Who owns our archaeology?

[Unitof1]

physical ownership has to be somewhere. The problem with the current system is that the museums take all the commercial rubbish we produce without justifying why they want to preserve it or attempt to get it used. Maybe if they charged people to use the archives they might not need to charge to deposit it and they might also get a lot more choosy about what they have deposited.
As the university of york has observed

[SIZE=3]Within the archaeological community there are well established procedures and practice for the archiving of excavation and survey research records in traditional media with organisations such as museums. There are scales of one-off deposit charges levied by museums on new deposits. Developers have also accepted the principle of funding archiving costs for archaeological research undertaken in advance of re-development. These charges and the developer funding of the archive costs are based on a single defined charge at deposit. A deposit-based charge therefore should involve a form of endowment for the archive and excludes recurrent annual charges.
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[SIZE=3]a single defined charge at deposit. A deposit-based charge therefore should involve a form of endowment for the archive and excludes recurrent annual charges.
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Whats being left out here is what about the charges that should be made to those wanting to use the archive like museum charges, like smr charges, student fees. If you charge enough then the archaeologists could be paid for their archives.

The well established procedures we have has evolved from civil service based municiple museum archive where the public were taxed to pay for everything that the curators think needs an archaeological intervention. Every intervention I make needs to have something end up in a “museum”. They then want to charge me for what ever it is that they want to do with it. It is frankly daft. I bet if the museums were run commercially it might be different.

[mpoole]

As well as who owns heritage, who has the right to sell it? I see constant listings of unprovenanced items, including beads, being sold online. How does one protect this sort of heritage?

[Unitof1]

possibly the buyers value them and they will preseve them

[mpoole]

What worth are they if collected/scavenged without provenance from sites and sold without provenance? They simply become old bits of rubbish, don't they?

[P Prentice]

As well as who owns heritage, who has the right to sell it? I see constant listings of unprovenanced items, including beads, being sold online. How does one protect this sort of heritage?

i see a necessary compromise whereby scavengers are compensated for providing evidence of context before they can fence their gear