Unearthed War Relics See Battle Again

Del. Kenneth R. Plum (D-Fairfax) said he got hundreds of angry e-mails and letters for sponsoring the bill. "I was not prepared for what happened to me," he said. "The floodgates opened."

Yes, relic hunters concede, there are the bad guys -- the ones who use night-vision goggles and sneak into protected sites at night to dig things up, or the ones who sell what they find on eBay.

But there are others who have such a passion for the past, particularly the Civil War, that they write books on what they find. Some take photographs or use the Global Positioning System to pinpoint what they dug up. Others have donated hundreds of hours to help archaeologists -- once using their metal detectors to find the site of a Civil War battle near Chantilly that archaeologists had missed.

"I found this is more honest," said William Leigh, a Virginia archaeologist-turned-relic-dealer who is a regular on relic hunts. "These people are in touch with history. Archaeologists could learn from the passion of these people."

Although archaeologists fighting the digs say they understand the thrill of finding an artifact, they point to the excavation of the site of 1876's Battle of Little Bighorn, Custer's Last Stand, in Montana. For more than a century, historians held to the U.S. military's version of events: that Custer rushed in for glory and was crushed by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. They discounted the Native Americans' very different memory.

National Park Service archaeologist Doug Scott, who enlisted the help of relic hunters, spent years painstakingly mapping where each bullet was found. Using microscopic analysis of the firing-pin marks, he traced each bullet to a particular gun and tracked its movement on the battlefield. He discovered that the Native Americans were right. Custer had followed military procedure. He was simply outmanned, outgunned and outfought that day.

"Evidence doesn't lie," Scott said. "History may be accurate. But archaeology is precise."

When a relic hunter dug up 800 cartridges on private property just off the battlefield for souvenirs, Scott was beside himself. "We're missing the part of the battle that tells us how the warriors and the soldiers all got there."

The same weekend as Diggin' in Virginia, 200 relic hunters roamed Fort Powhatan on the James River during the Texas-based North South Hunt, jockeying to see who could mine the most Revolutionary and Civil War goodies. (The same group holds the Grand National Relic Shootout and the Git R Dun hunts in Virginia.)

The fort, southeast of Richmond in Prince George County, was home to one of the few regiments of U.S. Colored Troops. On May 21, 1864, they, along with a Pennsylvania artillery regiment, beat back a Confederate cavalry assault.

How did they fight together? How did they live together? With the artifacts dug up, the answers to those questions are lost.

"That story's gone," said Barbara Heath, an archaeologist leading the fight for the Council of Virginia Archaeologists.