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De La Hoya

The purpose of an archaeologist is to study human cultural activities through the analysis of material remains. The importance of a site remaining uncontaminated and unaltered is vital in the process of reconstructing sites and accurately assessing the material remains. When a site is tampered with, and the context of a find is compromised, crucial information is lost. This is why looting is such a detrimental activity with irreversible results. Looting, synonymously associated with tomb robbing and smuggling, "is the illicit, unrecorded and unpublished excavation of ancient sites to provide antiquities for commercial profit" (Renfrew 2000: 15).
There are many different types of looters, like pothunters or huaqueros, who are driven by financial aspirations. Their intrusion into different sites all over the world has affected the amount of information available and the ability to fully develop hypotheses and understand different human societies. Their stolen objects, however, are not exclusively for private collections; rather, some have found homes in the show rooms of different prestigious museums. Giovanni Belzoni is a good representative of this occurrence and for this reason, councils, investigations, legislative acts, foundations and declarations, such as the UNESCO conference of 1970, The Philadelphia Act, and The Mimbres Foundation have been implemented in attempt to protect the multitude of undiscovered archaeological sites (Renfrew and Bahm 2000: 568-569).
Archaeologists are concerned with the study of human cultural activities through the analysis of material remains. It is an interdisciplinary study as archaeologists do not merely focus on biological or genetic connections of people, but are also interested in their critical thinking how they performed tasks. Material remains, which they also have to analyze and study, are the physical tools that archaeologists need in order to answer these questions. When looters enter a site and think they are...