Collide-a-scape

I’ve already questioned the idea that the decline of Chaco Canyon as a regional center in the twelfth century constitutes an example of societal “collapse,” but there’s another major event in Southwestern prehistory that could conceivably qualify.  This is the large-scale and apparently complete depopulation of the entire Northern San Juan region between AD 1280 and 1300.  This cultural region, which covers large parts of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, is often called the “Mesa Verde” region, after the well-known cluster of sites on and around Mesa Verde now part of major national park, but it also includes many other areas, including the recently designated Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Cedar Mesa/Grand Gulch area in Utah.  All of this vast area, as well as the parts of the San Juan Basin to the south that were still occupied after the decline of Chaco, seems to have been abandoned astonishingly rapidly.  The western parts in Utah were apparently abandoned first, starting around the 1260s, and all construction and other apparent activity came to a very abrupt halt throughout the region by 1280.  In some areas, such as Mesa Verde proper, construction was quite active throughout the 1270s, making the total lack of evidence for construction in the 1280s particularly remarkable.

So what happened here?  There are two main types of explanations, environmental and social, and their relative popularity has varied over the years.  The environmental explanation depends largely on the striking coincidence of the abandonment of Mesa Verde with the so-called “Great Drought” of AD 1276 to 1299, one of the earliest major climatic events to be identified in the tree-ring record.  The near-perfect alignment of the drought with the final abandonment of the area is indeed remarkable, and this explanation has been pretty popular and remains so today, but there is considerable evidence that there was more going on.  For one thing, while all of the Southwest is in some sense marginal for agriculture, within that context the northern San Juan is one of the most productive and reliable agricultural areas.  Indeed, much of southwestern Colorado is used today for commercial farming, largely using dry-farming methods not all that different from those used in antiquity.  The Mesa Verde area gets plenty of rainfall, and while a short growing season can be an issue at the higher elevations, throughout most of the region it is not generally problematic.  Models of agricultural potential based on tree-ring data have generally shown that the carrying capacity of the Northern San Juan greatly exceeded any plausible estimate of its overall population throughout prehistory, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that individual communities would always be able to support themselves on the land they happened to have.

Social factors, then, are probably involved along with the drought.  There is definite evidence for a considerable amount of violence during the thirteenth century in this area, and settlement patterns become increasingly defensive over time.  There is also an increasing diversity in public architecture among the various communities, suggesting that traditional religious or ideological structures may have been breaking down and being replaced by new ones.  A strong tendency toward settlement aggregation, perhaps due to defensive considerations, may have played a role in these religious trends.  Furthermore, all of this may have been influenced or set in motion by deteriorating environmental conditions; environmental and social factors were not necessarily separate things.

So where did the people go?  The general assumption is that they mostly went to the northern Rio Grande Valley, which sees a remarkable increase in its population right around AD 1300, just as Mesa Verde is emptying out.  This is a bit problematic, however, since there is relatively little evidence for people with obvious Mesa Verde cultural traits showing up in the Rio Grande at this time.  This may be because people were emigrating away from Mesa Verde in small groups and assimilating into existing Rio Grande communities, or it may have been because people were changing their cultures as they moved, perhaps abandoning the old social institutions that had been ineffective in preventing the abandonment and adopting new ones that seemed to work better.  It’s hard to say, really, and this is a topic of ongoing research.  One interesting effort recently has been the Village Ecodynamics Project by Washington State University and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, which has used agent-based modeling and other innovative techniques to try to understand the culture history of the Northern San Juan.

Okay, so that’s more or less what happened.  Does it count as a “collapse”?  Let’s look back at Jared Diamond’s criteria for collapse:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

In this case 1, 3, and 4 are pretty obvious.  The Mesa Verde region was totally depopulated, which is about as major a loss of population as you can get.  It’s also very large, and the changes that resulted from the abandonment of the region and the influx of population to the Rio Grande have persisted to the present day; many aspects of Mesa Verde culture notable in the archaeological record were not brought to the Rio Grande, and are not present in the modern Pueblos there.  Since Diamond apparently considers only one of the first two criteria to be necessary, he probably would consider this a collapse, but most other collapse theorists, including Joseph Tainter, consider loss of complexity to be a more important consideration than loss of population, so let’s look at complexity in the Mesa Verde case.

There basically isn’t any evidence for significantly complexity in Mesa Verde before its abandonment or in the Rio Grande afterwards.  Unlike the Chaco case, the villages in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan seem to have had relatively egalitarian social structures, at least economically and probably politically as well.  This is not to say that there were definitely no disparities in political power, but that they were likely masked and subverted by an egalitarian ideology that prevented massive accumulation of wealth and power.  This is the case in the modern Pueblos, where despite some possible inequalities in power and political influence among different clans or societies the overall ideology has enforced a general economic equality.  This seems to have been the case in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan as well, and it could have been in part a reaction to the perceived excesses of the Chacoan era, although it’s noteworthy that a certain amount of Chacoan influence seems to have persisted, especially in the Totah area around Aztec, albeit without much evidence for the economic inequality that marked the Chacoan era itself.

Mesa Verde doesn’t get mentioned in the collapse literature as much as Chaco, although sometimes the two are kind of muddled together incoherently, and for good reason.  What we seem to be seeing at Mesa Verde is a period of societal difficulty that resulted in depopulation and migration, a common pattern in Southwestern prehistory.  While there were some changes in society during the abandonment and migration that make it difficult to tell exactly where the people ended up, these changes don’t seem to have been related to any change in the overall complexity of the society, which remained about as complex as it had been before.

Chaco Canyon is often discussed in the “collapse” literature as a prime example of societal collapse, often tied to climatic change and sometimes to ecological overshoot (although that part’s pretty dubious).  Both Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter use it as an example of societal collapse in their respective books on the subject.  It’s easy to see why; Chaco is remarkable for its impressive remains in a very harsh and unpromising setting, but it’s clear that those impressive remains date to a remarkably short period of time, and that something happened afterward that changed things considerably and led to a near-total cessation of further activity in the canyon.

The human occupation of Chaco Canyon goes back a very long way, but the key developments that made it an important regional center seem to have begun in the AD 800s with the initial building of a few “great houses,” which in that period were large masonry structures similar in layout and construction techniques to the “small houses” in which most Southwestern people lived at the time but much on a much larger scale.  These early great houses, including Pueblo Bonito and Una Vida, show considerable signs of residential use in their earliest parts, and it seems that they were at least initially residential structures.  It’s not at all clear what inspired their construction, but there were similar structures being built in other parts of the region at the time, so Chaco may not have been particularly special at first.  Over the course of the next hundred years, however, something seems to have happened to make Chaco a major regional center, and starting around AD 1030 a building boom in the canyon in which the existing great houses were expanded using much more elaborate techniques and an even larger scale of construction coincided with the construction of entirely new great houses both in the canyon and throughout the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico and beyond into Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.  These “outlying” great houses were mostly placed in existing small house communities, which continued to be occupied, and were connected to the canyon via an elaborate road system.

Over the next hundred years, construction both inside and outside the canyon continued almost without pause, and at the same time a vast amount of material of all kinds was brought into Chaco from a vast surrounding region: turquoise, shell, copper bells, macaws, and other exotic materials, as well as more quotidian items such as pottery, construction timbers, and corn.  Then, around AD 1130, everything seems to have come to an abrupt halt.  Construction of great houses, after a shift around AD 1100 toward a different type of architecture, seems to stop entirely by around 1125, and activity in the canyon slowed to a crawl at that point.  There was probably at least a small population remaining until the depopulation of the whole region in the late 1200s, but it was nowhere near as large as the apparent population at the system’s height.  It is this decline in activity that collapse theorists seek to explain when they look at Chaco as a case study.

So what happened?  There are various theories out there.  Many point to a prolonged period of drought from around 1130 to 1180, which coincides suspiciously closely with the end of major activity at Chaco, as having somehow led to the collapse, although this explanation is somewhat problematic given that earlier droughts, especially a short but severe one in the 1090s, didn’t have nearly the same effects on the system.  Others argue that political, social, or economic instability within the Chaco system itself, whatever its nature, was the main cause of the collapse, with drought perhaps playing a subsidiary role.  Most people agree, however, that Chaco is indeed an example of societal collapse.

But is it?  Let’s look at some of the criteria for defining collapse, using Diamond’s list:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

Measuring the population of Chaco at any time is surprisingly difficult, but given the much lower level of activity after 1130 I think it’s safe to say that there was a major decline of some sort.  The extent to which Chaco was a complex society at all is disputed, but I find the arguments for complexity more convincing than the arguments against it, so let’s take relative complexity as a starting point and see if there’s evidence for a loss of it.  Recall Ben Nelson’s definition of complexity:

Social systems are considered complex if they are comparatively large demographically and spatially, encompass multiple settlements in an integrated political structure, and exhibit horizontal and vertical social differentiation. Other properties associated with complexity are hereditary ranking, production of surplus and its appropriation by an elite, craft specialization, and long-distance exchange.

Large demographic scale is basically the same as population, so that one’s covered.  We’ll get back to spatial scale and settlement pattern later.  There isn’t much evidence for horizontal social differentiation at any point in the Chacoan archaeological record, but the vertical differentiation implies by the elaborate burials in Pueblo Bonito does seem to end around 1130.  Ranking goes along with vertical differentiation, and surplus and its appropriation are controversial and hard to find in the archaeological record, as is craft specialization.  That leaves us with long-distance exchange, which does continue to go on at Chaco, but at a much lower level than before.  So yes, I think it’s fair to say that Chaco became less complex according to most of the criteria that can be used to assess complexity there.

That brings us back to spatial scale, and here’s where things get tricky.  It turns out that the evidence for reduced activity at Chaco Canyon after 1130 doesn’t correspond to a similar reduction in activity in most other parts of the Chaco system at the same time.  Indeed, some areas, such as Aztec Ruins on the Animas River to the north, see a marked increase in activity after 1130, and both Aztec and the Mesa Verde area further north see continued activity on a large scale, indicative of a large population, until the depopulation of the whole area in the late 1200s.  The area to the west doesn’t see such dramatic growth, but it does seem to keep on going without much change after 1130.  Similarly, while the area immediately south of Chaco seems to have been largely depopulated even earlier than the canyon itself, the area further south continued to see activity long after, indeed up to the present day at Zuni Pueblo.  And in many of these areas, especially at Aztec and at the northern and southern extremes of the original Chaco system, the outlying Chacoan great houses seem to have continued to be used, though perhaps not the same way as they were originally intended to be used, long after the cessation of great house construction in Chaco itself.

So it seems that the Chaco “collapse” really only applies to a single location, Chaco Canyon itself, and not to the society as a whole.  Indeed, some archaeologists have interpreted these data as showing not so much the collapse of the system centered on Chaco but a series of changes in it, possibly including a shift in emphasis away from Chaco itself toward Aztec, which replaced it as the center of the system.  Whether or not some form of the system that developed at Chaco continued at Aztec, it’s clear that there were a lot of changes going on in the region during the 1100s, including an apparent movement of population away from Chaco, probably at least in part to Aztec and Mesa Verde.  The lack of continued construction on the scale seen from 1030 to 1130 and the reduced level of trade do seem to suggest that the Chacoan system declined in power and influence after 1130 whether or not it moved to Aztec, but there turns out to be very little evidence of a “collapse” occurring over a large spatial scale, although the changes do seem to persist for a long time.

So what are the implications of this for studies of collapse in general?  It’s hard to say, but I think one lesson is that it’s important to look at these things on the societal level rather than on individual sites or localities, no matter how important or central they seem.  Some Southwestern archaeologists now prefer the term “reorganization” to “collapse” for situations like the changes at Chaco after 1130 and the contemporaneous events in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico.  It’s certainly quit different from the massive depopulation of the whole Four Corners region in the late 1200s, which however doesn’t fit well into “collapse” models either because there’s little evidence of a system on any level larger than the individual community during this period, with the possible exception of a rump Chacoan system operating on a small scale out of Aztec.  That event, which corresponds to another prolonged drought, is of interest in its own right, but this post is long enough already.

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.

I said I would talk about the “collapse” concept while I’m here, so here’s a start.  This topic has gotten a lot of play in the public discourse in the past few years, as the prospect of severe impacts from climate change has led to an increase in apocalyptic doomsaying among certain environmentalists and others as well as a renewed interest in studying past episodes of societal collapse to understand their dynamics and whatever lessons they may hold for us today.  Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse is probably the best-known and most prominent examples of this type of thinking.  I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment on the specifics of it, but it’s gotten quite a bit of criticism from various quarters that I think is important to acknowledge regardless of the merits of Diamond’s argument overall.

First, though, we need to understand what exactly we mean by “collapse.”  What does it mean for a society to collapse?  Intuitively it seems obvious, but there are actually a variety of processes that have been interpreted as “collapses” in both the scholarly and popular literature, and the term is often left undefined.  One place to start is with a 2006 review article by Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist now at Utah State University who, unlike many people who have been talking loudly about collapse in the past few years, is an actual expert on the subject who has been studying it for decades.  In the article Tainter discusses Diamond’s book at length, along with a variety of other primarily scholarly studies explaining various events in the archaeological record in terms of societal collapse.  More specifically, the works Tainter talks about here deal with one type of collapse, that attributed to “overshoot,” i.e., the overexploitation of natural resources through either population growth or increased per capita consumption.  This is the type of collapse that gets the most attention in a modern context, since the idea behind most predictions of doom for our own society is that we are on an unsustainable trajectory due to expanding population or overconsumption.  The overpopulation argument goes back to Thomas Malthus, of course, and its current form owes a lot to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb.  More recently this concept of overpopulation has been variously supplemented or replaced by the idea that it is per capita consumption, especially in wealthy nations like the US, that is on an unsustainable course that will lead to exhaustion of natural resources and, perhaps, societal collapse.  There are other ways societies can collapse, but this is the one people tend to be worried about today, and finding examples of it in the archaeological record has been a high priority for many people.

Tainter’s article goes through a variety of collapses that have been linked to overshoot, and finds most of them severely wanting in evidence.  He is particularly scathing about Diamond’s work, calling his discussion of the Anasazi “a confused muddle” and rejecting many of the case studies in the book as not even really being examples of collapse at all, but rather unsuccessful attempts to colonize areas unsuitable for the subsistence practices of the colonizers, who eventually died or left.  Tainter’s criteria for collapse rely heavily on a loss of complexity, with a “simpler” society succeeding a more “complex” one, and this notion is echoed in Diamond’s stated criteria for collapse as well, although Tainter argues that Diamond doesn’t actually apply these criteria rigorously and consistently.  Instead,

Diamond’s approach was seemingly to find cases where (a) bad things happened, and (b) he could construct a plausible environmental reason. The outcomes, however diverse their nature, are lumped into the category “collapse.”

The one case that Tainter does give some credence to is Easter Island, although even here he notes substantial criticism of the overshoot model of deforestation leading to the collapse of the complex society that developed there.  The cases he finds most convincing as examples of overshoot leading to collapse are the Third Dynasty of Ur and the Abbasid Caliphate, both in southern Mesopotamia though separated by thousands of years.  Even here, though, Tainter sees the collapse as being less a result of “pure” environmental degradation and more a matter of inadequate decision-making by elites in response to problems caused by overexploitation of natural resources, in these cases salinization caused by intensive irrigation agriculture.  In most of the other cases of collapse, the major problem seems to have been climatic or other uncontrollable changes that disrupted systems that had worked fine otherwise, in many cases probably combined with the same problems of poor decision-making.

Now, climate change and poor decision-making are obviously factors that are very relevant to modern-day problems, so in a sense Tainter’s dismissal of overshoot-based collapse theories in archaeology doesn’t matter too much for the relevance of case studies like Diamond’s to the present day.  Indeed, it seems like the overall negative tone of the review article is a function largely of its narrow focus on overshoot specifically rather than collapse in general.  Still, Tainter’s conclusion, surprising even to him, that there are very few documented cases of environmental degradation due to human exploitation leading to societal collapse is an important cautionary note in showing how important it is to carefully analyze the archaeological record before trying to apply its lessons to contemporary problems.

Hi, I’m teofilo.  As Keith mentioned earlier, I will be guest-blogging for him this week.  As he also mentioned, I am currently a graduate student in urban planning (at Rutgers) and have also worked seasonally at Chaco Canyon.  People often see that combination as rather incongruous, but I think it actually makes a lot of sense, and part of what I’ll be doing here this week is trying to show how the two go together.  I’ll especially be focusing on the concept of societal collapse, which is something that gets discussed a lot in both archaeology and planning, at least in certain circles.  Chaco has often been drawn into these discussions as an example of collapse in the archaeological record that can be useful as a cautionary example in dealing with current challenges such as climate change.  That’s reasonable enough, but I think there are some pretty serious problems with the ways some people have tried to bring Chaco into the modern collapse/sustainability conversation.  I’ll be discussing that in more detail in the days to come.

I do have my own blog, Gambler’s House, which focuses on Chaco but also discusses Southwestern archaeology more generally along with a wide variety of related subjects.  Most of the posts I do there are rather different from the sort of thing I’ll be doing here, so I doubt I’ll be doing much cross-posting this week, but if you’re interested in this stuff there’s plenty more to see over there.

Anyway, I’m glad to be here, and I thank Keith for the opportunity to expand my horizons a bit and engage with a different sort of audience than I’m used to.  It should be an interesting week.

I’m in an archaeological state of mind.

This week I will be traveling and working on some new assignments. So blogging will be light–and probably archaeologically related. On that note, I recently came across this neat story that talks about the use of computer modeling in archaeology, and the similar aims and challenges it shares with climate modeling:

Archaeologists can treat the past as a proving ground for calibrating their models. This allows them to refine a model and improve its accuracy before it is applied to contemporary situations by soil and agricultural scientists. “If we can predict the past really well, then that gives us a good chance of predicting the future,” said Barton.

This is similar to the way climate modelers calibrate their models with ancient climate data gathered from sources like tree rings, pollen and ice cores. Reenacting the past and comparing the outcome to what actually happened is one effective way to test a model. Large differences between what the model says and what past evidence says can expose weaknesses in the model.

Some of the most fascinating (and on-going) archaeological modeling is part of the Village Ecodynamics Project, which attempts to sort out the social and ecological factors that led to the depopulation across a huge swath of the American Southwest in the 12th century. The Anasazi cultural collapse is of enduring fascination to scientists and the general public. But I’ve come to suspect that there are connecting dots to a larger story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention, perhaps because the ruins aren’t as visually spectacular or well-preserved.

The issue of human-manufactured biodiversity is controversial. After all, if humans are overrunning nature and degrading the vital ecosystem services that we depend on, isn’t it rather beside the point if we also inadvertently boost biodiversity on some landscapes?

I don’t think so. More environmentalists need to realize that the boundaries between pristine nature and civilization grow fuzzier by the day. The latest example is a new, intriguing study on pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon, published last week in PNAS.

This is the kind of stuff that makes my geeky heart flutter: interdisciplinary research on how ancient farmers engineered their environment in a part of the world that most people today consider primordial nature. Additionally, these findings hold important contemporary ecological lessons, as the study’s abstract explains:

The profound alteration of ecosystem functioning in these landscapes coconstructed by humans and nature has important implications for understanding Amazonian history and biodiversity. Furthermore, these landscapes show how sustainability of food-production systems can be enhanced by engineering into them fallows that maintain ecosystem services and biodiversity. Like anthropogenic dark earths in forested Amazonia, these self-organizing ecosystems illustrate the ecological complexity of the legacy of pre-Columbian land use.

In a nice write-up of the study, New Scientist interviews Doyle McKey, the lead researcher, who says:

Human actions cannot always be characterised as bad for biodiversity. Some might be good.

That’s one of those inconvenient truths that purists who subscribe to the human/nature dualism don’t like to hear. But science has come a long way since the publication of George Perkin Marsh’s seminal text.  The increasing collaboration between archaeologists and ecologists is revealing an ancient world that discomfits doctrinaire environmentalists. (In the American Southwest, I’ve written about one such collaboration here.)

Moreover, as the New Scientist article puts it:

The new study is bound to further fuel the debate over whether most of the Amazon rainforest and the associated savannahs are pristine ecosystem.   “To my mind, the debate has been too black-and-white,” says McKey. “Nature and culture are interacting to produce interesting things, and maybe that is the way this debate should go.”

Seems like good advice to me.

Michael Wilcox, a Stanford University archaeologist, has a new book that takes a fresh look at the Pueblo Revolt. A university press release captures some interesting themes of Wilcox’s post-colonial work in the Southwest, such as this quote directly from his book:

Archaeologists and anthropologists have imposed disease, demographic collapse and acculturation as explanations of discontinuity and cultural extinction. Almost universally written from a European perspective, the mythologies of conquest have helped render Native Americans invisible.

Part of what’s bugging Wilcox is also the focus of a new volume of essays (by a number of scholars, including Wilcox), that challenges the research behind Jared Diamond’s popular and influential tome, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It so happens that just yesterday, Rex over at Savage Minds covered this renewed debate in a detailed post.

Not having read either of the newer books, it’s impossible for me to offer any informed comment on them. But the Stanford piece quotes some provocative Wilcox statements, such as this one at the end:

I may be critical of archaeology, but what I am saying is that it makes sense to do work that is responsive and includes the opinions of indigenous populations. The more that archeologists and Native communities work together, the better things get. I really want this field to do well, and I believe it can be much better. It has to because stories of the past matter.

On this, he’s likely to get little argument from southwestern archaeologists, as many have become increasingly receptive to Native American concerns and oral history. But there’s something about that last sentence–because stories of the past matter–that might set off alarm bells in some quarters. Because, in fact, there are points where science and tribal stories of the past collide.

It’ll be interesting to see how Wilcox and his colleagues reconcile the tension between science and oral tradition. As my recent piece on the contested Navajo history in the Southwest suggests, science can be trumped by the politics of this newfound, well-intentioned sensitivity.

A story I’ve been writing about and following closely since last summer has taken another odd and tragic turn. Here’s a can of worms that’s bound to be pried open:

Ted Gardiner, who had many off-the-record and deep background conversations with The Salt Lake Tribune during the past eight months, insisted he had come to the federal agents on his own to try to stop what he saw as immoral trafficking.

Gardiner was the sole source in the biggest sting operation against pothunters in the Southwest. He killed himself on Monday. Will those “conversations” see the light of day?

Last year, evidence from a DNA test was thought to have solved one of Utah’s oldest cold cases: the 1934 disappearance of Everett Ruess.  National Geographic Adventure published a big, splashy exclusive on the 75-year old mystery. But some observers, most notably Kevin Jones, Utah’s state archaeologist, had reason to question the findings in the story, including the genetic analysis that seemed to confirm the identity of the discovered bones.

In this Salt Lake Tribune story last summer, Jones continued to air his doubts:

A lot of people threw aside their skepticism with the announcement of the DNA tests. They don’t realize that DNA is just another line of evidence, and can yield mistakes as well.

That infuriated the scientists at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, who did the DNA analysis. One of them, Dennis Van Gerven shot back:

Genetic evidence is not just another kind of evidence. This is the kind of evidence that puts people on death row and takes people off death row.

That quote is going to haunt Van Gerven for some time.

Kevin Jones turned out to be right. Here’s my short profile of him in the current issue of High Country News.