![]() ![]() ![]() “This is a book about the underbelly of archaeology, from both a personal and a global perspective,” he explains. Then he leaves the thing where he found it.Ĭhilds’ “Finders Keepers” is a fascinating book, full of swashbuckling pothunters, FBI raids, greasy museum curators who don’t really care and many, many other characters (including ghosts). He crouches, he walks around, he scribbles in a notebook. ![]() Often he finds artifacts, and when he does, he tries to reconstruct the story of their creation and use. ![]() He grew up on the Colorado Plateau and has written several books about his adventures in the desert. Childs is a desert ecologist who also happens to be a fine storyteller. Whose story? The woman who made the pot? The child whose bone it once was? The man who made the arrowhead? Does it belong to the cultural context - the Pueblo Indians, the Anasazi, the Navajo? Or does it belong to the ecological, geological context?Ĭraig Childs has spent most of his life asking these questions. Maybe you felt a little twinge of guilt when you moved it, maybe all you felt was the desire to keep that object, to place yourself in the story of which that object was itself only a small part. Once upon a time, hiking in the desert, you found an artifact an arrowhead, a piece of a pot, a fragment of bone. A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession ![]()
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