I found an indian artifact. It is a fat bellied owl pendant from the poverty point culture. What is it worth?

Question

I found an indian artifact. It is a fat bellied owl pendant from the poverty point culture. What is it worth?

Answer 1

It isn't worth anything since it has no provenance. When people go out and "find" artifacts, then try to sell them, they become virtually worthless because there's no real way to trace where it came from and even if it's an actual artifact and not a fake. The artifact market is so flooded with fakes and copies (and good-quality ones at that) that pieces tend to not be worth very much. Their market value becomes based more on asthetics than on their status as an artifact.

If you did indeed find a pot-bellied owl pendant and can remember the exact location of this find, maybe you should call your state archaeologist's office and register the find. They can't take it away from you (though you may want to consider donating it to a museum for display or study), and registering sites is helpful to professionals who are trying to learn more about the past, and might also prevent the site from being destroyed if developers want to build in the area.

Answer 2

Where did you find it?  If you found it on national land, it wasn't "found" - it was stolen.  The previous poster was right - an artifact is priceless because of the information it can convey about a particular culture.  If we don't know exactly where it came from, we've lost a valuable piece of prehistory.