The day the SUVs arrived in Waldron, Ind., a rural town 40 miles southeast of Indianapolis, the residents took notice. It was April 1, 2014, and to get to the house on South 850 West you had to drive down a long stretch of flat roads, past orchards and farmland. The line of government cars was easy to spot in this community of less than 700 people.
The caravan pulled in front of a large, if unassuming, rural home. FBI Special Agent Tim Carpenter and cultural anthropologist Holly Cusack-McVeigh got out of the cars, accompanied by other agents and the local sheriff. They walked past a human-sized terra-cotta replica of a Chinese warrior, which offered a first hint of the obsessions of the homeowner inside.
Carpenter, armed with a 100-page search warrant, the largest he’d ever compiled, knocked on the front door. When Don Miller, age 90, appeared, he only smiled. He didn’t seem worried to find federal agents standing on his porch. “I don’t think he believed that what he had done was problematic,” Carpenter told me. After consulting with his lawyer by phone, Miller voluntarily let them in.
Inside, and squirreled away in outbuildings across his property, was one of the largest personal stores of cultural artifacts in the world, according to the FBI. “In my experience dealing with antiquities cases, a large private collection would have been 100 pieces,” Carpenter says. “Then I walked into Don Miller’s house.” He had more than 42,000 items.
In the basement, glass cases and wooden shelves displayed some of what he’d amassed in a makeshift museum. He loved to show off the items that he’d dug out of the ground and gathered over eight decades, regaling friends, Boy Scout troops, curators and reporters with stories of his global adventures. Miller was what professional archaeologists deridingly call a pothunter, an amateur who seeks buried treasure. Amateur archaeology is a thriving hobby in America, with many types of collectors. Surface hunters gather what has leached from the earth or what may have been churned up by, say, farm or construction equipment. Relic hunters tend to use metal detectors. And then there are those like Miller who employ shovels and picks and, in his case, heavy machinery. Digging is when you become a pothunter.