This innovative casebook explores the emerging law of archaeology the problems of ownership and control presented by buried artifacts, sunken ships, undiscovered sites, museum collections, and forgotten human burials. It combines carefully edited judicial opinions with extensive descriptions of famous controversies that were not litigated, all arranged to illustrate relevant legal concepts in a sequential development. The cases are buttressed by full coverage of relevant federal statutory materials and a collection of representative state statutes. Taken together, the materials present a fascinating opportunity to study the process by which both public and private law respond to rapidly changing political, ethical, and technical circumstances. In the preface to the book, Cunningham defines a "relic" as any object that has survived from the past. As so defined, the term includes things as diverse as individual artifacts, human remains, former sites of human habitation, and monumental ruins. To an archaeologist, each of those objects of antiquity would be viewed simply as different categories within a broad group known as archaeological (or "cultural") resources. To a lawyer, those items retain distinct identities; where the archaeologist strives to envision a cumulative pattern, the lawyer is confronted by a disparate array of objects. Indeed, an integrated, comprehensive body of the law of relics and hence of archaeology simply does not yet exist. Archaeology, Relics, and the Law chronicles the evolving relationship between law and archaeology.
A teacher's manual/update is also available.
