[wl]

> I see Roman coins or Roman era stuff for sale on some FB groups. Frankly, buying them, even if illegal (some countries have laws making anything historical found state property), is not the end of the world provided you don't destroy them.

The problem is that buying these artifacts incentivizes bringing more of them to market. The result is looting of archeological sites. Diggers get their marketable trophies to sell at the cost of destroying the knowledge future archeologists could obtain from the site because it has been jumbled. Recovering looted antiquities is a small consolation as the value of such objects to archeology is severely diminished when they are divorced from their archeological context.

The only ethical thing to do in our current situation, if you value archeology as a method to understanding the past, is not to engage in the antiquities trade and encourage others to do the same.