22nd October 2009, 02:06 PM
Jesus, that is grim. Mind you, if it were on private land in the UK and the site wasn't protected could you not just do the same thing? Obviously, if you started advertising 'dig a Roman villa and take home the finds' word would get out pretty quickly and it might be Scheduled (although how quickly is anyone's guess). I did hear of a case recently where the landowner, because he was interested, started machining out part of a site and was effectively stopped because he needed permission to carry out what were judged to be engineering works (I think that was the term) and would thus have to apply for permission, which would then have had an archaeological condition placed on it. Does the US have any planning laws?