They called the operation Cerberus Action, after a mythical,
hydra-headed canine that fiercely guards the underworld.
The underworld was brought to light on June 10, when federal agents
busted 23 people who allegedly looted archaeological sites in the Four
Corners region of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Ranking among
the largest crackdowns ever against the black market in Native American
antiquities, the sting drew praise from archaeologists—and
outrage from rural Four Corners communities where artifact collecting
is a traditional pastime, and sentiment against the federal government
runs high.
Still, the message broadcast by this high profile
investigation—complete with an undercover snitch—is that
artifact looting on federal lands remains a widespread, serious crime.
“Antiquities theft is an incredible problem,” says Beth Grindell,
director of the Arizona State Museum on the UA campus. “And it’s
virtually impossible to control. There’s a lot of public land out there
and very few police patrolling it.”
Museum researchers do their best to help by actively reporting
thefts or suspicious activities they see in the field. “We work
collaboratively (with law enforcement) as much as we can,” says
Grindell. “When we are aware of things that have happened—when we
are on lands ourselves and see that there are problems—we always
contact the police and let them know about it. But we understand that
they’re under enormous personnel constraints.”
In a given year, volunteers with the Arizona Site Stewards Program
also report more than 200 vandalism incidents and nearly 30 lootings at
archaeological sites across the state. So far this year, there have
been at least 16 serious vandalism incidents in the Tucson region
alone.
Unfortunately, budget cuts have put a strain on the Arizona State
Parks department, which runs the monitoring effort. “But we have
received some funding from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the
Forest Service,” says volunteer coordinator Nicole Armstrong-Best. “And
we’re working on a new Web-based database system, so that we can track
these numbers much more efficiently and effectively.” In the meantime,
she says, volunteer monitors are still maintaining plenty of eyes and
ears in the outback.
Unfortunately, the difficulty of protecting ancient sites is only
exacerbated along the border, where illicit traffic can damage
artifacts in remote areas that are difficult and sometimes dangerous to
safeguard. Perennial funding shortfalls only worsen the problem,
according to a recent report by the Good Neighbor Environmental Board,
which advises the president and Congress on border issues. “Protecting
cultural and natural resources in remote areas in the border region is
extremely difficult,” says the report. “Public land managers have far
too few patrol officers to oversee the lands under their
jurisdiction.
“For example, much of the border area of the Coronado National
Forest in Southern Arizona is remote and unroaded,” it continues. “This
1.7 million acre National Forest has approximately six full-time law
enforcement personnel. Other employees occasionally are placed in the
field, but seldom on the border. … The financial incentives, coupled
with the low probability of getting caught, keep looters active.”
Anemic funding also means that the vast majority of Pima County’s
nearly 4,000 archaeological sites have yet to be analyzed, making it
difficult to know what should be protected.
But the bottom line, concludes the report, is that people need to
learn that these precious remains must remain untouched—except by
trained scientists. “Public education is the key to cultural resource
preservation in the border region,” it says. “If more of the public
understood and respected cultural resources, greater self-restraint
would be exercised; land-holding agencies would find it easier to
justify the expenditures for preservation activities; and
law-enforcement and judicial agencies would be more willing to use
existing antiquities laws.”
Meanwhile, as the Four Corners raids revealed, these artifacts are
at risk not only from sophisticated looters, but also from a culture
that often tolerates and even encourages tampering with sites. As
executive director of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance in
Ogden, Utah, Jerry Spangler witnesses this problem firsthand.
He says visiting archaeological sites and removing artifacts is a
longstanding family activity. That mindset has contributed to local
outrage over the federal arrests, in an area already well-known for its
strong sentiments against the federal government.
Nonetheless, Spangler believes the arrests have set a new benchmark.
“Ultimately, I think it will have a positive effect,” he says, “because
it sends the message that this is a crime, and just because your
ancestors did it, it doesn’t mean that it’s right if the law says it’s
wrong.”
Of course, professionals will likely just recalculate the odds and
costs of getting caught. But at least they’ll have to think twice; in
this case, Bureau of Land Management and FBI agents tapped an informant
purportedly connected in collecting circles. Through him, agents were
able to purchase everything from Pueblo pottery and Hopi kachina masks
to precious Navajo pendants. In total, the informant was given $335,000
over three years to buy more than 200 objects, and recorded the
transactions with video and audio equipment.
The Arizona State Museum played a role in evaluating some of the
seized items, says Dr. Grindell. “We’ve seen them, and we’ve consulted
on it. But they haven’t been turned over to us. They’re property in an
ongoing criminal investigation.”
Still, many other objects seen by the museum are not obtained quite
so dramatically. For instance, she holds up a prehistoric
Babicora polychrome pot, which dates from around 1200 and 1450
A.D.
“This came to us recently,” Grindell says, “and we can’t tell for
sure whether the people who gave us this pot were legally entitled to
own it or not. We really don’t know where it came from. It had been in
this family’s collection for a while, and they turned it over to the
museum.”
In such cases, it’s often tough to ascertain whether the materials
were collected prior to laws prohibiting their removal, including the
Antiquities Act of 1906 or the Archaeological Resources Protection Act
of 1979. That can make tracing their origins even more difficult.
It also means that most scientific knowledge surrounding the piece
is lost forever. “Typically, families have collected for many years,
and they’ve forgotten,” Grindell says. “Or they’ve collected from a
parent or a grandparent. The stuff gets passed along, but the
information doesn’t.”
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.
Hurray for the arrests! I was talking to a friend recently who boasted that he’s taken many, many artifacts from many different sites over the years. I told him he was guilty of theft, and he said he justifies it by saying that corporations raze archaeological sites to erect buildings and other people pick them up, too, so he’s OK. He says he’s preserving “history.” I told him theft is theft and by removing the artifacts, he’s erasing the context and they add nothing to scientific knowledge. He thinks if years from now after he’s gone and someone finds them in his apartment, he’ll be contributing to history. What flawed thinking! My father was a site steward for years before politics involved made him bow out. But hey, we’re Americans, right? We have a long history of destroying history!
The first defendant to be tried in the Cerberus case was given a slap on the wrist by Utah judge Clark Waddoups. On September 17th, he sentenced Jeanne Redd to 3 years probation and a $2,000 fine. Redd looted not only artifacts but human bones and teeth taken from ancestral Pueblo graves were found in her possession. How would you like it if someone dug up your great grandma and put bits of her on display on the coffee table? It looks like it’s not just the public that needs to be taught to respect archaeological sites, it’s the judiciary too! Waddoup’s extraordinarily lenient sentence will only serve to encourage looters. Kudos to local Site Stewards who are volunteering their time to protect our endangered archaeological sites from vandals.