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Finding The Past

One woman's ancient discovery raises modern issues

By Ken Wright

Found in: | Inside | Politics | Outside |

Found by Hikers!

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This effigy pot (inset) was found by hikers while boulder hoping down a canyon side in Grand Gulch area. This is a very rare Mesa Verde Black on White effigy of a mountain goat; it is also a pitcher. It probably dates to Pueblo II times (around A.D. 1100). James Murray (foreground with case), one of the hikers, and family from Tucson, AZ, assisted BLM rangers and archaeologists in relocating the pot and removing it to safety.

Found by Hikers!

Three hikers spotted this set of three (inset, one is hidden with exposed half washed away) nested bowls. The bowls were eroding out of a deep cut bank about two meters from the top.

Found by Hikers!

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Allen Bernstein and Tracy Dierking of Salida, CO. They found two large ollas (water pots) and one contained seven bone tools. They were married later at the site of their find.

A Brief History of Time on Cedar Mesa

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Utah's Cedar Mesa is a high-elevation, canyon-carved plateau of slickrock and piñon-juniper forest set between the Abajo Mountains, Dark Canyon, the Clay Hills, and the canyon of the San Juan River. Only a handful of people live there today, even though it's popular with visitors for its remote camping and hiking. It is also home to a rich archaeological record of the many peoples who made the mesa home for many millennia.
Nomadic people plied their hunting and gathering trades on Cedar Mesa as long as 8,500 years ago. The permanent population of the area began to boom for the first time, though, with the settling of a people commonly called The Anasazi, a Navajo-language term meaning “ancient enemy” (although the official reference today is “Pre-Puebloan People”).
The Anasazi inhabited the region on and off for some 1,300 years, as the culture changed and adapted to changing influences and conditions. The first Cedar Mesa Anasazi were part of an era called Basketmaker II, roughly A.D. 50 to A.D. 400, a time when the atlatl - a brilliantly simple spear-throwing tool - was the weapon of choice for hunting, and the art of basket making was honed to the level of weaving waterproof baskets. Dwellings in this time were small, above-ground units with roofs of twigs, grass, mud or even rocks. These people also augmented their hunting and gathering with simple crops - corn, squash, and pumpkins - a skill that would be more refined in the Basketmaker III period.
In the Basketmaker III time, A.D. 400 to 750, pit houses - semi-underground structures with walls and roofs - and small farming communities were spread across the mesa and canyon bottoms. Also in this time, Cedar Mesa appears to have been largely abandoned for a long spell, probably because of drought.
The population of Cedar Mesa began to boom again around A.D. 1050. By this time, the culture had changed again, apparently influenced by Mesa Verdean and Kayenta-area cultures encountered during the migration. This era is labeled “Puebloan,” and is marked by pueblo-style buildings, the replacement of the atlatl with the bow, the manufacture of fine pottery and cotton weaving, and the introduction of domesticated beans into the diet.
Cedar Mesa had been abandoned again - the people migrating to the Rio Grande and Little Colorado river valleys - by the end of the Pueblo III period, between A.D. 1150 and 1300, probably again due to a combination of drought and a cooling climate.
For information, history, natural history, “tread lightly” techniques, and other information about Cedar Mesa, visit the Cedar Mesa Project at cedarmesa.org . - K.W.

Discoveries waiting to be made at Edge of Cedars

If you want to make the most amazing archaeological finds of Anasazi history, all you have to do is visit Edge of the Cedars.
Edge of the Cedars is a Utah state park protecting 16 acres set at 6,200 feet, in Blanding, at the foot of the Abajo Mountains. The park surrounds a partially excavated Puebloan-era ruin, including a reconstructed kiva, inhabited from A.D. 700 to A.D. 1220, and features an artifact-packed museum, the official repository for archaeological finds from public lands in southeastern Utah. The museum also displays exhibits on the area’s post-settlement history, and the region’s Navajo and Ute cultures.
“Edge of the Cedars” is a name for the area bestowed by 19th century cowboys from the Bluff area, who camped where the piñion-and-juniper (locally called “cedar”) forest met open chaparral. The pueblo-complex ruins — originally a village of six groups of pueblos and ceremonial areas — was listed on the Utah State Register of Historic Places in 1970, and entered into the National Register in 1971. The site became a Utah State Historical Monument in 1974, and the museum opened in 1978.
The museum features revolving exhibits on special topics, speakers, classes, and offers hands-on activities such as corn grinding with mano and metate, and Navajo rug weaving. Presently, visitors can see “Discovery!,” an exhibit featuring the artifacts and stories of finds made by hikers to the Four Corners, including three of the 10 two-thousand-year-old farming tools discovered by Durango resident Sandy Bielenberg in April 1999.
Other upcoming events and information about the museum can be found at www.stateparks.utah.gov/park_pages/edge.htm.
Edge of the Cedars is located at 660 West 400 North, in Blanding. It’s open daily year round, and admission is $5. For information, call (435) 678-2238.
K.W.

What would you do if you went out on a hike one day and stumbled on a major archaeological discovery?

When that happened to Sandy Bielenberg, she found out that question isn't as easy to answer as you might think.

In April 1999, Bielenberg and some friends were out hiking southeastern Utah's Cedar Mesa, an area of canyon-carved high desert that was once home to a complete native culture (see sidebar, "A Brief History of Time on Cedar Mesa," page 35). Today the area is inhabited by only a few scattered residents and land-management rangers, but across the landscape is spread the remnants of that Anasazi civilization - ancient dwellings, artifacts, rock art, and other remains from their hunting, gathering, and light farming way of life.

As a long-time desert rat and river guide on the San Juan River, just south of Cedar Mesa, Bielenberg is well versed in the archaeology of the region. And that's how she knew she had found something special when she casually pulled a stick out of the dirt on a small rock shelf.

What emerged was a three-foot long carved wooden tool that looked something like a paddle.

"I pulled it up and went, Oh my God!" she says.

She picked up a nearby cow bone and poked around in the dirt more, and uncovered more sticks, all lying in the same direction.

"I just kept saying, it's so out of context, these sticks all together," she remembers.

The question, of course, came immediately: What to do?

The answer took a year.

She had to do something right away, though. So she reburied her find and marked the spot with a rock, so she'd recognize it but no one else would see it as a marker.

Over the next few months after returning to her home, in Durango, she made a point, she says, to not tell anyone about the discovery - she didn't want anyone else to go looking for it. Her conscience nagged her, though, that she had dug around in what she knew had been an undisturbed archaeological site, a rarity even in a place as remote and archaeologically rich as Cedar Mesa.

Should she break her silence and tell someone? she wondered. "It just hung around in my mind. I knew it was an important find. I had never seen anything that was this exquisite.

She was aware of the dilemma she was in. Years earlier, she had been a guide on a San Juan River trip when a tourist found an intact Anasazi pot. He wanted to take the artifact home with him, and the head guide told the customer he could keep it, although Bielenberg fought him on the issue. She seethed all the way out the rest of the trip, she says. (And her gut feeling seemed to be confirmed when their next camp was hit by a flash flood; when, at the takeout, the bus was found stuck off the road; and when, on their way back to Bluff, the bus's headlights went out as they descended the steep, single-lane, dirt switchbacks of the Moki Dugway in the dark.)That had been a good lesson in leaving artifacts where they're found. But she also remembered another time, when working on the Yampa River, how a pair of Civil War-era binoculars that was discovered near Disaster Falls, where the Powell Expedition lost a boat, were left in place by the Park Service for future river visitors to "discover" on their own. They soon disappeared.

She decided to do some research. She looked for similar tools around the region - at Mesa Verde, in trading posts, at the Anasazi Heritage Center, in books. Nothing. But that just made her more certain she had found something special. That notion was confirmed when, reading an issue of Boatman's Quarterly Review, a magazine for Grand Canyon river guides, she found an article about an important recent discovery of similar strange ancient "paddles" in the Grand Canyon.

She decided it was time to contact a friend of hers.

Sally Cole is a renowned archaeologist specializing in rock art in the Four Corner area, and is the author of the regional classic Legacy on Stone: Rock Art of the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners Region. Bielenberg left a message on her answering machine saying she had found some artifacts she wanted to talk to her about. Cole assumed they were stone objects.

"So I called her and told her they were common," Cole laughs. "Then she started describing them and I knew they were something else."

Bielenberg and Cole met at the Anasazi Heritage Center, where she showed Cole her drawings of the artifacts. Cole's response was "Whoa!," she says. "That's not what I was thinking about! I knew immediately it was something rare." She also thought she recognized the paddle-like item from an image on a rock-art panel along the San Juan River.

"I told her she needed to contact an archaeologist right away," she said.

What Bielenberg had found was truly significant: An untouched Basketmaker site, eventually dated to A.D. 230. She had uncovered 10 different stick-handled, carved farming tools - one bound together with yucca-fiber cordage. "It was like a kit," says Cole, with detectable awe. "And the site was undisturbed, unlooted. That's very rare," she adds. "It's like catching a snapshot in time. It looked like a farmer had set them down and didn't come back. We just didn't know what the 'time' was."

"That's extremely significant for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it was in-place," Cole explains. "They were discovered in a datable context, in situ. That's a really significant find because the whole site can be interpreted."

First, though, the site - now officially named the Sandy B Site - had to be investigated. After Bielenberg contacted the BLM archaeologist in Monticello, he conferred with the staff at the Edge of the Cedars State Park, in Blanding, and the decision was made to recover the artifacts Bielenberg had found (see sidebar, "Discoveries waiting to be made at Edge of Cedars," page 35).

"Sandy had been with a large group," Cole says, "so it was inevitable that word would get around." Also, she says, since Bielenberg had just re-buried the objects with sand, "we knew they would get exposed again."

Deborah Westfall, Curator of Collections and Staff Archaeologist at Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum, also was in favor of recovering the artifacts. "Ideally, it is preferable to leave artifacts in situ," she explains. In this case, though, she says, "It is good that the artifacts came to the museum since they were likely to become more exposed if left in situ. Exposure to the elements would result in their inevitable decay and consequent loss of scientific information. Exposure also increases their visibility, making them vulnerable to theft, looting, and destruction of the site."

And so, a full year after her original discovery, Bielenberg led an expedition of archaeologists - including an armed BLM law-enforcement ranger, in case the site had been looted, in which case the visit would have become a criminal investigation - to her find. "This was a huge thing for them," Bielenberg says.

Her marker was there. And so was the bundle of sticks.

"It was an untouched Basketmaker site," Cole reminisces about the magic that was that first visit to the Sandy B Site. At the site, there was a Basketmaker ruin nearby, and some rock art. "Everything around it was interpretive, in context."

Westfall, meanwhile, had to deal with carefully recovering the nearly two-millennia-old pieces of oak. "Because the artifacts were considered fragile, being made of wood, there was concern about packing and transporting them safely from the discovery site to the museum," she describes. "I assembled archival packaging foam to wrap the artifacts, and constructed cardboard cradles to encase the wrapped artifacts."

Those artifacts made it safely back to the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum, which is the official repository for archaeological finds made on public lands in southeastern Utah. After undergoing scientific scrutiny, three of the 10 farming tools from the Sandy B Site are now on display in the museum's "Discovery!" exhibit. The exhibit includes Bielenberg's story of her discovery, alongside the stories and artifacts of discoveries made by other hikers in southeast Utah.

Sandy's story and the others like them are important because they highlight the threats to the Four Corners area's unique, precious, and fragile archaeological treasures.

"Site deterioration and destruction has become a great problem due to increased vandalism, looting, and over-visitation of archaeological sites," says Teri Paul, Museum Director and Park Manager at Edge of the Cedars. "Some unscrupulous people seek to make their fortune by looting and selling artifacts from sites on public lands. These people are effectively stealing history from us all."

The law, though, is on the side of the artifacts. "In 1906 the American Antiquities Act made the taking of artifacts from public lands without a permit a felony," says Paul. "The 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act specifically made the unauthorized removal of artifacts, or damage to archaeological sites on public land, punishable by fines or imprisonment."

Still, she says, much damage to archaeological sites is not malicious. "Others may not realize the damage that site visitation can do. Sites can be 'loved to death.' This can happen when a site is over-visited. It also can happen when people make new trails, camp within the walls of a pueblo, or make campfires. These can damage, confuse, and muddle the archaeological record."

"We encourage visitors to be good stewards of archaeological sites," Paul says. "Help to protect and preserve these cultural resources. Please treat them with respect."

Specifically, visitors to archaeological sites are urged to follow simple guidelines:

�? Stay on trails - even small impacts in the desert last decades.

�? Don't climb on walls.

�? Don't take anything.

�? Keep pets out of archeological sites.

�? Leave things in place. Most popular sites today have a "treasure pile," where some artifacts - potsherds, yucca cord, turkey bones, dried 1,000-year old miniature corncobs - have been placed for people to examine. Leave everything else where it is for others to discover.

�? When near ruins, stay off middens - the hidden trash heaps that usually lie downslope of dwellings. These piles are fragile and, while not holding valuables, hold lots of archaeological information.

As for the Sandy B Site, "It's cool that somebody like Sandy found it and didn't take stuff home," Cole raves about Bielenberg's choices in deciding what to do about her discovery. "She handled it perfectly."

But what if you make an archaeological discovery?

In general, "Leave it there," says Cole. "That's the ideal. We don't necessarily need more pots in museums."

But if you really think you've found something significant and important, she says, "Immediately give a call to the archaeologist at the agency in charge of those public lands."

And remember to savor your once-in-a-lifetime moment.

"I think it's amazing we found an undisturbed site," Bielenberg recollects joyfully. "I was totally psyched. I held that thing in my hand and it was a thousand years ago. It gives you hope."

Ken Wright is a contributing editor to Inside/Outside Southwest. He makes his archaeological discoveries in the middens at yard sales throughout the region.