> On 3/7/07, Bill Kearney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > Why don't archeologists ever actually supply longitude and latitude? >> >> That's not hard to explain. They're not interested in J.Random Idiot >> trampling the site and stripping it of archeological value. Or just >> hiding >> it from their fellow researchers so they can publish first. > > I thought that but in this case the earthworks are so large. I was > hoping to see it from space basically.
We're getting better about publishing locations, but often we are restricted from divulging that information by the government or (in the case of a lot of work in North America) by the corporation funding the project, or by Native American interests. There is a problem with people not only digging up the Prehistoric remains, but I've worked on sites that were looted extensively by metal detectorists, such as a Mexican-American war battlefield that had bulldozer scars from where they dug up remains. There's a problem with bottle hunters digging up historic middens as well. So, as much as I personally would like to be open with archaeological site information, it's often out of my hands and there are a lot of archaeologists who have very real concerns with giving out longitude and latitude. In the case of the earthworks, a relatively small amount of work has been done on them, and not a lot of it in English. I have a colleague working on similar earthworks in Brazil and she is doing some basic soil composition research on them just to figure out what the heck they were built out of. Colleen Morgan -- PhD Student Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
