Artifact raid in Four Corners...

Jun 20, 2009 09:09

I caught a reprint of this piece in the Squaresville newspaper earlier this week and only after I read it did I realize the author was the legendary Western writer Craig Childs. Federal agents busted an illegal ring of southwestern antiquities hunters and dealers based in the Four Corners area. Most of the people busted were respected elderly members of the community. One man, a doctor, freaked out and killed himself.

Click here for the complete story.

Childs is clear about his stance: "Pulling artifacts from the land without documentation and adding them to private collections is a form of archaeological genocide, erasing a a record of a people from a place. He thinks, "... illegal digging has decimated one of the richest archeological regions in the United States, putting thousands of years of human history in private hands."

The antiquities issue has heated up over the years. There used to be an ethos of 'finders keepers.' (and I would say this is not out of alignment when I spent my summer's in Cortez with my grandmother and used to dig in the prairie dog field never sure if I preferred to find fossils, artifacts, or a prairie dog to own as a pet: I never found any). This ethos was based in part on the assumption that arrowheads and potshards weren't worth much. My neighbors even had a skull belonging to some long dead hominid. ('Old Joe' as he was called, was frequently called upon for school service.)

But somewhere there was a shift in what was deemed appropriate. I would say that even growing up it was one thing to find something and keep it, and quite another to sell it on. Now the question seems to be split along several ethical lines: 1. scholarship - should artifacts be removed and labelled and studied by professionals; 2. the human factor, usually related to dignity of indigenous people, and our own kind of superstitious respect for the dead and their belongings; 3. value - ethics always shift when something is considered valuable, whether in terms of power structure (who gets to 'own' the items) or actual monetary value.

The other questions is where the heck are we going to put all the stuff? I have a growing suspicion (totally unconfirmed btw) that the 'scholarship' option is frequently called upon as a kind of compromise. And that the institutions themselves do not have the time, space, or funding (much less interest: pre-Columbian is a notoriously underfunded field) to remove, label, or care for these objects. How many stories have we heard about farmers uncovering amazing archeological finds and being totally ignored by the academy? I'm not arguing on behalf of pothunters here, but I am asking the question.

In any case, I think the piece is fascinating, less because I have a strong opinion on antiquities, (or disagree with the author, whose work I need to explore more fully) than the fact that it marks a bizarre confluence of people and ideas that happens in this landscape.

west

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