by Craig Childs
No doubt the Patayans whose cave we had entered gave such detailed motions to their hunt. The same families may have lived in this region for over a thousand years, enough time to entrench their traditions, except rather than eland, Patayans would have pursued bighorn sheep. They are known to have set fire to bighorn carcasses in what were likely ritual acts, leaving behind charred skulls and horns stacked upon each other in the open desert. Little is known about these people, partly because universities that establish summer field camps prefer the higher, cooler parts of the state. What is known is that they buried their dead in caves and on the graves built cook fires and sleeping platforms, adding layers of their lives to the ground.
Now their offerings were in my hands. We passed them around, fireworks going off in our imaginations. These were not beads spilled accidentally in a rock shelter. These had been put here as offerings. I trusted the people around me, even the bead stealer. We all knew this was different. The objects inside the rock stack had been painted and lowered into the ground, maybe settled on the chest of a dead man Irvin was reaching around.
After making the circle, each artifact was returned to Irvin, who placed it back inside. We were somewhere between Harelson and Haury; curious, perhaps meddlesome, but not intending to take anything.
I wanted more, though. I knew there was more. I was caught up in the elation of discovery, my eye fixed on the pyramid itself. I wondered if it had some interior chamber such as those inside stupas in India or chortens in Tibet. It looked easy to uncap. I felt hesitation in my body, a sense of trespass, but my curiosity was overwhelming. I told myself that we would leave this place exactly as it was. Only a moment’s disruption, and we’d be gone.
I reached out and grabbed the flat, heavy topstone and lifted it off. I set it on the ground as dust spilled into a space inside the pyramid.
Irvin got off his knees and looked in, our heads touching. A nest of shadowy wooden objects lay within, and for a moment I just stared like it was a bottomless well, nothing but time down there. I reached in, touched one, lifted it out. It felt dry and old.
It was a bow, but made small, a miniature. I had never seen such a thing in the wild. It would have been a representational object, certainly an offering. Along its sides were etchings, lines and hatchwork. A shiver started at the back of my neck and spread around my body, as if gaps between centuries were closing.
The other guides stared at the bow in my hands. A bunch of Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns we were, enchanted by what a person might find in a cave. Irvin took the bow from me, studied it, and grinned with amazement. He handed it to someone else as I dislodged another, and then another, each with a different sign etched or painted on it.
I envisioned people gathered here, ceremonies invoking animal spirits, calling for a good hunt. The Patayans were here before reservations, before the Spanish and their horses, before guns. Dating back at least to the early centuries AD and probably long before that, the people who occupied the desert surrounding the lower Colorado River moved seasonally, growing crops along the river, hunting and gathering in the desert beyond. We were well within their migration range, a place they would have come to in the spring while their temporary encampments were being washed out by annual river floods. This cave would have been a key location, a place to take shelter for a period, or a place where young men came to mark their first kill.
“These are cool,” someone said, letting loose a laugh that somehow sounded mean. I looked up. I knew him only as an ugly man with an expansive, ratty beard and an unstable character. He was new to the company, and this was the first time he and I had ever walked in the desert together.
“I mean, it’s a real bow,” he said. “A real Indian bow. Have you ever seen one of these before?”
I said, “No, not out here.”
He looked at me and said, “You can’t tell me we have to leave these.”
My mouth was open. I needed a drink of water badly.
“I think they should stay, yes,” I said, my lips gummy with thirst.
“Get off your shit,” Ugly Man replied.
“I don’t think we should be stealing from a shrine,” I said.
“That’s pussy talk.” He glowered, making sure I did not get an edge on him. He had heard me with the bead stealer and knew I would be easy. “These people have been dead forever. When was the last time anyone was here? I mean, really? It’s been hundreds of years. You think they remember this place? They don’t.”
Earlier in the day Ugly Man and I had had a small altercation, and he had threatened to brain me with a rock. I had stared back at him dumbfounded, not sure what to say. He radiated aggression. I had to be careful. A fistfight in a cave full of hunting magic and ancient dead would not be good. And for me, a fight with Ugly Man would not end well. Though American born, he had just gotten out of the Israeli army, fighting Palestinians house to house. I, however, was raised mostly by a single mother and have a predilection for flowers.
“It’s a shrine,” I complained again.
He wagged the bow at me. “Listen, somebody else is going to find this. How could they not? And they’ll take all these bows just like that.”
“You want to take them instead?”
“Better us than them.” He glanced around to see who was with him, but nobody was. Ugly Man cocked his jaw. “Come on, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Trying to answer him, I felt like I was stammering, empty-handed. I had no argument for how I felt, other than that we should not take these things. They are not ours. But I had never had to come up with a reason why.
The day before, I had given up on the beads much easier, but this transgression felt a level deeper. Professor Young would have said that this was culturally significant and probably would have felt a justifiable responsibility to report it to officials, something I would not do for fear of the cave being excavated and its contents moved into storage. Randy Cohen would have called the cave a stand-in for the rightful owners and probably done the same as Young. What would I do?
I blurted, “Finders keepers.”
Ugly blinked as if confused. But he knew I had him. Being the finder of these bows, I got to say what happened to them. He studied the bow in his hands, my words more potent than a double dare.
“Oh, come on,” he said in disbelief. “Really?”
He glanced around again and saw he still had no supporters. It would have shamed him to take the bow outright, with nobody believing in him. He was in the wrong crowd and had to suck it in, looking at the cave ceiling, letting out a frustrated breath.
“OK, whatever,” he said. “You can keep your bow.” Later, I couldn’t get the rotten taste out of my mouth. Even as we dispersed to our own parts of the cave, each taking a bow to study in silence, I felt I had opened a door I should have left closed. I sat with my journal, my private room of drawings and words, sketching bows and arrows on clean, white paper, but I had trouble concentrating. When the shadows began tilting outside, it was time to go. Each person set a bow or two at the foot of the shrine. I gathered them and placed them back just as I had roughly sketched them from memory, the one with zigzags above the one etched with lines. It might matter how they were placed, I thought.
One seemed to be missing.
I had not thought to count them to start with, and now I wasn’t sure. The cache felt that much smaller, though. I looked behind me, saw everybody readying for departure. Ugly was stuffing something in his pack, having trouble making it fit. He got the thing in, slung his pack onto his shoulders, and moved for the entrance. Before he was out he checked his back, saw me watching him, and quickly looked away. I knew it then for sure: He had screwed me. He was making off with a bow.
My brain kept shouting as I watched him leave, Do something, do something, do something! But I had no plea that would convince him. Short of my stealing the bow back, which could involve physical violence, there was nothing I could do. The bow was now his.
What does it mean that
we take memories out of the ground like this, permanently emptying the land piece by piece? In describing the spiritual and physical landscape of North America, N. Scott Momaday once wrote that over the course of thousands of years of occupation people “died into the ground again and again and so made it sacred.” By one bow, this cave had now been unhallowed.
It felt like winter inside me. I was the one who had spotted this place to begin with, who had uncapped the small pyramid, and who had let the bow escape. I felt like a thief. I had to be more careful about my actions and the fine lines of ethics around me. It is, after all, only a matter of scale among beads, bows, and who knows what else. I reached out and put the topstone back, sealing the chamber, cutting my losses. I turned and walked out of the cave, where I was branded by sunlight. The desert opened the way it always does, welcoming all sinners.
CHAPTER 2
THE DESTINY JAR
It is difficult to know the right thing to do, or to even imagine there is a steadfast right or wrong when it comes to antiquities. A benign act in one sense becomes a trespass in another. I once observed an archaeological field survey where students were planting colored pin-flags at every artifact they located on the ground: potsherds, arrowheads, square nails, bits of porcelain, a curl of black leather from a shoe. The earth around them seemed busy with generations and cultures, made even more so by this fresh forest of calf-high markers. Researchers called numbers back and forth, checking off lines on a clipboard as they measured distances between specimens, recording every placement and relationship, a consummate record of context. The entire site could then be reconstructed in the lab, layers of time cross-referenced. At the end of the day, they packed every small find into bags and boxes and carried them away, a procedure known as a surface collection, or, to some, hoovering. Everything was sucked up. I later walked through this naked acre of land and it seemed as if nothing human-related had ever happened here, like a plug of history had been pried out. It felt dispirited and eerie. No students I spoke with had any reservation about what they were doing, and I, too, believed it was for a good cause—the accumulation of greater knowledge—but the end result was the same as everywhere else, a piece of emptiness left behind.
The removal of things from their places happens in so many ways, both meticulous and reckless, legal and not, that it feels like a flood coming off the land, a tide rolling back and exposing nothing. I have found empty territories out there, regions riddled with so many holes, spoil piles, and blown-open graves that the past seems mined. The feeling of violation is not limited to North American archaeology. I have felt the same uneasiness in Honduras, seeing the overgrown mouth of a looter’s tunnel in the side of a Mayan temple, and in Tibet, standing inside a lonely, ruined monastery where I found the floor pilfered into craters. It is how we treat history as a whole, willing to do anything to get it into our hands.
I once took some climbing rope into the east-central Arizona uplands and spent a season crossing the Apache reservation, north of the Black River, where I found cliff dwellings stacked inside vaulted canyons. It took days to get back in there, and I worked hard tracking cliff walls with binoculars or on the ground hunting for a telltale potsherd. The pottery led up, like a trail marker, to cliff dwellings overhead, and every one I found was empty. Most had been hit by pothunters, dirt floors dug wide open to get at burials underneath where the best artifacts can be found. Some digs had been smoothed over by archaeologists as if they had left a clean sheet over their excavations, most of their specimens now in storage at the Arizona State Museum. The land slowly changed for me as I found one cleared site after the next. No matter how thoroughly I searched, just about every site was disturbed, if not by diggers and shovels, then by people pawing with bare hands, leaving only crumbs of broken artifacts, corncobs, and gray, undecorated potsherds.
The people who used to live here are now known as Salado, manufacturers of bold polychrome vessels and fine loom-woven textiles. It is not even known what they actually called themselves, and though a careful search of the country reveals ancient boundary markers in rock art and ceramic styles, there is no defined area belonging to any particular people. They are dead and gone, and their physical memory has no defense other than various federal and state laws saying that their artifacts are a national heritage, U.S. property, and are thus not to be removed but by government decree.
A month after coming out of the wilderness, I was still wondering where it had all gone, imagining countless possibilities of curators, closets, and trash cans. That was when I walked into a reading room in a building a few states away from Arizona. With a book in my hand, looking for a place to sit, I noticed a display case full of dusty-looking objects on the other side of the room. I walked to it, and what I saw brought me up against the glass. Inside were so many whole pots it looked like a Mexican market. The colorful styles pinned down the location: they came from where I had been traveling. They were Salado. I wasn’t sure whether I should be more astonished by the coincidence or by how out of place they seemed. The only description was written in pencil on an index card.
These came from Arizona.
Looking closer, I saw one of the lesser pots had been split in two and then put back together. It was a classic pothunter’s mistake, a shovel driven straight through the center.
“You son of a bitch,” I muttered, shaking my head, almost laughing with disbelief. Someone got away with this archaeological loot, grew too old to hang on to it, and gave it to a public institution to care for. The institution did not know what to do with it, so they stuck it in a reading room with a vague note explaining its provenance.
I felt I had to do something to lean against this flood. Without much thought, I hatched a plan.
I carefully scoped out the reading room to see when it received the least traffic, and two weeks later entered with a satchel, a knife, and a bandana. My heart was beating up in my throat. The last time I had done anything like this, I was fourteen. I shoplifted a toothbrush from a neighborhood drugstore and barely made it to the exit without emptying my bladder on myself. I had vowed never to do anything like it again. Now I was in my midtwenties, and the stakes were much higher.
I moved quietly between tables and chairs. The lights were off. I kept swallowing my spit even though I didn’t have any. I checked the doorway over my shoulder, and checked it again. No one there. I went to the display case and took out my knife, thinking, Make this quick. I pressed the stone-sharpened blade into the molding and peeled it all the way around until the glass came out easily in my hands. I used the bandana to lower it to the floor, making sure not to leave fingerprints.
I reached in, snaked my hand between fat multicolored jars—clean, colorful specimens that could sell for a couple of thousand dollars on the open market. I picked the one split in half. It was smaller, less obvious, the size and shape of a cantaloupe, painted with red, white, and black designs. It was the one that seemed the most violated. A fine mist of dust had gathered on its shoulders. My fingers spanned it as I lifted it into the open where I could see the damage more clearly, the inside webbed with masking tape and hard gobs of craft glue, evidence of a cheap, inexperienced repair job.
A band of thieves we are, pillagers of time. One person stole this pot from the ground, and now I was taking it back. No paperwork, no drawn-out legal battles—this uncatalogued collection shoved off in the corner was not on anyone’s radar. So I was going to repatriate it myself. Who else knew the canyons of its origin better than I? I slipped the vessel into my satchel.
Inside the case, the absence was obvious, a gap left on a shelf. I reached in with the bandana and rearranged the remaining pots until they looked evenly spread, leaving faint circles in the dust. I leaned in my head and blew across the row of pots. The dust danced up and settled.
I took only one artifact from the case, a truly symbolic gesture, considering how unlikely it was that anyone would even notice it gone. As far as I could ascertain, the pothunter had lived for a bri
ef time in the 1950s in Arizona, where he probably enjoyed going out with a shovel over his shoulder, an amateur archaeologist. This time he had hit gold with a fourteenth-century Salado-culture burial site. He likely kept the artifacts in his house until his wife demanded that he move the dusty prizes out to the garage. Eventually he died, and then his wife died, and his children were left holding the bag. They donated the small collection to a public body, no name or plaque to go with it.
I lifted the glass, seated it, worked the molding with the backside of my knife blade so it appeared undamaged and firmly held the glass in place. My knife went back in my satchel and I turned for the doorway, then down a hall to a winding stairwell. Then I remembered the alarm. A pair of sensors hung on either side of the exit doors and could be set off by something as subtle as a magnetic strip stuck into the masking tape. Why would they tag an old, broken artifact like this? Earlier I had dismissed the possibility, but now, peering at the two big doors in the distance, I began questioning my logic. If I tripped the alarm, these halls would ring. Would I bolt or freeze? I imagined myself just standing in place, my face looking dumb as a dark stain spread down my pants.
I tried not to think about it. I walked faster, but the doors felt as if they were receding. Or maybe I was becoming smaller. I reached out as far as my arm would stretch and pushed against a brass plate. The door opened.
The alarm did not trigger.
I stepped outside and eased the door closed behind me, soft click. In cool, open air I turned and the morning sun touched my face.
