Is America Allowing Its Past to Be Stolen?

In recent decades, the looting and mining of American Indian artifacts have become serious problems. Archaeologists fear that irreplaceable knowledge about America's historic and prehistoric past is being lost. The federal government has taken steps to try to deal with the problem on federal lands, but commercial looting continues—as does the legal mining of artifacts and destruction of valuable sites on private lands. The major underlying question is: Who owns the past?