Scholarship
larry_cockerham,
Unfortunately, with the economic restraints placed on museums, display space is a premium and most museum collections remain in storage, away from public view. With the vast diversity in types of buttons, or bullets for that matter, these items are generally represented by a small sample and I know of no museum where one can view an example of every type used during the war. Political correctness dictates that firearms are evil things and fewer go on display each year. Add to that the current multimedia museum trend, where slick presentations take precedence over relics and you find a situation where, for example, less than 5 percent of the Gettysburg NPS collection is displayed.
The major fact that makes me a proponent of relic hunting is that the scholarship continues. As I mentioned earlier, relic mapping of sites has provided an amazing amount of information about who carried what and who was where and when. This information cannot be found in existing books or museum displays because until we study the relics at a particular location there simply is no information to share. In my area, bullets and cartridges, a combination of relic retrieval and the intense studying of existing documents by such dedicated scholars as Dean Thomas are correcting errors and misconceptions in all of the published works that preceeded the current crop of publications. I have more bullets and cartridges displayed on my website (
http://www.baymediapro.com/collection) that you can find at any museum, and these bullets, like the ones at every museum, are the result of the efforts of numerous diggers.
I understand your concern about desecrating sites simply for monetary gain, and would like you to understand that nobody dislikes these examples of poaching more than the conscientious diggers. The first element of the "diggers code" is GET PERMISSION!!! Those people that go on private property, or worse, protected battlefields, without permission do not represent the ethics or motivation of the majority of diggers, who take the approach of LEAVE THE GROUND CLEANER THAN YOU FOUND IT. Example, on a recent large digging event at Brandy Rock in Culpepper, VA we disposed of several large bags of trash (and about four tons of iron debris) that was found on the farm during the three days of excavating. We didn't bring that trash into the farm with us, but we sure did take it out.
My main point here is that I hope that you will see that not every mook out there swinging a coil and digging holes is a pirate. Some of us really do care about the history and the people who were there before us.
Just a humle opinion,
TomH