Miller may have been an anomaly for the size of his looting, and the extent to which he took bones out of graves, but “Don Miller is not unique,” says Deborah Nichols, who is president of the Society for American Archaeology. Forensic anthropologists were able to determine that the bones primarily belonged to Native Americans. When the FBI left Miller’s house - six days after arriving - they had uncovered more than 2,000 bones, representing 500 human beings, and seized more than 7,000 items. “Pothunters come here and dig, and they have stolen pots and our human remains,” says Leigh Wayne Lomayestewa of the Hopi Tribe, who works as a research assistant in the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Kykotsmovi Village, Ariz. He also took Native American bones - a practice that, historically, has been shockingly common. Miller, however, didn’t just take the funerary artifacts. Pothunters like Miller routinely target Native American graves “looking for the associated funerary goods,” Carpenter explains. Many pieces in Miller’s home came from graves, where Indigenous peoples bury their loved ones with personal items meant to carry them into the afterlife. Some of what he gathered had been unearthed before laws explicitly said he couldn’t, but much of it he’d gotten illegally.Ī ceremonial drum taken from Papua New Guinea. He stockpiled thousands of arrowheads and stone tools and sherds of pottery. Miller’s main obsession was with Native American cultural goods 80 percent of what he took came out of the ground in the United States. The Miller case represented a shift: Increasingly, the Art Crime Team had been looking into thefts against Native American communities and how to repatriate items back to those tribes. The team has repatriated art stolen by the Nazis and returned fine art and antiquities to their countries of origin. Agents often work undercover, posing as experts in the art world or as collectors. Formed in 2004, this unit of 25 specially trained agents seeks to rescue stolen cultural items. One archaeologist brought in by the FBI openly wept when he saw the vastness and quality of what Miller had reaped.Ĭarpenter showed up at Miller’s house that April morning as a member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. He traveled the world buying and excavating, eventually displaying in his basement artifacts ranging from Ming Dynasty vases to ancient Italian mosaics to Indigenous wares from Indo-Pacific regions such as Papua New Guinea. He began digging as a kid and was still going well into his 80s. Miller was one of the most prolific pothunters of his generation. And then there are those like Miller who employ shovels and picks and, in his case, heavy machinery. Relic hunters tend to use metal detectors. Surface hunters gather what has leached from the earth or what may have been churned up by, say, farm or construction equipment. Amateur archaeology is a thriving hobby in America, with many types of collectors. Miller was what professional archaeologists deridingly call a pothunter, an amateur who seeks buried treasure. He loved to show off the items that he’d dug out of the ground and gathered over eight decades, regaling friends, Boy Scout troops, curators and reporters with stories of his global adventures. In the basement, glass cases and wooden shelves displayed some of what he’d amassed in a makeshift museum. “Then I walked into Don Miller’s house.” He had more than 42,000 items. “In my experience dealing with antiquities cases, a large private collection would have been 100 pieces,” Carpenter says. Inside, and squirreled away in outbuildings across his property, was one of the largest personal stores of cultural artifacts in the world, according to the FBI.
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