Collide-a-scape

There’s been some interesting discussion in the comments to my post on looting and archaeology, including some pushback on the polemical tone and innuendo of the post, which I think is largely deserved and fair.  I wrote the post in a deliberately provocative way, and it’s quite reasonable for people to challenge some of the insinuations in it.  That said, some people seem to be interpreting it as insinuating that collecting artifacts is still a widespread or accepted practice in Southwestern archaeology, which is definitely not the case and not what I meant to imply.  When I said that collecting of artifacts in dubious ways has extended into the recent past and is probably still going on, I meant by a very small number of archaeologists who would be doing so very quietly, and I will admit that I don’t know of any specific examples and don’t mean to imply that I do.  The vast majority of Southwestern archaeologists over the past sixty years would be horrified by the idea, and they are quite right to portray what they do as very different from mere pothunting and collecting artifacts for their own sake.  By saying that there isn’t really much difference between the two activities, I was referring to a common perception from the outside.  Obviously the way I phrased it didn’t make that as clear as I intended; although I did intend it in a somewhat polemical way, it seems to have come across as a much stronger statement than I meant it to be.

There are some archaeologists working in other parts of the world, including Oscar White Muscarella, Paul Barford, and David Gill, who have argued that collectors and museums, along with some archaeologists, have played a major role in supporting looting.  The Southwest is fortunate in that its archaeological establishment, despite the problems with its public image, has been resolute in opposing pothunting and the illegal antiquities trade, which has made it a bit easier for authorities to enforce the cultural heritage protection laws on the books.  What I was trying to get across in the previous post is that despite this admirable public stance, archaeologists in the Southwest still have a problem with persistent public misunderstanding of what it is that they do, and that while occasional cases of active participation in the antiquities market are obviously not going to help that, the main problem is a lack of effective public outreach and explanation of the very real differences between archaeology and pothunting.  Jim Allison chimed in to point out that this is easier said than done, and he’s quite right.  Effective outreach requires time and money, and there is never enough of either.  I don’t have an answer to the question of how, exactly, archaeologists should be doing this sort of outreach.  I’m just saying that it needs to be done, and that archaeologists in all parts of the complicated network of institutions and relationships that constitutes Southwestern archaeology today need to put more effort into figuring out how to do it in order to fight many of the major problems they face.

One of the biggest things to happen in Southwestern archaeology recently was the dramatic arrest in June 2009 of 24 people, most of them from Blanding, Utah, on charges of illegally excavating and selling artifacts from public lands.  The resulting criminal cases have been going on ever since, and they’ve mostly resulted in either plea deals or very light sentences after conviction.  Keith has done some reporting on this issue, including an interesting interview with Winston Hurst, an archaeologist from Blanding who has been put in a very awkward position by these events.  I was covering developments in the cases pretty closely for a while, but then things slowed down and recently I haven’t been keeping as close an eye on the cases as I was before.  One case I did follow with some interest was that of Bob Knowlton, an antiquities dealer from Grand Junction, Colorado.  He initially pleaded not guilty, but, like some other suspects, has recently changed his plea to guilty as part of a plea bargain under which the charges seem to have been reduced to two misdemeanors associated with the sale of a single artifact.  He claims to have purchased that artifact, a “cloud blower” pipe from Big Westwater Ruin near Blanding, from the family of Lamar Lindsay, the archaeologist who supervised excavation of the site,which is on BLM land.  It seems Lindsay, who worked for the state of Utah, discussed the pipe in his report on the site, but it somehow never ended up in the Utah Museum of Natural History with the rest of the artifacts from the site.  If Knowlton is telling the truth, it seems that Lindsay kept the pipe, and after his death someone in his family sold it to Knowlton.

This points to one aspect of these cases that doesn’t get discussed much: the role that some “professional” archaeologists have played, and probably continue to play, in the illicit antiquities trade on both the supply and demand sides.  These days archaeologists tend to portray themselves as “scientists” interested in knowledge as opposed to the “pothunters” who are only interested in material gain.  There’s quite a bit of truth to that characterization in the present context, but the distinction is pretty recent.  Some prominent Southwestern archaeologists of the early twentieth century began their careers as pothunters, and both they and other archaeologists continued to collect antiquities, often without much regard for their origin, well into the recent past.  I think it’s pretty likely that there are still archaeologists out there who do the sort of thing Knowlton is implying Lindsay did, i.e., keep particularly nice artifacts for their own collections, and there are probably even more who buy artifacts from others without paying too much attention to where they came from.

Even beyond that sort of thing, however, there’s really not all that much difference between “professional” archaeology and pothunting, as many Native Americans (and Craig Childs) would be quick to explain.  Both involve digging up artifacts and keeping them; the main distinction is (theoretically) that archaeologists keep careful records of what they find and make that information available to the scholarly community through publications.  Another distinction is that many artifacts from professional excavations end up in museums where the public can see them rather than in private collections, but given that the vast majority of the artifacts actually end up in the back storage facilities of museums rather than on display, this is something of a distinction without a difference.  I do think archaeology is worth doing, and that the information gained through excavation makes an important contribution to human knowledge, but let’s not kid ourselves about what’s really going on here or get up on any high horses.  If archaeologists want to convince the general public that what they do is good and what pothunters do is bad—and judging from both the opposition to archaeology among many tribes and the lenient sentences being handed down to the Blanding defendants, they are nowhere close to convincing enough people of either—they need to start doing a much better job of explaining the difference.  As Winston Hurst explained in Keith’s interview, if it continues to just seem like a dispute over who gets to dig up and keep artifacts, local people or government archaeologists, there’s no way the government is going to win in the court of public opinion.

For a would-be pothunter, I supppose arrowheads are like a gateway drug.  Of course, not everybody becomes a junkie. And most people who become addicted to uncovering a piece of the past don’t become pothunters. That said, see if you can match the quote to the right author below. Don’t click on a link until giving it a try.

1) “I was hooked on this from the first time I picked up an arrowhead as a kid.”

2) “It is in our genes to collect and connect with our heritage. We have an inherent desire to touch and reflect on our past.”

3) “I grew up with a gut reaction to archaeology where an arrowhead in my hand felt warm with possibility.”

The three authors, in no particular order:

A) anonymous Blanding, Utah resident

B) Jane Waldbaum, past president of the Archaeological Institute of America

C) Craig Childs, well-known archaeology writer

Earlier this summer, after federal investigators arrested two dozen residents from Blanding, Utah, for looting ancient Indian burials, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) was quick to denounce the FBI’s conduct. Hatch called the federal pothunting raid “overkill” and asked Congress to investigate the FBI’s sting operation.

A Salt Lake Tribune editorial scolded Hatch for

trying to make cheap political points back home at the expense of federal agents.

Yesterday, Hatch held the CIA to a different standard. As the Salt Lake Tribune reported, he

said the Justice Department’s decision to open a preliminary inquiry into whether CIA officers violated federal laws would put a chilling effect on the nation’s ability to gather intelligence and thwart potential terrorist acts.

The pothunting story in Utah that has captured my attention is actually just one tentacle of a sprawling illegal antiquities investigation across the Southwest. I’ve known this for some time, having talked to various dealers snared in the federal sting operation. None of them have been arrested so their role has gone largely unmentioned in the media.

But there are two newspaper reporters who are connecting the dots, bit by bit. I’ve been following their reporting with great interest over the last month. Their latest scoops can be read here and here.

Now that my CU Fellowship is over, I’ve been out in the field reporting on a bunch of stories, so blogging has been light the last few weeks.

Here’s a piece on the big pothunting investigation I recently wrote for Science magazine, published today (sub req). For those who haven’t followed the twists and turns of this case, it’s pretty fascinating. It’s a rich story that keeps sprouting odd tentacles.

Here’s the latest development, as reported in the Salt Lake Tribune.

That’s the title of this astonishing story in the current issue of Science News. Antiquities trafficking is the bane of archaeology, yet it appears that archaeologists in the Middle East and elsewhere are playing an unwitting role when they employ local laborers for excavations. (The first generation of southwestern archaeologists learned this lesson the hard way, and unfortunately, they’re still paying for it.)

The article reveals an intricate underworld peopled more by anonymous middlemen than mobsters. Few archaeologists or law enforcement officials rarely see

the chain of secretive relationships that turns looted pieces of the past into scrupulously documented keepsakes for affluent buyers.

When a shoe stand in the middle of Jeruselum is part of an illegal, multi-billion dollar market, then Ebay and a famous auction house aren’t your biggest problems.