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I pledge/affirm that I will not intentionally violate the terms and conditions of any applicable local ordinances and/or federal or state antiquities laws or regulations, as they exist or shall be hereafter amended or enacted; practice buying or selling artifacts for commercial purposes; disregard proper archeological field techniques; or engage in the willful destruction or distortion of archeological data.
Some relevant antiquities laws and regulations:
The Texas Historical Commission
The State Rules and Regulations (This includes the Antiquities Code)
The Antiquities Code of Texas (.pdf)
Why We Have an Ethics Statement
The Ethics Statement is part of our commitment to the conservation of the evidence of the past that still exist
in the soil, in museum collections, and even (sometimes) in cardboard boxes in people's closets.
When artifacts are removed from the ground or historic structures without anybody recording where they came from and what artifacts and
features (ancient hearths, trash pits, traces of building foundations) they were near, much of the information
value of those artifacts is lost. The artifacts still exists, and it may have
artistic or monetary value,
but its usefulness for understanding how ancient people lived in Texas is lost forever.
As archeologists, we're primarily interested in how people lived so we make every effort to ensure that
artifacts are removed from archeological sites along with the full information they contain. Buying and
selling artifacts encourages the taking of artifacts without regard for the information the contain. "Scientific
digging" means using the best techniques currently available to salvage all possible information from
archeological sites to learn about how people lived in the past. We support the honest use of scientific digging
and archeological field techniques, and we do not support buting and selling artifacts.
Archeologists also must take great care to ensure that the information retrieved from archeological sites
along with artifacts (often recorded on paper or computer records) can be kept with the artifacts forever. This means that
we encourage artifacts and their associated information to be placed in official repositories such as museums and universities.
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