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The Outdoor Museum

Artifacts viewed where they lay keeps them in context

By Ron Dungan

The clouds have lifted, the rains have stopped. For days, we have walked among broken walls of old Pueblo villages in southern Utah, fingering pottery shards and corn cobs, peering into dark, empty rooms. Black clouds roll in, the creeks flash and we hunker down, slipping out of the canyon when the time seems right. We take nothing but photos, the memories burned into our cerebral hard drive, the days a blur of dark skies, muddy water, moonlit cliffs and pottery chips. Days later, we are back in the bush, this time on a guided trip. We follow Vaughn Hadenfeldt into another canyon and he uncovers its secrets: yucca sandals, pieces of jewelry, a bone awl. The afternoons are sunny and warm, the nights clear and cool. On the second day, he moves a tumbleweed from a shelter of tilted stone and motions us forward.

You could walk 5,000 miles in the high desert and never see this. But there it was, an Anasazi pot, lying under a sandstone slab. Centuries of rainwater moving down slope had worn a hole in the bottom, slowly taking it back to ground. We took photos and stepped away, moving deeper into the canyon. It is best to leave these things, the awls, the pots, the bones. They are part of this land of deep canyons, flash floods, drought and red sunsets. For four days, we followed Hadenfeldt, owner of Far Out Expeditions in Bluff, Utah, which offers back country tours that focus on archaeology. Hedenfeldt is a believer in what some call the outdoor museum. The idea is to leave artifacts in the outdoors, where they belong.

But Pueblo culture is vanishing, piece by piece. Pot hunters, souvenir collectors and archaeologists have carted it off for many years. There is a big difference between pot hunting and archaeology, but early archaeologists did not document everything. Hadenfeldt said he has been told that somewhere in a New York museum are two lockers full of yucca sandals. The lockers are labeled "left sandal" and "right sandal." You can still see plenty of ruins and rock art in the Southwest, but most have been stripped of the pottery, wood and stone that once covered the desert floor. After more than a century of Anglo fascination with Native American culture, the back country is bare.

The purge began in the late 1800s, when the Wetherill bothers, primarily Richard, John and Al, who ranched in the Mancos Valley, came across the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and other ruins in the Four Corners. When winter blew out of the mountains and there was little to do on the ranch, the Wetherills and their friends loaded pots, bones and sandals onto horse-drawn carts and sent them off to eastern museums.

Although there were some careless digs in the early years, many archaeologists, even the Wetherills, with little formal training, kept good records, said Winston Hurst, an archaeologist who helped lead the Wetherill Project. The project used Wetherill's notes to link artifacts in museums with the sites where they were found.

"Some of them did an amazing amount of documentation," he said.

Early archaeologists eventually came to call the pueblo builders and pot makers Anasazi, and some researchers regarded them as a vanished civilization in the high desert, a mystery to be solved. The Pueblo tribes looked on with amusement, horror, anger. They were the descendants of these wall builders and knew all about the abandoned villages. To the Hopi, the Zuni and various New Mexican tribes, these places weren't abandoned at all. The clans had left them temporarily, as they always had.

As museums filled and private collections grew, people began to change their thinking of how to handle artifacts. In 1906, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which made it a crime to remove anything from public lands. Private lands are exempt. But the process of stripping the back country of artifacts had begun. A black market in artifacts encouraged treasure hunters with shovels. Generations grew up in the Four Corners believing that artifacts were there for the taking. The Antiquities Act was just another example of the federal government meddling in the lives of decent folk, an inconvenience.

Which brings us to the present. Modern America has embraced Native American culture and the West. More people keep visiting the Four Corners and more people keep moving here. Some of then track the planet with GPS devices and detail their adventures on the internet. Pottery chips go up for sale on eBay. Many sellers offer certificates of authenticity and say the chips were taken from private land. Hadenfeldt says that this part of the Antiquities Act amounts to a giant loophole. Locals have begun to embraced the idea of the outdoor museum. But people keep coming, and not everyone gets the message.

"I'm not sure that the locals are the problem now," Hurst said. It's people from outside the area, taking one pottery chip.

"They walk out there and see this stuff on the ground. And to them, that's the way it's always been. They cry tears because they found an artifact on the ground. They put it in their sock drawer. They put in their little medicine bundle."

He has even heard of cases of scout leaders and teachers telling kids that it's OK to collect stuff as long as they don't dig. This is not true, but once the belief is out there, it's hard to stop.

State Archaeologist Kevin Jones said that leaving items in place is a policy his department practices whenever possible. But the looting continues.

"In theory it's a great idea," Jones said. "In practice, it's not. Artifacts are disappearing like crazy." Even in areas with not much visitation, things are disappearing. Range Creek, a Fremont site that got a great deal of publicity when it was purchased by the state, is far from the beaten path, has a constant law enforcement presence and gets few visitors. But even there, artifacts have disappeared. In other parts of the state, pottery chips are evaporating at an alarming rate.

"People don't think it's a big deal because they're just taking one or two," Jones said. "They put it in their pocket and it's gone forever."

Archaeology has advanced far beyond the days of shovels and mules. Many sites, once studied, are reburied. Graves are left alone. Researchers may hire specialists in geology, biology and botany to study dust, DNA, ash, bone, pollen. They have technology that allows them to look underground without digging, and large museum collections at their disposal that have yet to be studied in depth. They consult with local tribes and listen to the oral histories. Even with all these advanced techniques, they need to know exactly where an item was found.

There are probably thousands of corrugated pots in museums, but to Hurst, they are not all the same. Researchers have moved away from the idea of a central tribe to the idea of families and clans, tied together culturally. A pot from southern Utah may look the same as one from northern New Mexico, but have subtle differences. Pots broken in ceremony have a different context than pots broken by accident. They are all important, and they all have a history that is largely a history of place. But leaving a pot creates a problem. What if someone takes it?

"Granted, that's a possibility," Hadenfeldt said. "But I would much rather have the chance of seeing something out there, left in its original location. ... Unless it's something unique and fragile. Then maybe the outdoor museum doesn't quite hold," Hadenfeldt said.

Education has helped. The Park Service has rangers spread the word whenever possible, even at ruins that have been swept clean of artifacts. There are ranger-led tours at Keet Seel, Wupatki and Mesa Verde. The Ute tribe has guided tours. The BLM posts signs telling people to leave things as you find them.

"Education works," Jones said. "And one of the places we see that it works well is among river runners . . . They have an ethic . . . They're quite respectful of sites." They are respectful, Jones said, because they want to return to sites and bring their friends.

Enforcement has also helped. Some sites are watched with cameras, lasers or sensors. Planes fly over extremely sensitive areas. But enforcement takes money, and the federal budget is coming up on hard times.

Some people wonder if we should just round up everything and put it in museums, solving the problem once and for all.

"That sounds real swell, but most museums can't afford to warehouse everything," Hadenfeldt said. Everything that goes into a museum must be recorded, studied, documented and kept dry.

The Pueblo people, for their part, wish everyone would leave their stuff alone. It's there for a reason, outlined in their stories. Although we think of Pueblo people as sedentary, they have always been movers. The Hopi say they migrated many years until they came to mesas where they now live. Before the migrations started, the Hopi chose the Bahana to be their leader, said Karen Berggren, Park Manager at Homolovi Ruins State Park, about 70 miles south of Hopi Mesas. But the Bahana said that he would travel east and return later. When he came back he would teach them many things, and it would be a golden age. The Hopi say that when the Bahana returns, he is gong to follow the ruins and pieces of broken pottery.

So the Hopi don't want the pottery stored in museums or sock drawers. They want it left on the ground. Berggren estimates that the park has lost 95 percent of the pot sherds that were there in the last decade. She tells the Hopi that people are just going to take it if something is not done. The Hopi tell her, then it's on their heads.

She gets letters all the time. People send her a small bag of pottery chips and tell them all the bad things that have happened to them since they took the chips from Homolovi.

"They say my my dog died, my truck died, my TV died. Take it back."

But she can't take it back. People who take chips from one site are likely to take them from another. If archaeologists can't be sure exactly where the chips should go, they keep them out of the site. A similar letter is on display at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Someone took a chip, and their car broke down, not once, but again and again, long after they left Chaco. Don't take the chips. Bad juju will follow.

When the rains return, we follow Hadenfeldt out of the canyon. He is not concerned with

us getting wet, he's concerned about the roads. Days of rain can take them out, he says, and we do not argue. We have had our fill of rain. He takes us to Edge of the Cedars Museum, where many artifacts lie behind glass. He remembers when some of them were on the ground. The next day he takes us to look at rock art.

But first, we take a walk to Target House, a ruin with a large circular petroglyph. It is a nice ruin and worth the walk, but we could hear the ATVs roaring in the distance, though BLM rules had banned their use in the area. We can see the holes in the floor of the ruin, where pot-hunters have worked the ground with shovels. There are no chips on the ground, no corncobs. There is nothing but dirt and rock.

"I just wish that people had a different relationship to this stuff, and that it wasn't always about possession," Hurst said. Placing items in museums strips artifacts of context and strips the land of artifacts. "It's just unfortunate. It sterilizes the world."

Phoenix Ariz.-writer Ron Dungan finds his treasure where he gets his lumps - with a fly-fishing rod in hand.