Sunday, June 27, 2004

Awesome discovery in Utah

I read a great article on Yahoo news about an ancient Indian settlement found in Utah. The rancher who owns the land has been keeping the settlement protected by placing gates at both ends of the canyon that the settlement lies in and has kept this site virtually unheard of. Here in this canyon is a settlement from the group named Fremont, there were standing structures, items like arrowheads and pottery all over the ground and perfectly preseved mummies. I think that it is absolutely amazing that 1) that he was able to keep people out of the area so well 2) was able to keep the place quite to keep the looters out and 3) didn't sell out, by letting some collector come in and destroy the place. He sold his ranch to the San Francisco Trust for Public Land. Now hopefully that basically the whole world knows about this site, that it will still beable to be kept intact. I'm just worried that looters will find a way in. Archaeologists have barely started working on the site yet, they said that there is so much stuff/buildings on the surface that it will take them quite some time to document all of that before they even start excavating.
While on the same subject here is something I forgot to bring up while I was talking about my Honeymoon. We were walking around in the Luxor, and we walked into a store that had replicas of egyptian statues and other such stuff. Well They had about three glass cases full of stuff so I started looking and here these were real ancient egyptian artifacts! One was full of coinage, then the other two were full of small statues, necklaces, braclets and some other small things. Now there were signs in each case saying that these were all purchased legally and that both the U.S and Egypt allowed these artifacts to be put up for sale. But it just seemed wrong, sure maybe these are common items found but there are probably some smaller museums around the world that would love to incorperate some egyption atifacts into thier collection.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just love it when people now a days actually stand up for what they believe in or what is right instead of selling out to the highest bidder. Too bad there are not more people like that in the world today. I too agree it is much better to have things in museums because that way the whole world can appriciate them instead of just the few people who are willing to buy them....of course there are exceptions to every rule.

:) Kate :)