So, presuming you're an archaeologist and know how to quickly-and-efficiently extract and catalogue artifacts without damaging them; and presuming the country that the site belongs to has no governmental body or NGO willing to protect the site; then you may as well book the first plane ticket there, rush in, (carefully) pick up everything of value, box it all up and ship it to a museum—any museum—where it will be put under glass until the significance of the artifacts can be understood.
If the locals want their history, their museum can get it back from your museum. Until then, it'll at least be protected from ending up in some foreigner's Spanish class.
The context of an artifact is its position in the site relative to everything else, and it's incredibly important. A stone flake by itself tells you a little, but a stone flake next to a core by a fire with carbonized bones in it tells you a lot more about the people who lived there. This is why archaeological digs painstakingly record the position and orientation of everything they find, in addition to soil features, etc. that might reveal even more. If you see an artifact in a museum that is from an archaeological dig, there's a book in an archive somewhere that has a drawing of the level in which it was found that gives its orientation and position relative to a datum. You could return to the dig and place the artifact in precisely the same location that it was found in using this data.
Archaeology is an evolving discipline, and better ways of extracting additional information from digs with new methods are being found all the time. For this reason, most major digs do not cover 100% of the site. It's considered good practice to leave some of the site undisturbed so that future archaeologists can apply yet-to-be-invented techniques to the site to reveal more than is presently possible.
So, by scooping up artifacts indiana-jones style, you're destroying a huge part of the information that they might have revealed. Is it better than looters digging the place up? Perhaps, but only just barely. It's a highly destructive, unethical act. It's like justifying a smash-and-grab because there's a riot going on and you happen to be slightly more needy than most. There's a small chance that looters won't find the site or that a government will decide to protect it in time, and it's better to take that chance than it is to loot the place and ensure the site is destroyed.
> In 1856, General Alexander Cunningham, later director general of the archaeological survey of northern India, visited Harappa where the British engineers John and William Brunton were laying the East Indian Railway Company line connecting the cities of Karachi and Lahore. John wrote: "I was much exercised in my mind how we were to get ballast for the line of the railway". They were told of an ancient ruined city near the lines, called Brahminabad. Visiting the city, he found it full of hard well-burnt bricks, and, "convinced that there was a grand quarry for the ballast I wanted", the city of Brahminabad was reduced to ballast.
go take a look at any bigger western museum. in most, most of the artifacts are foreign and no way they are willingly giving them back. if that would be the case, for example maybe 80% of the Louvre in Paris would be plain empty
>It still had dirt inside of it
This is probably because I am Australian but this jumped out at me. Australia is free of many parasites, pests, diseases etc that are common in the rest of the world. This is maintained by very strict border controls.
The idea of anyone transporting some random object containing dirt into the country and not having customs officers through a fit is a shock.
And that doesn't even begin to address systematic ideological Moslem terrorist attacks against Palmyra, Bamiyyan, and many other historic treasures.
[0]http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700182158/Overkill-or-jus...
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/524
EDIT: It would appear the "insult" line is a bit of a stretch given how Arabic works, and is perhaps not really that insulting. Yet still, modern scholarship suggests the appropriate transliteration of the word from Arabic is Muslim, not Moslem.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-o...
No kidding. I had a Spanish teacher in high school from Peru who'd bring in artifacts he'd found in caves around his home town, his collection included a human skull he claimed was from an Andean civilization. It didn't dawn on me until years later how ludicrous it was that this man had kept this skull he'd found in a cave and then took it across the world to be handled by kids. It still had dirt inside of it!
Now I wonder how many laws and customs he'd broken, and whether it was a significant enough find that much was lost by him using it as a trophy.