One of the worst cases I've come across was in a major museum institution in Wash. D.C. After 6 - 7 mos of trying to get permission to photograph artifacts that had been removed from a country I was then working for I arrive at the museum to find no one available to give me physical access to the collections. It went down hill from there. When I finally got to the artifacts I found that after 30 years the only thing that had been done with them was to put them in a drawers (they had been removed in 1950s). Some weren't even accessioned, assigned catalog numbers, photographed or described. In addition to the artifacts the museum 'archaeologists' had cut a huge section out of the middle of the shipwreck that the artifacts had come from & shipped the whole thing back to the States where it was promptly lost in the museum. Since the artifacts like the section of ship had come from a marine environment most were in bad shape because no conservation had been done. The 'excavation' was even covered by Nat. Geo. About 2 years after my visit to the museum I heard from the new curator (a personal friend) that the ship section had been found still crated up in a storage facility. And this is in a country with lots of $$? Remember the end of the 1st Indiana Jones movie? It's no joke. I left the field 'bout 10 yrs ago. I hope things are getting better.

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