ABSTRACT
People in the US have been looting prehistoric graves and buying and selling artefacts from those graves since Europeans first arrived on our shores. In the nineteenth century, it was thought that the large earthen mounds which dotted the landscape in the heartland of America – particularly the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys – must have been built by migrating Mexican Indians or perhaps an unknown ‘race’ they called ‘mound builders’. Most people did not believe that the Native Americans they knew could have made such beautiful artwork as was found buried with the dead. It seems as if the attitude of looters was that these were not graves of ‘people’ but of an ‘extinct race’ with no living descendants, so no one cared. (What contemporary looters feel when disturbing skeletons is not known to me, but they are obviously callous about it.) Only in the last fifteen years or so have Native Americans been able to make their voices heard on these matters, and that is changing everything for archaeology and archaeologists, for museum collections, and for dealers and collectors of Native American antiquities.
