This stuff was supposedly illegally excavated — based on the great condition, there should be a plea deal and he turns in the excavators, who would then be employed training the supposed experts on how to locate and extract such great stuff.
They should do like the governments did when they confiscated tons of poached ivory! In RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION they torched the ivory to keep it of the market.
They should take these beautiful artifacts, crush them to dust, mix with asphalt and use as road fill!
(You know I don’t really mean that!)
“This stuff was supposedly illegally excavated — based on the great condition, there should be a plea deal and he turns in the excavators, who would then be employed training the supposed experts on how to locate and extract such great stuff.”
The slowness of the pros is because they care about context. What’s near it? What pollen or burnt wood is with it? Besides I’ll wager that most if not all of these are artful fakes. I recall an old movie where somebody stole the Mona Lisa. He already had a bunch of copies and was busy selling them. As I recall, he kept the original. There have been fake antiques for so long that it was a problem in ancient Rome. If you bought the fake, who would you dare get to authenticate it? This reminds me of when a SWAT team raided one of my tenants and recovered 48 10” pot plants and announced that they were worth $50,000. The authorities tend to exaggerate.