Today's Key Issues Ownership Whole vessel storage at the Anasazi Heritage Center. From the photograph collection of the Bureau of Land Management, Anasazi Heritage Center, Dolores, Colorado. These include federal and state agencies, museums and repositories, archives, tribes, universities, and private land owners. Unfortunately, there is a significant number of collections that have no available information on exactly who owns them and, therefore, who is responsible for their long-term care. Ownership responsibility for land-managing federal agencies is identified in the uniform regulations implementing ARPA and, for all federal agencies and federally recognized tribes, in 36 CFR 79.
Many states have laws that identify state ownership of collections recovered from state lands.
When archeological research is conducted on private land, the land owner has first rights to the collections unless a signed agreement transfers ownership to a responsible party, preferably a repository that meets the standards of 36 CFR Part 79. If the project was conducted on federal, state, tribal or community land through a permitting process, the collection usually belongs to the agency or organization that owns or administers the land. If the project was conducted on private land, the land owner has first rights to the recovered collections unless a signed agreement transfers ownership to the researcher or to a repository set up by the researcher. CRM companies do not own collections generated from contracted projects. The contract agreement should clearly state who owns the resulting collections and has copyright and other intellectual property rights to the associated records.