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Vanishing Art

Pot Hunting and Skeleton Picnics in the American Southwest

By Andrew Gulliford

Found in: | Inside | Art | Politics |

Two hours after wearing a surveillance wire in a pot-hunting investigation, I placed a loaded .38 Colt revolver in my pickup. Just in case. I told my wife to lock the doors and windows, shut the blinds, and keep our small sons inside. The young pothunter I had just help the feds bust knew I had fingered him. He had to know. I was the only finger.
I had a meeting to attend that night, far from home. My name and address were listed in the telephone book, and I couldn't know if the pothunter would seek revenge. Some do.

EARLIER That day, many years ago now in New Mexico, federal agents taped a live microphone to my chest. I pulled my shirt on and together we waited for the pothunter to arrive at the museum. I was the museum's director, and the pothunter was coming to see me. The young man had heard rumors of valuable Mimbres-culture pots and where to find them. Tempted by a fast fortune, he grabbed a shovel and went exploring on federal land. Having some luck, he called the museum to discuss getting an appraisal of his illegal find. As his luck goes, however, I answered the phone, where sitting next to me in my office was an armed Bureau of Land Management agent drinking coffee.
Covering the phone's mouthpiece with my hand, I said to the agent, "You're not going to believe this. I've got a pothunter who wants me to evaluate pots he's dug up. What should I tell him?"
The sting was set for two weeks later. With plain-clothes agents in the museum, another watching the building from the outside and another posing as a perspective buyer, we waited for the pothunter. He was on time.
We went down to the windowless vault where collections were stored. Chatting excitedly about his find, with everything he said being recorded, the man even marked on a U.S. Forest Service map exactly where he had dug up his prehistoric artifacts, a few small corrugated plainware bowls and a couple of large painted sherds, or pieces of broken pots, in the classic Mimbres style.
As we photographed his pots, he asked about the stunning bowls displayed on nearby shelves. After collecting what we needed for the investigation, I told the unsuspecting pothunter that I would get back to him with an appraisal. He left the building. An agent stayed with me as I assessed the value of the pots and pieces. Based on the condition of one of the pots, I determined the value of the collection to exceed $500, the magic number for a felony conviction.
The feds stopped the pothunter and confiscated the pots, a shovel, and other evidence. Soon after the agent departed, it occurred to me that it would be months before a trial date or a judgment would be made on this case - I'd made myself and my family vulnerable. It was a long six months to when the digger pled guilty and received his sentence.
Prior to that incident, the BLM had found evidence of extensive looting on federal lands in the Burro Mountains - the location of an entire Indian village had been reduced to craters. When the excavator was arrested, he had thousands of illegally obtained artifacts in his possession. Agents also found a loaded .12 gauge pump shotgun lying across his kitchen table.
Across the Southwest, the illegal excavation of artifacts on public and tribal lands has been hobby, occupation, guilty pleasure and even family tradition.
At the turn of the 20th century, metropolitan museums around the world competed to establish collections. Some museums paid locals, including Mormon families in southeast Utah, to dig pots, primarily from ancient Indian burials. Southwest Colorado, southeast Utah, and southwest New Mexico - home to the Ancestral Puebloan and Mogollon/Mimbres cultures - are epicenters for pothunting in the Southwest.
In the not-so-distant past, it was family fun on Sunday afternoons to have "skeleton picnics" - at ancient sites, everyone got a shovel and dug in, seeing what turned up. When human remains were uncovered, the bones were tossed aside with the exception of skulls. They, as well as intact pots, were coveted finds. In the Mimbres and Animas River valleys in New Mexico, the Mancos Valley in Colorado, and in side canyons of the San Juan River in Utah, local families matched the zeal of the Southwest's first archaeologists who were also letting the dust fly.
By 1906, with the passage of the federal Antiquities Act, Congress legislated that digging prehistoric Indian sites on public land without a federal permit was illegal. But without enforcement, looting continued into the 1930s. Pothunting did die down with the advent of World War II, but as soldiers came home and surplus Jeeps became popular, looters drove even deeper into backcountry areas, where they accessed new sites.
Professional archaeologists advocated for tougher laws and President Jimmy Carter signed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act in 1979, which mandated much stiffer penalties on looters. But by then a black market for grave goods had footing. Illegally gotten goods sold alongside legal goods in Santa Fe, Denver, and Manhattan, where Sotheby's yearly Indian Arts catalog skyrocketed prices.
In Hurley, N.M., 1988, I interviewed John and Mary King who had a spectacular collection of Mimbres and Salado bowls, effigy pots, arrowheads, manos and metates, all of which King had collected himself from the artifact-rich area. Proud of his work, King claimed to be a Ph.D., or "pot hunter deluxe." To illustrate the frenzy for ancient pots, down the road in Deming a bank vice president who made car loans to poor Hispanics was capitalizing on a scheme to acquire the treasures. If his clients did not have the down payment, he would pull out photos of classic Mimbres pots, smile, and say, "That's all right. Just bring me in a couple of these," telling them where to dig.
By the late 1980s, as federal enforcement increased, so did the pothunting frenzy, which had spilled onto private land. In disgust, state legislators began to pass burial bills or laws to protect unmarked graves, both prehistoric and historic, on private property. For their efforts, state legislators were cursed. Or worse. State Senator Tilman Bishop of Grand Junction, the author of the Colorado burial bill, received an unmarked package at his office. It contained a fairly complete 1,000-year-old Anasazi skeleton wrapped in a local newspaper. A note attached to it read, "This is none of your business."
Ironically, even thieves weren't safe. After showing off his fabulous King Collection to a few visitors, John King woke one morning to realize his garage had been burglarized and his better bowls stolen. Before passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), police considered stolen antiquities no differently than they did all private property. I was in the Grant County sheriff's office in Silver City, N.M., when most of the King Collection returned from Seattle, along with a back story. The thieves who had stolen the pots had fenced a few to a collector in Seattle. Apparently, the thieves took a liking to his ancient Inuit carved walrus ivory, also illegally obtained, so much so they came back the next night and not only stole again the pots they had fenced to the collector but took the ivory too. The collector called police and positively identified the crooks. Though he had bought stolen property and had a questionable collection, he went scot free, as did the original pothunter John King.
In the sheriff's office, we cut the evidence tape wrapped haphazardly around single-strength boxes that the FBI had used to package rare Mimbres antiquities. Considered mere "evidence," of the 36 exquisite, 1,000-year-old black-and-white bowls, 18 came back smashed. Sometimes you can't even trust the good guys.
So it didn't surprise me when this summer the Blanding, Utah, bust went down and, according to numerous published accounts, the BLM arrested 24 suspects who in a sting had been paid more than $335,000 by an informant. I was saddened but not surprised when, indicted for the second time, Blanding physician James Redd committed suicide. As tragic as that is, and at such a huge loss to the local community, it reinforces the notion that strange things can happen to pothunters and those who traffic in grave goods. A second suspect fatally shot himself twice in the chest. In southwest New Mexico, many cases of older pothunters dying of painful paralysis perpetuate the notion. A type of arthritis runs amok through their bodies. Native Americans seem to understand. They nod their heads slowly and know better than to disturb ancient graves.
In Utah, U.S. senators expressed outrage over the Blanding bust and raid during which armed federal agents wearing flak gear, bullet-proof vests and carrying automatic weapons knocked on doors and entered homes in southeast Utah. Locals complained about "Gestapo tactics." But in a state with liberal gun laws, federal agents have few options but to expect the worst when entering a private residence. The stakes are much higher than the misdemeanor consequences of displaying a pot or an arrowhead on a fireplace mantle.
For the past decade, commercial pot hunting and pothunters have been linked routinely to the illegal drug trade as a way to launder cash. A dealer who has sold methamphetamine, cocaine or marijuana, for example, can be exposed carrying wads of cash into a bank. To avoid the exposure, a tactic used by dealers is to purchase pots and resell them using phony certificates stating the artifacts came off private lands. Rather than concentrate on local pothunters, dealers, and regional raids to win the battle against illegal pot hunting, a better result would come from a focus on the high-end buyers of Southwest antiquities.
Instead of complaining about the tactics used in the Blanding raid and arguing for congressional investigations, senators Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett could use their influence to push for passage of a national cultural export law prohibiting the sale of Native American antiquities outside of the United States.
It's ironic that five years before passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906, which prevents digging cultural resources on public lands, Iowa Senator John Lacey wrote a bill prohibiting the illegal shipment of wild game across state lines. Now we have the Endangered Species Act and a host of international treaties on game protection, but the U.S. is one of the few nations in the world that does not have a law restricting the sale of our cultural artifacts. Try to leave Mexico City with pre-Columbian statues in your luggage. Try to get on a plane in London with early Anglo-Saxon or Celtic jewelry. Try smuggling religious icons out of Russia. You won't get very far in any case. But get on a plane in Denver or Albuquerque with rare Anasazi bowls - destination either domestic or international - and no one will stop you.
When the King Collection returned to Silver City, the most precious of all the bowls, the rare and exquisite Three Cranes bowl, painted and fired by a master potter ten centuries ago - probably a woman - survived without a scratch. The bowl is magic. I've held it in my hands. Tapping gently the edge, the thin-walled bowl rang like a piece of fine crystal. The yucca-brush paint strokes are flawless. The artist mastered perspective on the inside of the bowl, on a concave surface, as carefully as any genius of the Italian Renaissance. The bowl is a masterpiece, a national treasure, and it's gone.
It's a grievous story. Within a week of the bowl's return, a collector flew in with cash - assumed to be $50,000 - and the Three Cranes Bowl, the height of a culture famous for its ceramics, disappeared. I possess the last photos of the bowl. I show the slides to my college classes in a lecture on pothunting, a poignant display and a good lesson in American tragedy.
To stop the theft of American antiquities, America needs not only more rangers on the ground but also more support to the federal officers who enforce Congressional laws meant to protect American treasures. That would be a good start, but we also need a new law, a federal mandate that states unequivocally that prehistoric American Indian artifacts are unique in the world and will not be traded or sold outside the United States. And, to prevent pothunting in the Four Corners, the domestic and international distribution and sale of Ancestral Puebloan artifacts must halt wherever it takes place, from Santa Fe to Manhattan and from Berlin to Tokyo.

Andrew Gulliford is a historian, photographer, and professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College in Durango. He is the author of Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions published by the University Press of Colorado. He can be reached at Gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.