Birdstones, banners, and Uncle Sam

A number of years ago I was involved in the Suffolk County Archaeology Association and attending graduate school at Stony Brook University in Anthropology where I had also earned my BA in anthro. I was researching local history and prehistory and came upon a limited edition (500 copies) of a book published on the "boat stones" of Long Island, New York where this all relates. In it was a map showing where most of these carved stone "bird effigies" were found, on the northern fluke of the "fish-shaped" island, ("Paumonak" it's thought) and attributed to a mounting on water-borne craft, i.e., dugouts, etc., one once at Garvies Point Museum in Oyster Bay, NY was created and rowed across Long Island Sound in an "experimental archaeology" endeavor. These carved stone artifacts are shaped somewhere between a oarlock and bird, many with bulging eyes on the simple form, and often with two holes where they were attached, perhaps to the front of the watercraft. The point of this, is that the volume was published in Colorado, the objects are in collections elsewhere, other than Long Island, to my knowledge, collected singularly, from their origin and appropriately, however, attributed to a location, on a map. I imagine often, antiquities lose their locations, which in the nuclear archaeological chemistry experiments I've been witness to, at Brookhaven National Lab, now run by a consortium of universities, formerly the US Dept. of Energy, make their provenience and provenance hard to establish with certainty, which can cause all sorts of problems over fakes, forgeries and leave national legacies in dangerous doubt. I would rather know the WWII archaeologically researched "beaker culture" than the Adolf Hitler conception of Teutonic history for example, considering all sorts of illegal arts were stolen then. I imagine the more we can now share information on the world wide web the better it might be for appreciation of each others history, although, I think Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that the proliferation of telecommunications satellites might lead to a world-wide "Babel" as assertions of ethnicity and other singularities emphasize separation rather than cooperation.