cultural sites on federal lands. Today, many aspects of the nation’s cultural heritage are recognized, protected, and interpreted in national parks, other public lands, and in communities. Many of these laws are broadly applicable—the Antiquities Act and the National Historic Preservation Act—while others are specific to particular lands or resource types.

Perhaps most historically important of these laws is the Antiquities Act of 1906, which has been amended once. Section 1 states:

Any person who shall appropriate, excavate, injure, or destroy any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity, situated on lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States, without the permis- sion of the Secretary of the Department of the Government having jurisdiction over the lands on which said antiquities are situated, shall, upon conviction, be fined in a sum of not more than five hundred dollars or be imprisoned for a period of not more than ninety days, or shall suffer both fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

Another of my personal favorites is Executive Order 11593, signed by Richard M. Nixon in 1971. Section 1 begins:

The Federal Government shall provide leadership in preserving, restoring, and maintaining the historic and cultural environment of the Nation.

I found a few of the links to be broken, but this list is a good start for anyone interested in Federal laws, policies, and programs that relate to archaeology. Click here to go to the NPS page listing.

On March 11th, President Obama signed the Omnibus Appropriations Act (H.R. 1105), which funds federal departments, agencies, and programs not funded through the regular appropriations process for FY2009, which began October 1, 2008. Note that this signing was nearly half way through the fiscal year to which it applies.

Monies that will at least partly benefit archaeological and historical programs listed here total nearly $500 million, out of $410 billion total for the Omnibus Appropriations Act. That’s 0.12%. Note that additional funds had come to archaeological endeavors through the original appropriations process.

For a certified PDF of the bill, click here (1.2 MB). To read the bill online, click here to go to the link on THOMAS, the Library of Congress webpage for legislative information (named after President Jefferson). The enrolled version is the final text, passed by both the House and the Senate, and signed by President Obama.

The SGA website’s editor has just learned that the Society for American Archaeology expressed strongly worded concerns to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Georgia State Senate about cuts to archaeology program funding during budget negotiations in late March. President Dean R. Snow sent the following letter to the Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor, The Honorable Casey Cagle, dated 27 March 2008.

Dear Lieutenant Governor Cagle:

The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) is greatly concerned about the Georgia House of Representative’s version (HB 119) of the state’s budget for Fiscal Year 2010. This plan would practically eliminate the state’s archaeological program precisely at a time when it is needed most.

SAA is an international organization that, since its founding in 1934, has been dedicated to the research about and interpretation and protection of the archaeological heritage of the Americas. With more than 7,500 members, SAA represents professional archaeologists in colleges and universities, museums, government agencies, and the private sector. SAA has members in all 50 states as well as many other nations around the world.

HB 119 cuts more than $250,000 from the Historic Preservation Division (HPD) of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, eliminating the State Archaeologist and other positions. These reductions would seriously hamper the State of Georgia’s ability to conduct important project reviews and consultations required by federal law. If the cuts in HB 119 were enacted, the state would see a substantial delay in the implementation of stimulus projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Federal agencies are required under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 to consult with HPD whenever federal actions in Georgia may affect historic properties, including archaeological sites. HB 119 will eliminate the review staff needed by the state to respond in a timely fashion.

In addition, federally-required consultations with Native American tribes on federally-funded projects would also be delayed or eliminated, potentially exposing federal agencies to legal challenge, further delaying implementation of needed stimulus projects. A number of legally-required project surveys on state lands would have to be contracted to professional consulting companies, which may incur costs to the state greater than the amount of spending reduced by the legislation. The proposed cuts would also end funding for proper storage of the artifact collections recovered from state lands. These materials belong to the people of Georgia and deserve to be curated in a scientifically sound manner. Finally, the State Archaeologist’s Office provides public education to Georgia’s residents and visitors regarding the state’s historic and prehistoric past. This critical service to the public will be lost if the cuts are allowed to stand.

While we understand that many states are facing difficult fiscal situations due to the current economic situation, the House budget’s proposed reductions to the HPD are counterproductive and will cause the state more problems than it will solve. These reductions will result in a substantial delay in the implementation of badly needed stimulus projects, difficulty for the state to carry out legally-required reviews and consultations, and the inappropriate care and storage of irreplaceable archaeological resources.

We respectfully urge the State Senate to restore full funding for the state archaeology program in its version of the Fiscal Year 2010 budget.

Regards,

Dean R. Snow, President

The recent amendment to one of Georgia’s archaeology laws might affect you, whether you are an avocational or professional archaeologist.

Code Section 12-3-621 has always required a person who is going to dig on an archaeological site to first notify the Office of the State Archaeologist. This recent amendment has made that notification a lot easier. You can send an email from HPD’s website, at www.gashpo.org—see Archaeological Services, and under that click on “Notify State Archaeologist before you dig.” The text of the law is there as well. The other way is by calling the archaeology notification hotline phone number toll-free, at (866) 755-0014. Leave a voicemail message at that number anytime, giving your contact information and the location of your intended excavations.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the State Archaeologist, Dr. David Crass, david.crass@dnr.state.ga.us, (404) 656-9344, or HPD’s Archaeology Program Coordinator, Christine Neal, christine.neal@dnr.state.ga.us, (404) 657-1367.