Illegal dig draws probation, fine for Natural Dam man

A Crawford County man was sentenced to five years probation Tuesday for illegally excavating prehistoric bluff shelters in the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest.

David Tudor, 59, of Natural Dam pleaded guilty in April.

Federal agents used hidden cameras to monitor Tudor for four months in 2015 while he dug for arrowheads and other artifacts in the national forest near his home, according to court documents.

They seized 2,831 artifacts from Tudor’s residence, according to a Nov. 16 grand jury indictment. He forfeited those artifacts to the government.

Excavation of artifacts from federal lands without a permit is a violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. All artifacts excavated from federal lands are the property of the United States, according to the act.

In a sentencing hearing Tuesday in federal court in

Fort Smith, Chief U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes III approved the plea agreement, fined Tudor $2,500 and ordered him to pay $12,471 in restitution. Tudor paid the fines and restitution Monday.

Tudor could have gotten a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine, according to the plea agreement.

According to the sentencing minutes, Tudor is “prohibited from entering any national forest in the United States except for necessary ingress or egress on paved highways for purposes of travel to a destination outside the boundaries of the national forest.”

Federal agents learned of the thefts when they received an anonymous email about Tudor posting photos of his finds online, according to court documents. Tudor posted pictures of arrowheads and other artifacts on his Instagram page, where he goes by “dirt0310.”

“Comments the defendant posted on the Instagram account implied he often rode on horseback to various bluff shelters and caves in the Ozark Mountains to collect prehistoric artifacts,” according to the plea agreement. “There were extensive photographs depicting bluff shelters (many of a hand holding artifacts with the bluff shelter in the background), and at least one post contained a comment that he was ‘addicted’ to this activity.”

The camera surveillance began June 3, 2015, and continued through mid-October of that year, according to an affidavit for a search warrant filed Nov. 6, 2015, in U.S. District Court in Fort Smith by Morgan Amos, a criminal investigator with the U.S. Forest Service.

Investigators moved the surveillance cameras from one location to another to correspond with Tudor’s posts on Instagram.

“Tudor has been posting apparently new artifact finds most every week on his Instagram site during the scope of my investigation,” Amos wrote in the affidavit.

Investigators found several locations where Tudor had been digging on federal land.

Still-photo and video-surveillance cameras were installed at the digging sites. The cameras documented Tudor digging for artifacts, according to the affidavit.

Duane Crims, a law enforcement officer with the Forest Service, reported finding arrowheads, bone fragments and pieces of ceramic pots among the artifacts at Tudor’s residence.

Permits to excavate prehistoric sites in the national forest are granted only to people with professional archaeological credentials who have submitted an artifact curation plan, according to the affidavit.

Federal agents learned of the thefts when they received an anonymous email about Tudor posting photos of his finds online, according to court documents.