Collector Forced to Give up Artifacts

Andy Proffet, 'FBI working with artifact collector to return items' Shelbyville News, April 3, 2014
The FBI on Wednesday was searching the home of a collector near Waldron and assessing the artifacts in his collection which had taken him a lifetime to build, closing off a road in the process.

FBI spokesman Drew Northern called 91-year-old Donald C. Miller of Waldron "an amateur archaeologist," who had collected the artifacts over his lifetime. "Mr. Miller has a large collection of artifacts and we are working with him to help him repatriate those items to the appropriate folks," Northern said. "There are treaties and statutes that deal with repatriation of cultural artifacts, and Mr. Miller is working with us to return those." Northern said he couldn't specify whether the artifacts in question were of native American or foreign origin. "But they are items of great cultural value that Mr. Miller has amassed in his private collection over the years, and the FBI is there, we have our resources meticulously cataloging and collecting and working with Mr. Miller to preserve these items," Northern said. 

The authorities call these items "priceless" and have brought in archaeologists and anthropologists to help catalog the items. They will then decide if any were stolen or need to be repatriated to the indigenous tribes they came from.