This is a lesson designed to help you think about the implications of vandalism to archaeological sites. This is a two part presentation. The first is the story of Slack Farms presented by Brian Fagan. The second is a multimedia story of vandalism to archaeological sites in Colombia, South America. The impact to the Kogi people is traced in a series of quicktime clips taken from the video "From the Heart of the World"
The Tragedy of Slack Farm by Brian Fagan
Like most archaeologists, I have, over the years, developed a numbness to the orgy of site destruction that surrounds us on every side. But a recent story about Slack Farm on the front page of The Los Angeles Times has opened old wounds afresh. "Plunder for Profit," Looters Rob Old Graves and History" the headlines leaped out at me with sickening familiarity. But it was only when I read on that I began to realize the full horror of the events at Slack Farm.
The Slack Farm site lies near Uniontown, Kentucky, on land just opposite the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash rivers. The Slack family, which had for many years owned a house and farm at the site, had allowed no digging for artifacts, although on occasion people stole into the corn fields at night to dig illicitly.
Archaeologists had known about the site for years, knew that it was a large, relatively undisturbed Late Mississippian settlement. Judging from surface artifacts, the site dated to sometime between AD 1450 and 1650. The farm was of special importance, for it straddled the vital centuries of first European contact with the New World. Cheryl Ann Munson of Indiana University stresses the significance of the farm: she has studied every other large site of this period both up- and downstream. All the other sites have, Munson reports, long since been ravaged by pot hunters. Yet through last fall, Slack Farm had, remarkably, remained nearly intact, a unique archive of information about Late Mississippian lifeways. 
But no more. With the death of Mrs. Slack the property changed hands. The tenant farmers on the site did make some attempt to keep people from looting the place. Last fall, however, ten pot hunters from Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois paid the new owner of the land $10,000 for the right to "excavate" the site. They rented a tractor and began bulldozing their way through the village midden to reach graves. They pushed heaps of bones aside, and dug through dwellings and the potsherds, hearths and stone tools associated with them. Along the way, they left detritus of their own-empty pop-top beer and soda cans-scattered on the ground alongside Late Mississippian pottery fragments. To day, Slack Farm looks like a battlefield-a morass of crude shovel holes and gaping trenches. Broken human bones litter the ground, and fractured artifacts crunch under foot.
Two months passed before local residents complained about the digging. Eventually the Kentucky State Police stepped in and arrested the diggers under a state law that prohibits desecrating a venerated object, such as a human grave. The looters pleaded not guilty to the charge-a misdemeanor-and now await trial. But whatever the court decides, the 
archaeological dam age is done-and it is staggering.
No one knows how many graves were ravaged, what artifacts were removed, what fine pots or funerary ornaments vanished onto the greedy antiquities market. No signs of the dwellings, hearths and other structures they disturbed remain. A team of archaeologists from the Kentucky Heritage Council, Indiana University and the University of Kentucky, aided by many volunteers, is now trying to assess the damage and record what is left of the site. They are cleaning up the pot hunters' holes, recording what intact features remain and collecting artifact samples to document and date the settlement more precisely.
The ravagers of Slack Farm had no interest in science or prehistory. They were hunting for artifacts for their personal collections and for money. There is a flourishing market in pipes, pendants, whole pots, and other Mississippian grave furnishings. Under these circumstances, pot hunting can be addictive.
Prehistoric artifact prices are staggering, and rising steeply as the illegal supply-especially from overseas-becomes scarcer. A stone ax can fetch as much as $1,000, a pipe up to $5,000. A looter who finds a rare type of Mississippian pottery bottle or an embossed copper plate can name his price, and expect to get it. The marketplace is so hungry for antiquities of every kind that a lively underground market in very high quality forgeries grows daily.
In some ways, one can hardly blame land owners for cashing in on the potential of such hidden treasures. They lease rights to companies to mine their land for coal. Why not lease rights to pot hunters to dig for artifacts? Both coal and artifacts can be regarded as wealth underfoot. But in the case of the prehistoric past the issues are much more complex.
This point was underlined for me when I showed the newspaper account of the Slack Farm tragedy to some friends at a coffee break. I was horrified by some of the reactions. "So what?" shrugged one coffee shop acquaintance. "It's a free country." He expressed what turned out to be a widely held view: it's up to landowners what they do with their property. In my numbness, I had forgotten that many people see nothing wrong with private landowners ravaging the past for profit-as long as laws are not broken.