Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
A Crawfordville man was arrested recently by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office on a warrant from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) for causing damage to an archeological site.
Austin M. Smith, 36, of Wakulla County, was arrested on Monday, July 19, based on an incident in the Aucilla Wildlife Management Area (AWMA) near Lamont back in March.
According to the warrant affidavit, FWC officers came upon Smith and two others (a man and a woman) in a red pickup truck collecting rocks at an archeological site in the AWMA.
Upon questioning by the officers, according to the report, the three admitted to having dug on the property and removing debitage, pottery, shards and assorted rocks, as well as digging in the road. Debitage is described as lithic debris and discards found at sites where stone tools and weapons were made.
The three also allegedly admitted to the officers that they knew what they were doing was illegal.
The materials seized from Smith exceeded 110 lbs. of assorted rocks, pottery, shards and debitage. The other man turned over 10 lbs. of rocks and debitage. And the woman turned over a rock that she had picked up at the site.
Once the officers had collected the materials as evidence, they issued the three a trespass warrant for a year from the WMA and released them pending a further investigation.
It was later, while reviewing surveillance footage from the documented site that the red pickup truck was spotted at the archaeological site on four separate occasions, including on the day that the officers stopped it.
Once the area manager estimated that the damage to the site at $5,740, the FWC officers issued the warrant for Smith, charging him with unlawful excavation of an archaeological site, criminal mischief of $1,000 or greater, and violation of wildlife management regulations.
The looting of archeological sites by both amateurs and professionals has long been a statewide problem, reaching epidemic proportions in the early 2000s due to the high prices that artifacts were bringing in the antiquities market, particularly overseas.
At that time, it was reported that Florida had about 20,000 archaeological sites, a majority of which had been looted to one degree or another, according to records.
Archaeologists say that looting not only deprives society of priceless non-renewable resources that can provide a window into understanding past cultures and lifestyles, but it also strips the artifacts of their archaeological context.
Context, according to archaeologists, refers to the placement of the object in the ground in relation to other artifacts and its surroundings. The artifact, experts says, tells only half the story; its placement and the surrounding objects tell the rest of the story. When artifacts are taken out of context, they say, a fuller understanding of the past is lost.
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