 So the type site for the late Iron Age in Switzerland was discovered and publicized in Europe, at a time in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, when museums in the United States had already begun to acquire material from Neolithic and Bronze Age late dwelling contexts, creating channels of communication between institutions, collectors and scholars that were instrumental in the transfer of artifacts from La Taine across the Atlantic. In some cases, the transactions involved were clearly documented from initial collection to final sale, while in other cases the origins of the material were opaque, the sale of the material labyrinthine, and the ultimate attribution of mystery in need of investigation. The history of these collections provides important insights into the development of archaeological and museological methodology, including and probably most particularly an understanding of the increasing scrutiny and regulation imposed on the sale of cultural patrimony in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our investigation into the La Taine material housed in U.S. museums has two main goals. First, to add to the existing catalog of material from the La Taine diaspora, using the format established by previous catalogs produced by the Bound Historical Museum and the Museum Schwab in Bied. Second, to use European diasporic collections as a proxy for understanding sociocultural and historical developments in the transatlantic spread of prehistoric material culture by exploring and tracing the path from antiquarianism to archaeology and mapping the activities of the various agents involved in artifact collection networks. Tracking the diaspora of La Taine material to the U.S. involves five museums and 1,200 miles from the Midwestern United States to the New England Seaboard between 1857 and 1940. A comparison of the collections and their associated documentation offers a window into historic and intellectual trends at the time of acquisition and highlights the challenges associated with cataloging collections that have vastly different provenance portfolios in the archival record. The La Taine material traveled to U.S. museums along routes established by what Kult-Altofa and others have called lake-dwelling fever, an antiquarian phenomenon resulting from a confluence of favorable environmental and intellectual factors. On the environmental side, extremely low lake levels in the Alpine region in the mid-19th century revealed masses of previously inundated archaeological sites, setting off a frenzy of collecting by amateur and scholarly enthusiasts alike. On the intellectual side, interest in scientific methods posed Darwin and Lyle, along with an antiquarian spirit of academic competition and the multi-language publishing of seminal archaeological works, spread the infection abroad and eventually led to more systematic exploration and publication. Ground Zero for the Lake Dwelling Epidemic was 1854, with the German publication of the first volume of Ferdinand Keller's Omnibus, die Keltischen Fallbauten in den Schweizhazien. Keller's work inspired a passionate interest in European lacustrian sites throughout the western world, setting off the exploration and exploitation of sites by private citizens as well as state employees and scholars. The initial identification of the importance of the site of La Taine, or actually the site complex of La Taine more correctly, occurred prior to the lake-dwelling fever phenomenon in the early 1800s when prospecting along the shores of Lake Neuchâtel turned up a series of Roman-era coins. Knowledge of the site complex appears to have remained mainly local until it was mapped and catalogued in 1857 as part of a larger lakeshore survey directed by Colonel Friedrich Schwab. One of Schwab's trusted agents was a local fisherman named Hans-Lee Kopp, who gathered about 40 iron artifacts near the outflow of the Tzil River that was published by Ferdinand Keller. Part of this material was included in the important collection sent to the Paris World Fair of 1867, which gained the site international fame. Over time, the site experienced what can be categorized as three forms of material exploitation, and again this is certainly not unique to La Taine. The first and most persistent phase was characterized by unregulated competitive looting and collecting, defined here as removal of materials from archaeological contexts with little to no regard for documentation or provenance and an eye mainly toward profit. The degree to which context information was documented varied along with the motives of the individuals involved, and the label attend is known to have been added to objects from other locations in order to cash in on the prestige of the site. The second phase, antiquarian collection and excavation, coincides with the initial activity by Schwab and others who deployed local individuals to prospect at the site while recording basic provenance information. It includes semi-systematic excavations undertaken between 1880 and 1885 by François Borel and Émile Vouga. Finally, scientific excavations began under the direction of William Braf and Paul Vouga in 1907 and have continued intermittently through today. The La Taine collections and U.S. institutions include material from all three phases of activity at La Taine. The current project involves museum-based fieldwork at the Logan Museum at Beloit College in Wisconsin, the Chicago Field Museum in Illinois, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Harvard Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Mass, and some very small collections at the Yale Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian Museum, which were still in process of tracking down. Preliminary research at the Chicago Field Museum and the Logan Museum resulted in the 2008 publication of two master's theses in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Subsequent, museum visits have focused on photographing and scanning documentary materials, measuring and recording objects, and photographing artifacts. The resulting monograph, which is obviously still in progress, will join, we hope, the volumes about the history of the site of La Taine already published with the support of the Swiss National Fund for Scholarly Research, a project initiated in 2007 and directed by G. Belkainen and colleagues. The volume will build on the foundational research conducted by Richard Kubitschek and Aaron Farley on the Field Museum and Logan material, while the processing of the photographs of objects for publication is being carried out by Thomas Homer Ruby. The remainder of this paper will focus on the work carried out at the Field Museum and the Logan Museum. Of the U.S. collections with La Taine material, the largest gulf in provenience credibility exists between the material at the Logan Museum and that at the field. Documentary evidence provides secure temporal and spatial provenance for the Logan-La Taine collection, while the currently available evidence at the Field Museum can at best provide a hypothetical origin at or near La Taine. These case studies illustrate the difficulties posed by post hoc epatriation projects and suggest some ways in which they may be mitigated. The Logan Museum in Beloit provides an especially good example of what a difference detailed field documentation and archival material can make, even when almost a century has passed since the transfer of material. The institution is aware of the origins of the material and has correctly displayed and interpreted it since acquiring it from Paul Vouga himself in 1927. In assembling this object series, Vouga approximated the distribution of object classes documented at the site in the main collection in Switzerland to provide the Logan with a representative sample. Of the 27 items in the Logan collection, the top four material categories are offensive weapons, followed by personal ornament, hardware and tools. I'm just going to go back to this slide for a moment. The transfer of the objects was accompanied by documentation signed by the excavator and can be added with 100% confidence to the overall catalog of materials known to have originated from La Taine. A rather different picture is represented by the putative La Taine material at the Field Museum in Chicago, which illustrates the layers of obfuscation that can affect such late 19th century and early 20th century transfers of cultural patrimony. Unlike the Logan Museum collection, which was known to the scholarly community through Vouga's reports and other publications, and was visited by researchers like De Navarro in 1963 during his inventory of La Taine's swords in museums outside Switzerland, the Field Museum deal was brokered between 1899 and 1900 by several individuals. The archival documentation involves three figures, an obscure German-Swiss antiquarian, Professor J.B. Deasing, a Chicago-German-American businessman, J.L. Kruger, and a major figure in the Chicago business world, Martin A. Ryerson. Ryerson, a captain of industry in Chicago at the time and a major donor to the University of Chicago as well as the Field Museum, provided the funding offered for the complete collection of what was described as Swiss lake relics, including in this case the La Taine material, and ultimately was responsible obviously for the purchase itself, but was not in other ways involved. The overall composition of the objects in the Field Museum La Taine collection is predictably rather different from the Beloit material and from the La Taine material at various Swiss and European museums. For example, conspicuous by its absence is that most characteristic of showy display pieces, a La Taine sword. Even the small collection from the Logan has one, as do the other U.S. museums whose collections came from Bouga. Furthermore, implements and tools make up the largest object category, followed by offensive weapons, all of which are spearheads. The remaining object categories, which include fibulae and coins, are present in much smaller numbers. In effect, the Field Museum La Taine series is really a low-rent version of the typical La Taine museum collection. Field Museum records of the sale and transportation of the material include initial correspondence between various staff members at the field and J.L. Kruger, whom I've already mentioned, about whom we also know very little. We know that he first offered the museum his own modest collection, and then in subsequent letters about around, I'd say, the third or fourth letter, mentions that his cousin, Dr. J.B. Thiesing, had a much larger collection that was also available for sale. In a letter dated April 1st, 1889, which you see here, Kruger suggests that the Field Museum should purchase this collection as soon as possible, because the Swiss National Museum had been given first refusal, and if they bid on it successfully, it would no longer be available to the field. Concluding, quote, what the home museums buy, they keep, and you can see the quote here, and you can also see it in the letter here. That's that section. Indicating, obviously, that there was already some kind of awareness, both on his part and presumably on Thiesing's part, that what they were doing was really going sort of circumventing what were already laws in place about the transfer of cultural patrimony of this type. Thiesing claimed, ultimately, when he became involved in the correspondence, which also led then ultimately to the sidelining of Kruger, who had initially sort of established the contact between the Field Museum and Thiesing. He then is no longer part of the exchange. Thiesing claimed that most of the materials that he was offering the Field Museum had been collected between 1869 and 1874. Dates which correspond with the lowering of lake levels from the first Yoha water correction. The identity of the individual or individuals who actually removed objects from the site that Thiesing subsequently assembled for sale was not revealed in the museum documents. Initially, we considered the possibility that he himself might have acquired this material. Although the fact that he, at one point, references, and I think it's actually in the next letter, individuals that he had to consult before agreeing to a new purchase price suggest there might have been other individuals involved. We were able to establish that Thiesing was a prolific collector working in the area at the time, although he's mainly known for exploring cave sites, including the Haydn Küche in the Kalbrunntal. Meosel was a prolific collector of fossils, some of which are still in the museum and bound, that material he obviously then sold to the Swiss institutions. We know he received a doctorate in comparative linguistics at Rostock in 1867, and in the same year he obtained a position at the Kantonschule, about 80 kilometers north of La Tène, in Prundtrud. So he was in the right place at the right time to either have collected the material himself, which he doesn't admit to, or to having brokered it in some way. So we have a number of questions about this material, ultimately. First, since all the rest of the collection consists really of more standard Neolithic and Bronze Age, like dwelling artifacts, the iron material that Thiesing describes as coming from La Tène and the coins really don't fit that sort of larger collection. So the question is, why did Thiesing include them? Are they really from La Tène, obviously? That's number three. And then who was actually the individual who collected the material? The first question, to some degree, can be answered by looking at the correspondence with the field. Thiesing was also concerned, obviously, with comprehensive series and wanted to make sure that the museum got something which was as sort of comparable to what was available in Switzerland as possible. Answering the second question is obviously more difficult. We are going to need to do additional archival research in bound. It's possible that there might be some documentation there that will allow us to make some suggestions. Now, the third question, again, is kind of still going to remain open until we've had an opportunity to do that. What hasn't helped with the Field Museum material is that there was, from the beginning, a major problem with transcription from the original documents to the eventual inventory that the museum produced. So compounding, obviously, the problematic early acquisition history, we have the fact that the site name was incorrectly recorded in the archives and inventories. And it shows up there as coming from a site called either Catherine or Castine. It's obvious that whoever was transcribing it couldn't read the 19th-century orthography. And as a result of this, really ultimately led to a reburial, you could say, or sort of a resubmersion of this collection. And it ended up in the Field Museum's database as a result in a form that literally would not have yielded to any ordinary search, either for the site name or for the time period. So it wasn't until we were looking for lake-dwelling material there in 2004 that we realized that, in fact, there was a good chance the Field Museum actually had a pretty significant amount of material, possibly from the type site for the entire late Iron Age. So the culmination of our investigation of the Field Museum's Latin material so far leads us to the following deductions. It's almost certainly from a Swiss Iron Age site somewhere in the region, whether or not it's from Latin, as I say, remains an open question. Certainly the material is consistent with those recovered from the site of Latin, again with the exception of the absence of swords. Whether or not we'll be able to establish it as coming from the site, it's definitely a poster child for this period in antiquarian museology and can be added to the list of what De Navarro referred to as Latin apocrypha. To conclude, the history of the international diaspora of archaeological artifacts during the late 19th and early 20th centuries illustrates the rapid evolution of both museums and the discipline of archaeology during a period of major technological developments and landscape alterations that permanently affected archaeological sites. The channelization of the Yura lakes along with the transformation of wetlands into arable land exposed many previously buried or inundated sites. That this process occurred as the antiquarian movement was already in full swing can be seen as both a boon and a bane. The rush to collect artifacts was partly offset by a growing concern with documenting and publishing information about the sites revealed by this changing landscape. The protestations of scholars regarding the daily loss of data to unscrupulous collectors, along with calls for protecting cultural patrimony and the passage of legislation penalizing unregulated artifact collection and the sale of artifacts to individuals or institutions outside Switzerland is part of this phenomenon as well. In this sense, the history of the Field Museum and Logan-Laten collections parallels the emergence of archaeology as a professional discipline. The field material demonstrates how much data was lost in the unregulated collection of such objects and illustrates the importance of uncovering and recovering the socio-historical context of these collections as a means of mitigating that loss. Conventional print publication combined with digital epatriation will allow material from sites like Laten to be compared to what remains at the point of origin for the first time in over a century. Thank you.