During [Utah] Gov. Gary Herbert’s visit to Blanding, one of the poorest regions of the state, residents pleaded with him to keep open the Edge of the Cedars Museum State Park.

The ancestral Puebloan site and official archaeological repository houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Pueblo, Navajo and Ute artifacts. It also is one of five state parks recommended for closure by legislative auditors because of budget concerns.

This would be tragic for archaeology. I doubt Herbert sees it that way.

But because I’ve been to Blanding and this museum, I thought I’d share an anecdote. First, let me return to the Salt Lake Tribune article, specifically the lede:

Residents in the vast southeastern Utah outback that once teemed with pre-Columbian Americans worry the heritage and rich culture of their homeland will be stolen twice: once by black-market American Indian-relic peddlers, and then by the state of Utah.

Heh. My Utah readers have an inkling of what’s coming.

So I was still living in Colorado in the summer of 2009 when news broke of a splashy federal sting operation that collared 24 archaeology looters. Sixteen of them were Blanding residents.

I couldn’t get there fast enough. Here’s the story I ended up writing for Science and an interview I did with an archaeologist who lives in Blanding. You can catch up with those pieces later. Meanwhile, stay with me for a minute.

I got to Blanding a few weeks after the big bust, and just after the town doctor, one of the arrested suspects, killed himself. The mood was tense and angry. The first thing I did when I drove into town was stop off at the Visitor’s Center and Pioneer Museum.  An elderly white-haired man stepped out from behind a desk after I walked in. With a frozen smile and in a croaking voice he asked, “What’s your destination?” It was not an unusual question. Blanding is close to many of southern Utah’s red-rock scenic gems, like Arches National Park.

So I exchanged small talk with the friendly old man. His name was Harold Lyman. But he got tight-lipped when I started asking about the arrests. This seemed understandable, given the recent tragic turn of events.

Later on, I learned that lyman was a pillar in the community. For 50 years he’d been a tireless promoter of southern Utah’s unique tourist attractions. It was Lyman who recognized the economic value of Blanding’s proximity to the region’s recreational pursuits. He had helped re-brand Blanding as the “Base Camp to Adventure.” Lyman also had helped create Trail of the Ancients, a national scenic byway in southeastern Utah that rolls past ancient Pueblo Indian ruins. And he had a hand in establishing Edge of the Cedars Museum State Park.

On May 15, 2009, in recognition of these achievements, Lyman was inducted into the Utah Tourism Hall of Fame. Three weeks later, 150 FBI agents descended on Blanding. As national media stories all noted, the 78 year-old Lyman was among 16 Blanding residents arrested for looting archaeological treasures from American Indian burial sites.

When I visited Edge of the Cedars Museum during my trip, I learned that a good many artifacts housed there were once the ill-gotten booty of Blanding residents, which had been recovered during another notorious federal raid in 1986. In fact, the town’s grave digging history goes back many decades. As Craig Childs wrote in this High Country News article, “pothunting has been a pastime for generations” in Blanding. He described the tradition:

Sunday picnics included shovels. Kids rifled through spoil piles for beads or pretty potsherds, while the older ones dug craters into the red soil. For some it was a competition to see who could find the most beautiful or the most curious object. A painted 11th century olla in perfect condition was worth monumental bragging rights in town. Some sold the artifacts, and some kept them, treasuring them as mementos.

I hope the Edge of the Cedars Museum doesn’t close. As for the Blanding townfolk who are reportedly worried about losing this Native American heritage, well, they’ve always had a special connection to it.

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.

On the other hand, there’s Utah: a bastion of inanity, where that ol timey sagebrush mentality never dies.

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.

until a full and independent investigation of the climate data conspiracy and global warming science can be substantiated.

Mike Noel, a Republican state legislator, elaborated:

This is absolutely — in my mind, this is in fact a conspiracy to limit population not only in this country but across the globe.

Commenters at the Salt Lake Tribune feasted. Here’s a sampling to whet your appetite. One of my favorites:

I hererby surrender my Utah citizenship. I will continue to reside and pay taxes here, but I want to make it absolutely clear that these sub-literate troglodytes do not represent me.

About all those symbolic, nutty resolutions:

Ok let’s see if we can round this all up. So far, the bills offered include exempting Utah from federal firearms laws, exempting Utah from anticipated healthcare, and now, apparently, exempting Utah from physics. All that’s missing for this group is the big red nose and the floppy shoes.

From someone palpably exasperated:

Even if climate change is a hoax like the deniers claim, so what? What if we develop green technology that cleans up the atmosphere, creates jobs, makes renewable clean energy, and makes the world a better place for our children? Why are you know nothing, right wing conspiracy nuts opposed to that???

In Utah, religion is always part of the discussion:

Mormons believe in the most ridiculous, silly fantasies without needing a shred of evidence, yet these Mormon legislators demand “proof” and then ignore the mountains of evidence presented.

The public health issue connection:

If global warming is a total hoax, we are still choking to death along the Wasatch Front on our own fumes this winter. We need to do something serious to stop this. It is already killing people and making people sick. It does not matter whether the thick air is making the globe warmer or not. How much did the carbon companies pay Noel to stage this circus?

There’s hundreds more. Have a read.

In such cases, archaeologists are often working one step ahead of the bulldozer. Excavations are done quick and dirty. Salvage what you can for posterity.

Occasionally, though, a site is so important that even southwestern archaeologists are united (which is not often) in their conviction that preservation should win out over development.  Such is now the case in Utah, where archaeologists are lobbying to keep a proposed rail station in a Salt Lake City suburb from being built over a 3,000 year old “archaic” village site, which was discovered in 2007.

Usually, Utah archaeologists don’t rock the boat. (More on that in a minute.) But preliminary findings from this ancient site reveal the presence of maize. That’s incredible. Most scientists today believe farming didn’t hit the Great Basin until 2,000 years ago. So I can understand why the site is considered so “rare and unique” by members of the Utah Professional Archaeological Council (UPAC). Matthew Seddon, a UPAC member, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the ruins

could reshape our understanding of the development of agriculture in the West.

So UPAC members, who have mobilized on their listserv, are to be applauded for taking the fight to their state legislature. I just wish they had this kind of fight in them when it became clear that Nine Mile Canyon, another rare Utah archaeological treasure, was being overrun by hundreds of oil and gas trucks a day. (To learn how the BLM allowed that to happen, see my story here in High Country News.)

I guess its easier taking on a suburban developer than the BLM or the oil and gas industry.

The federal land plans must be on increasingly shaky ground because the Utah State Legislature has drafted a resolution expressing its strong support for the way BLM handled them.

My favorite line in the Resolution:

WHEREAS, there was no cutting of corners or abridgement of processes in preparing the resource management plans

What a coincidence:  the separate bills are moving through their respective chambers today.

Could this be the stirrings of another sagebrush rebellion?  Last week, Mike Noel, a Utah state legislator (R-Knab), offered to lead the charge.

This aint the 1970s, though. The demographics and electoral politics of the West are much different today (except in Utah, perhaps). So we’ll have to wait and see if there is any appetite for Son of Sagebrush: the sequel.

Today,  a senate committee of the state legislature  is taking up consideration of a bill that

urges Congress to preserve the exemption for hydraulic fracturing in the Safe Drinking Water Act and to refrain from passing legislation that would remove the hydraulic fracturing exemption.

Now why would Utah pols want to do that, just as evidence is emerging that ground water in the West is being contaminated by mysterious drilling fluids used widely by energy companies?

Some sportsmen have expressed worry that animal rights groups will begin giving birth control to deer so their population levels will reach a point that they can’t be legally hunted.

Not taking any chances, the Utah state Legislature passed this bill today, which allows only authorized persons to inject wildlife with birth control.

Now let’s be clear: the mule deer in Utah are threatened on many fronts, from habitat loss to chronic wasting disease.

But animal rights advocates armed with birth control darts?