Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

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  For my dad,

  his bones and ashes

  scattered across the desert

  Events in time are not—boom—over.

  They have tentacles, and they wrap around,

  and they swish back and forth,

  and they sink and swim.

  —AMY FUSSELMAN,

  8: ALL TRUE: UNBELIEVABLE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All characters and names in this book are real but for Art and Betty Cooper, who requested anonymity to keep their collection safe.

  I frequently use the word archaeology, which has different meanings based on context. While it describes the scientific discipline itself, I also use the word to define the presence of archaeological material, e.g., “There was archaeology all over the place.” It also refers to the larger arena surrounding artifacts, e.g., “Archaeology is one big stinking mess.”

  INTRODUCTION

  Her eyes looked tired, as if she had not slept in days. When I asked if she’d talk to me about her work as an archaeologist, she told me she was an unreliable source. I said not to worry, that I’d just like to hear her story. But her face worried me, and I felt like I was interviewing a vampire.

  I had a beer, nothing for her. An attractive woman with a penetrating gaze, she had her legs stretched out in the booth. She had been working as a contract archaeologist documenting and clearing human remains and artifacts for a highway expansion across the Navajo reservation in northern New Mexico. She said dead people were everywhere, remains of thousands of years of occupation; the whole place was a graveyard. She and her crew would dig by day, then go back to some cheap motel room. She said that there was so much sex and drinking that now it seemed like a dream, a hedonistic foray in the land of the dead. She was raw labor in the growing field of cultural resource management, working for an environmental consulting firm that sent excavators out to clear the way for development, to pull up pots, effigies, offerings, and bones in accordance with the law. She called herself a death-eater.

  Sitting at the booth she whispered, “I hate the Navajo.”

  “The people?” I asked.

  “No, the place,” she said. “The reservation.”

  She told me guys would come up to her, Navajo men, and tell her she should not be doing this. They said witches would come at night, steal the bones of people she was digging up, and grind them into powder that would be used in black magic rituals, hexes. She tried to reassure them by saying that when she and her colleagues found burials, the police would keep an eye on the sites until they could get them cleared out. That is when one man told her that police sell bones to witches, not enough that she would even notice, but enough to kill with. Navajo traditions are rife with death taboos and rumors of sorcery—makes sense in the Southwest, where bones are constantly weathering from the ground. The Navajo have learned you don’t touch dead people’s things. They aren’t yours. They just bring trouble.

  This is the Indiana Jones side of archaeology, the curses and chilling adventure. But in the real world, archaeologists do not believe in curses. They do their jobs. It is dirty, exhausting work and involves a lot of wind and mind-numbing ground surveys. It means construction crews are delayed, millions of dollars lost, developers watching impatiently while salvage workers dig up artifacts and skeletons. At one of her sites she found the remains of a more recently dead man, a body pitched off the side of the road. A few weeks later she found another, and she began to wonder what is the difference between someone who died months ago and someone who died a thousand years ago. Time grew thin for her, as if she could see through it. Navajos kept showing up, hitchhikers and transients telling her she better slow down with all this digging. She began to feel like a looter herself. She quit her job.

  I asked if she would ever go back. She nearly cried, shaking her head, saying, “No, no, no…”

  Then she straightened her face, looked at me, and said, “You know I would.”

  This book is about the underbelly of archaeology, from both a personal and a global perspective. It is a firsthand exploration into the many reasons we loot. To loot is to freely take something that is not yours. There are night diggers pillaging tombs and rioters with bats and crowbars pouring through the unhinged doors of the National Museum in Iraq. There are scientists who say it is looting when artifacts come without paperwork. Museum curators have called it looting when repatriation laws require them to turn over prized pieces of antiquity to faraway countries demanding their heritage back. Fingers seem to all be pointing at each other.

  If you are one of those people who have strong opinions about who should own ancient cultural property and who has the right to do as they wish with antiquities, you might be surprised by your reaction to what you read here.

  If you have wondered what all the fuss is about—what is so important about some clay seal lost in the desert for thousands of years—I hope this book will help you understand.

  I have found myself lost in the entanglement of antiquities. From the lowliest dirt geeks to credentialed excavators to the world’s biggest antiquities traffickers—all of whom you will meet in the coming pages—few hands are clean. With this formidable cast of characters working often at cross-purposes, the atmosphere can get a bit testy. Several people I began following during the writing of this book were by the end either dead or in jail. Others had only to endure the humiliation and fear of having their houses and collections raided.

  In no other field of research have I encountered so many people who have wanted the other party dead. At one point I interviewed an antiquities broker—he seemed like a nice enough fellow—and a few days later heard a rumor he had put a price on the head of a troublesome foreign journalist. Another man, a pothunter now in prison, explained to an undercover agent that you should always go into the field well armed—and if law enforcement pays a visit to your digging operation, you “drop ’em… and never come back.” Meanwhile, a university archaeologist has publicly implored troops to shoot people plundering archaeological sites in Iraq. On a more personal note, while I was reporting on a federal raid on looters in the Southwest, a friend sent me a note warning me to watch my back, saying the illicit artifact community was out for blood. You don’t get this kind of talk from geologists or stamp collectors.

  Why so much contention? We are dealing with the physical remains of all of human history. What one person takes often destroys it for another, a big gamble when we are here for such a short time, one thin layer of generations atop thousands of years of ancestry. What we do now forever changes the context of artifacts. Some see the fight over who should be able to own the physical past as a war. In order for an artifact to sit on a dealer’s shelf, it must often be laundered beyond scientific recognition, the bane of archaeologists. In order for it to be in the hands of science, it is often secreted away into storage where it may never be seen again. In between are many hands scrabbling for whatever they can get.

  An old Utah pothunter once took off his bracelet and passed it to me, an inlay of silver and turquoise probably a century and a half old. “You know where I got that?” he asked. “Off a dead Navajo.” The bracelet in my hands suddenly turned to i
ce. Though I had to swallow my own discomfort, I listened to the man whimsically explain his love for the past, saying an artifact like this is holy, physically embodying stories that take him back in time. In his mind, he was honoring the bracelet by giving it another go-round, but I remained stuck on the fact that he had driven a shovel through a nest of human bones to get it just for himself.

  At the same time I, too, have dug through a human skeleton using a trowel and a brush. It was in the service of an academic excavation, and not, ostensibly, for my own edification. To say the archaeologist is right and the pothunter is wrong seems instinctive, but why?

  Regardless of which players have ended up with which artifacts, we have come to the point of diminishing returns. What is left in the ground does not outweigh what has been removed. Mayan temples have been tunneled until they look like worm-eaten fruit. In China, thousands of tombs are found freshly looted every year. Parts of the Middle East look carpet bombed. Many museums, meanwhile, are stuffed until choking with objects. From arrowhead hunters to global dealers, from amateurs excavating illegally to archaeologists with university degrees picking at the ground with dental tools, we all want a piece of it.

  Even you, dear reader, have your finger in this pie as you admire a museum’s collection. Perhaps you have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and found yourself captivated by the voluptuous statue of an Indian woman, her body polished gray-green schist and labeled a Matrika, a mother goddess, from the mid-sixth century, Tanesar, northern India. Her right hand is missing, her feet broken off. Where did this statue come from? Anand Shrivastava, a Jaipur police superintendent dedicated to bringing down artifact smuggling rings, found a photograph of Matrikas in situ from 1961 at a shrine outside the village of Tanesar, where they had probably been in place for well over a thousand years. The shrine once had several beautifully executed Matrikas, all gone now, thought by Shrivastava to be stolen and smuggled out of the country. This particular statue surfaced when it was gifted to the Met from a private collection. The others from the shrine can now be seen in museum collections around the world. In 2003, Shrivastava traveled to the village with photographs of these missing Matrikas, asking if anyone remembered them. An old man reportedly stared at the photographs for a moment, then began to weep.

  In many museums you move from one artifact to the next, and they all bear such secret stories. They are there for the sake of posterity, which, right now, is you. Enjoy.

  In the debate over who should own the past, it is easy to forget what is being fought over in the first place, and from the ground up this book will be a reminder. John Carman, a leading scholar in archaeological ethics, writes, “Like it or not, by considering archaeological material as ‘cultural property’ we make archaeology not a handmaiden of history even, but of law and economics.” What we really want from archaeology is not a debate over who owns what, but a meaningful, tangible connection to people who came long before us. We are looking for our place in time, a temporal context for our own civilization and our very lives.

  I know a man who wanders parts of the Four Corners region in the American Southwest conducting archaeological surveys. Now and then he finds pre-Columbian baskets, pots, and imprinted clay tablets. Contracted by the government, he has to assess whether these artifacts are at risk of being vandalized or destroyed, and some he must help remove to federal storage for the sake of preservation. He says he would rather leave them where they are. They seem alive to him in situ, curated by sand and wind rather than by the unnerving stillness of a climate-controlled facility. He once found a weaving loom hidden in the wilderness, an intricate wooden artifact from the early centuries AD, which remained untouched in a dry, natural shelter until other people began finding it. Soon it had to be confiscated, taken to a museum so that no one else could steal it. The man understood why this had to happen, but the loom’s absence felt like a strange shadow in the world, a nitpicking emptiness. So, he carefully studied the loom, and after fastidious work constructed a replica. It did not have the same greased tarnish as the original, but was measured exactly, its many long, thin dowels tied together with twine and little knots. He walked his creation into the desert and placed it where the first loom had been, giving the shadow an object back.

  This is not simply a book of violations. It is a book of choices. It is how we answer the conundrum of archaeology, the moral questions it poses. Consciously or not, most of us have already made our choices. This book will help you understand why you made yours.

  PART ONE

  IN THE COUNTRY OF THE DEAD

  CHAPTER 1

  AMATEURS

  I grew up spitting on potsherds. I would find them on the dry, gravelly earth of south-central Arizona—pieces of broken bowls, jars, and water ollas dating back several hundred years. Rubbing spit around with my thumb, I would clean off the dirt to see if there might be a fragment of a design underneath, part of a red spiral or maybe the head of a waterbird painted with a human-hair brush. The prettier the design, the longer I held it, as if it were an eye opening in my hand, staring out from the other end of time.

  My dad used to take me hunting in the desert, and we would find pottery on gentle mounds or exposed at the cut of an arroyo. He would go down on one knee, the butt of his 12-gauge resting on the ground, his fingers sorting through ancient trash left from an era when huts and adobe fortresses once stretched across this country. It was not really trash, not in the way we think of it. People here used to bury their dead in rubbish mounds, not stuffing bodies in randomly but interring them with a full complement of vessels and jewelry made of shell and turquoise. Trash was a part of their social architecture, a claim on the ground. You could walk up to a site centuries later and know exactly who had lived there based on what they left in front of their settlements; who they traded with, what they made themselves, what kind of wares they employed in their kitchens. These refuse piles, their surfaces now winnowed down to just stone and pottery, are the stories of actual lives.

  I would watch my dad closely, matching his motions, leaning my .22 barrel against my shoulder as I searched for the right sherd to pick up, a big curve the cattle had not crushed and modern pickers had not taken. I learned to stand up with one I liked and admire it for a moment, just as he did, before flicking it to the ground like a bottle cap, or a coin winged into a fountain.

  If he ever took one home, I never saw it. Had my dad been a pothunter, I would have been one too, happily booting a shovel into the ground right next to him. But he was not. It was enough for him to imagine people buried under his feet, funerary vessels encircling their heads as he walked by. He liked to talk about mystery and the lay of things. Then, we would find a car battery someone had junked out in the desert, and if there had not been any luck with quail or cottontail, we would take aim and blow the crap out of the thing. It was our contribution to archaeology. If the belly-ruptured remains of a battery ever survived for a thousand years, someone might find them and be able to look back and see the two of us out on a Sunday afternoon, 1977.

  The general cutoff for archaeology is sixty years. Before that, it is trash, after that, an artifact. In a way, this is an arbitrary line, but sixty years is about the time when objects begin to fade from living memory. Even ugly things become beautiful after sixty years. What may have once been commonplace becomes rare. A forgotten vessel, such as a bottle or a jar, turns into a time machine. A piece of glass or pottery opens a keyhole to look through.

  The lives of these artifacts do not begin when they are lifted from the ground, or when you first make eye contact with them in a museum case. They begin centuries, even millennia, earlier, when they are first conceived—a potter fashioning a vessel from riverbed clay, an artisan polishing tiny shell beads for a necklace, later to be worn, then lost, maybe found again. They each carry private, human histories. Usually we see them in climate-controlled rooms, dust-free display cases, where it can be difficult to imagine where they came from. This is not the same as
seeing them in their place, where they were left. In situ, an object is far more than just itself. It becomes the horizon and the whole sky, and the occasional whip of a breeze where my father and I would walk, stopping along the way to peer back through time. The past becomes an entire landscape, a country. In order to understand why it has a hold on us, and why we sometimes have bitterly different responses to how we treat it, one needs to come to the ground and see where it all begins both physically and emotionally.

  By my early twenties I was eating jackrabbits and wiping my ass with rocks, a free man in the wilderness. Indeed, if ever awards were given to folks of my ilk, unaffiliated backcountry aficionados, I would have had my Eagle Scout badge. For money I got a job taking high school kids from Los Angeles into the desert. The company paid seventy-five dollars a day, good wages for a ratty bunch of guides working desolate country around the lower Colorado River between Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico. We taught basic outdoor skills, and we called ourselves naturalists. Mostly in our twenties and thirties, we were burgeoning scientists and misanthropes, each bringing to the table some appreciable field skill. One could heal injuries and cure sicknesses with local plants she knew by their Latin names; another excelled at finding potable water in the most forbidding terrain. There were those who could start fires with hand drills, those who caught small creatures with snares. I was the archaeology guy, finding rock art and little bits of fascination on the ground.

  On our days off we scavenged food from the company van and headed out together to set up quick camps and climb bareback ridges for no reason other than the sun and the hard scrape of the earth. Dressed in threadbare T-shirts or sports bras, we were tanned and scabbed and exquisite.