Is this legal?

If you have inherited a collection from a family member, or if all of your items were personally found over many years on private property, it is perfectly legal to sell your collection. The only exception would be if any items in your collection are made from endangered species such as eagle feathers. Any human remains or grave items of any kind are not legal to sell. After all, you wouldn't want somebody poking around in one of your ancestors graves and selling their jewelry or bones.

Hunting artifacts on any federal/state owned land is generally considered illegal by federal authorities without prior written permission or permits. However, collecting arrowheads exposed at the surface of federal lands is a matter of some controversy.

In 1979, congress enacted the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. The intent was to criminalize the looting of archaeologically important Native American sites. Unfortunately, some federal authorities interpretation of the act also makes it illegal to pick up surface found arrowheads, which have little or no archaeological importance what so ever. In 1979, then president Jimmy Carter (an arrowhead collector himself) included a clause in the ARPA that specifically excluded surface found arrowhead from the stiff penalties intended for the looters. It is known as the "Carter Clause". Most federal employees will deny the clause even exists, but if you were to look it up under section 6, subsection (b) it states:

"No person may sell, purchase, exchange, transport, receive, or offer to sell, purchase, or exchange any archaeological resource if such resource was excavated or removed from public lands or Indian lands" in violation of the act's general restrictions and permitting requirements."

It then goes on to say:

"nothing in subsection (d) of this section shall be deemed applicable to any person with respect to the removal of arrowheads located on the surface of the ground."

So technically, it is not permitted to take surface found artifacts from federal land, but the penalties under the ARPA of 1979 do not apply.

Here is a link to the complete ARPA of 1979.

http://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/FHPL_ArchRsrcsProt.pdf

While it will have no effect on an old family collection, several states including Oregon and Washington have created laws to make it illegal to pick up any type of artifact from the ground, including any items older than 100 years. So if you plan on hunting for arrowheads in the future, it would be very wise to check the laws where you plan on hunting.

The federal law that applies to ownership of and/or sales of Native American grave goods is known as NAGPRA, or the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. While this law generally does not apply to items I deal with, I felt it was important to mention on my web site, because I am occasionally asked to review items that may fall under NAGPRA.

Projectile points (and lithics in general) are not considered to be grave goods, unless they are documented by the original finder as being found in close proximity to human remains, which is extremely uncommon. Projectile points were tools, and generally were not buried with the deceased.

In a nutshell, NAGPRA was designed to give Native Americans first say on the disposition of the remains of their ancestors. Since becoming law in 1990, museums from the Smithsonian, down to small local museums have been ordered to turn over any human remains and other grave related items to tribes that lay claim to them. As far as the sale of these items is concerned, under section 1170, subsection (a) it states:

"Whoever knowingly sells, purchases, uses for profit, or transports for sale or profit, the human remains of a Native American without the right of possession to those remains as provided in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act shall be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more that 12 months, or both, and in the case of a second or subsequent violation, be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

In my experience, grave items are generally either organic in nature and don't last more than a few decades to a couple centuries, or if there are stone items, they generally are simple beads. There are bone collectors out there, and I want nothing to do with them.

Throughout human history in North American over the last 15,000 years, manufacturing techniques tended to be the same style during various time periods from Paleo to historic times. Determining a tribal affiliation to any kind of lithic artifact is impossible, because Native Americans at any given time were usually making the exact same style of projectile point from coast to coast, regardless of what tribe or clan they were associated with.

Regardless of how long ago your collection of artifacts was acquired, no law is being broken if you decide to sell it, as long as you didn't steal it from somebody else. There are literally tens of millions of projectile points and other stone artifacts in personal collections and museums today. To my knowledge, no Native American tribe has been successful at repatriating a collection of surface found arrowheads. Bones yes, rocks no.