Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  China will someday want the contents of this library back. No formal petition has been offered, but an official at the Chinese embassy in London recently said, “When the time comes I think the Chinese authorities will request the return of these relics. It’s hard to say when that will be. Little by little, we will expect to see the return of items taken from Dunhuang. They should go back to their original place.” The British Museum has balked, saying that if they gave these items back, they would open the floodgates for all sorts of collections that would be called into question. But stonewalling by a slowly declining nation in the face of a rising China can suffice only so long.

  China is now becoming a major purchasing force in the global antiquities and art market, buying back what was once taken. At a 2010 sale at Christie’s in New York, roughly two-thirds of the 611 lots up for auction were acquired by Chinese dealers and collectors. As the New York Times arts correspondent Souren Melikian noted, “They bought across the board, in every category, at every financial level.” The winds appear to be changing.

  It may take another Stein and Yuanlu, another Xuanzang, to loosen this collection from the grip of the British Museum. It would be a beguiling thing if all that was gathered from Yuanlu was returned, the library reinstalled in its cave, the entry sealed with bricks, and dust allowed to drift over the door until we once again forget what was there and why.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE CHOSEN ONES

  The role of archaeologist has changed over the years. If Aurel Stein had tried to get away with his acquisitions in the twenty-first century, he would simply have been arrested.

  Randall McGuire, a vocal researcher from Binghamton University in New York, has written, “At the dawn of the twenty-first century ethics in archaeology are not simple. They are very complex, conflicted, and confusing. Today, ethical questions and dilemmas are more about relations among people than about things.” McGuire wrote about performing fieldwork in rural northern Mexico, where locals were convinced he was looking for treasure. They wondered why else a man and his crew would toil under the summer sun all day. At one point, a little boy ran up to McGuire asking if he was from the United States. McGuire said yes, and the boy asked if he was looking for gold and silver. McGuire shook his head no and began explaining what archaeologists really do, how they are picking up specimens to better understand what happened in the past. Before he could finish, however, the boy ran off, unconvinced.

  Sensing unrest and misunderstanding, McGuire decided to hold a town meeting. He explained to about a hundred people that he was there with support from the National Geographic Society, his task being to study the remains of ancient maize farmers and shell-jewelry makers. He promised that he was taking nothing of value from them, no gold or silver. Many remained unconvinced. McGuire eventually shrugged off this misunderstanding as a sort of entrenched local mistrust, but what he failed to realize was that the locals were right. He was indeed looking for treasure, only they could not imagine that it resided in the bits and pieces he was picking up.

  Like so many others, archaeologists have proclaimed themselves as rightful stewards and recipients of the past. And also like so many others, they value their treasures for unique reasons. It used to be more about big finds, statues and manuscripts. Now it is about everything. Information is treasure—not the object alone, but the way it fits into the larger fabric of its context. If it is touched by someone else (even another archaeologist of less propriety), if it is moved, altered, taken, or destroyed, the larger picture becomes unrecoverable. Archaeologists rely on eighth-inch strata, reflections of X-rays, and the arrangement of isotopes. Was the artifact found in a ceremonial setting, a kitchen, or a grave? Was it left randomly along a trail or placed in a special room? If we had access to the original library at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, it would now take years to unload the room—the position of every manuscript taken into account, layers of time added up, dust analyzed for its properties. Not exactly Stein’s quick dash. Science has become ever more delicate, requiring virgin context, which puts archaeologists at extreme odds with modern collectors who are not so concerned with provenance, or pothunters who dig at will.

  Archaeologists have mounted an unflagging offensive against looters, collectors, and anyone else on what is seen as “that side of the fence.” Many researchers refuse to consider using artifacts or collections that did not benefit from methodical, scientific study. The notoriously bad provenance of sellable artifacts is equated with bad science, and any involvement with it (such as helping date or even price a dubious piece as Roxanna Brown did) is seen as reinforcing a market that wrecks the archaeological record. Many of the leading voices in archaeology decree that even communicating with collectors or dealers is a sin. The illicit hunt for fresh antiquities is the number one reason that archaeological sites around the world look as if they’ve been hit with a locustlike plague of looters, and archaeologists often see themselves as a force working against this destruction.

  In 2000, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) named stewardship as the first priority of any professional archaeologist. As SAA official ethics now state, “Stewards are both caretakers of and advocates for the archaeological record for the benefit of all people; as they investigate and interpret the record, they should use the specialized knowledge they gain to promote understanding and support for its long-term preservation.”

  But one must ask, preservation by and for whom? The idea of stewardship in scientific circles is nothing new, and it has been employed in the past with shameful results. In the late 1800s and early 1900s scientists went out like armies to “save” Native America from perishing. They believed cultural memory would soon wink out as tribes and clans fell to Manifest Destiny. Saving it meant preserving artifacts and oral histories for later study, and the work was done with the best of intentions. Ceremonial chambers still in use were gutted of objects, as if snatching crosses, candles, and vestments from a church. Totem poles came down. Moccasins and sandals were packed into boxes. These things were bought for a song, paid for with tobacco, window glass, lumber, or a handful of dollars. George Peabody, founder of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, one of the greatest purely ethnographic museums in the world, wrote in 1866 that “in view of the gradual obliteration or destruction of the works and remains of the ancient races of this continent, the labor of exploration and collection [should] be commenced at as early a day as practicable.” The sentiment was shared around the world, and it targeted many cultures. Pygmies and yak herders and Aborigines were all thought to be inevitable casualties of progress. On their way out of existence they were to leave their things at the door, to be taken care of by stewards.

  No one counted on population rebounds and crowded reservations, Indian colleges and casinos. No one thought indigenous cultures would survive to start demanding their things back, for example Tasmanian Aborigines pressuring European museums for the return of “historical ancestors,” and Australian Aborigines getting back the head of one of their leaders that had been stewarded in London as an anthropological curiosity. Native Americans gained the political foothold to markedly change laws governing archaeology in the United States. When they say they want something returned, it is no longer considered idle talk. After the 1990 passage of NAGPRA, museums in the United States were legally mandated to prepare all qualifying Indian remains and sacred objects for repatriation. What the tribes want—within the letter of the law—they come and get. (In the case of artifacts that have been bathed in poisons to prevent their decay, they got more than they bargained for.)

  Though institutions assume public relations smiles about the matter, they have been strained by the demands of NAGPRA. Often understaffed, they receive little or no additional funding to cover the workload, while the backlash has denied archaeologists permission to analyze human remains they dug themselves, battling over access to the likes of Washington State’s Kennewick Man with all the legal force they can muster. One archaeologist who declined to be
named confided in me, “NAGPRA? It’s just a big pain in the ass.”

  Considering the inconstancy of cultural mandates and different interpretations from within the science, what does stewardship even mean? Archaeologists and anthropologists relying on artifacts are, in fact, users as much as they are stewards. They employ the archaeological record for their own ends, reconstructing the past in a rational, institutional manner. If an artifact is to be dug out of the ground, I would want to see it in an archaeologist’s hands. What with their careful observation and skills of long-term preservation, they are a far cry from pothunters. But since archaeologists hold themselves up as self-selected stewards, they invite close scrutiny.

  A rooster tail of dust came up from a dirt road along the ochre margins of the Painted Desert, about forty miles east of Show Low, Arizona. Near the road’s end, a truck stopped at a bald promontory. Six diggers got out. Loaded down with shovels, hammers, and toolboxes, they trudged up a trail with the resolve of firefighters. At the top, they set down their things at the edge of a settlement that had been buried for eight hundred years, a circular great kiva with a cluster of residences built off to one side. The crew had come to empty a portion of this site, something they had been working on for weeks. Tarps were yanked off, ballast rocks rolled out of the way, and they went straight to work. Down on their knees, they had a long way to go and a short season to get there. They had come from the University of Arizona in Tucson to study ancient settlement patterns, and what they were digging would offer an even finer-grained lens through which to view the people who had lived on this spot on the map.

  As the day’s heat came on across a scorched landscape, dust devils began stirring. One whipped around the edge of a trench, a whirling pipe of fine sand that caused the woman at the bottom, an undergrad, to look up from her small task in the hard-packed earth. She wiped sweat and dirt from under the rim of her sunglasses. The dust devil crossed the excavation, then fanned into the air, gone. The woman scanned the horizon—a yellow-colored land rolling into the distance—and then fell again to her assignment.

  “What’s that?” I asked, crouched at the edge of her trench.

  Troweling around a circle, she said, “The mouth of a corrugated jar.”

  “Intact?” I asked.

  “It’s got some cracks in it. Looks like it’s shattered. But I’ll bet it’s all here.”

  She worked at the jar like a sculptor, brushing and carving, her motions delicately expressing the vessel’s gray curves. I watched carefully, excited just like her to see another patch of jar that had not been touched by daylight since it was buried centuries ago. As British archaeologist Michael Shanks once described, “Excavation is striptease. The layers are peeled off slowly; eyes of intent scrutiny. The pleasure is in seeing more, but it lies also in the edges: the edge of a stocking-top and thigh. There is the allure of transgression—the margin of decorum and lewdness, modesty and display.” Indeed, like every excavation I have ever attended, this one was tinged with a little impropriety—an absolutely vulnerable thing very intentionally being revealed by an outsider—yet it happened with an extreme delicacy that made it seem somehow excusable, not as rough and raunchy as the actions of a pothunter, who could have this thing dug up in less than a minute. (The jar being exposed today was a ceramic type Earl Shumway once said he would have tossed just to watch it smash.)

  The dig boss opened a file box, pulled out folders, and marched around checking off his lists while I watched the gray jar slowly emerge. It was being done right, the entire trench taken down like layers sliced off a cake, a purely scientific approach with a full record made of every eighth of an inch. As the PhD overseeing the project told me, the work is state of the art, every imaginable measurement accounted for, every object removed (along with samples of the dirt and the pollens in them). They were not taking the entire site, only a handful of trenches, like a crossword puzzle pulled from the ground.

  What was happening here was completely legal, ordained by government minions. There was no fear of federal agents, and no motion detectors or hidden cameras to signal a trespass.

  The first piece of the jar came loose, and the woman drew it out of its setting.

  “Here,” she said, passing the piece up to me.

  It was an eggshell curve about half the size of my palm, slightly blackened on the outside from cook fires, caked on the inside with soil; perhaps there might have been a bit of cornmeal preserved in its pores. I held it up between thumb and forefinger, thinking this was a remarkable moment: a vessel that had sat inert for centuries was suddenly put in motion, its round shape coming apart for the first time. This kind of thing becomes an addiction. Some archaeologists I know—a minority—have trouble staying within strict excavation boundaries. They want to follow a pottery cluster they find, or a lens of charcoal and fire ash, which leaves them slicing off extra layers of earth to see what is behind the curtain. These kinds of diggers are referred to as “deep sweepers,” and it is not a term of endearment. Archaeology is called a discipline for a reason. You stick to your job.

  That summer I was going from dig to dig, hopscotching around the Southwest to get a taste of different excavations. I visited the Homol’ovi Project near Winslow where for a couple of days I helped excavate in a fierce desert wind, and then refreshed myself at the U of A field camp up in the cool, piney woods above the Mogollon Rim. From there I spent another several days on a tenth-century great-house excavation in the Four Corners, unearthing a chamber under the big sky.

  I was an archaeology groupie. Summers before, I had worked as a base camp cook for museum excavations in Colorado. I would do anything to get close to these peepholes that were being dug in time. It was, indeed, a privilege. Even if I only excavated mouse bones, potsherds, and horizons of fine, gray dust, the sense of revelation springing out of the ground was well worth it. (Not to mention enthusiastic camps awash in evening talk about ancient wars and migrations. And, of course, there were nights spent in poorly lit bars where excavators were far more raucous than the usual ranchers and drunks.) I have secretly wished to be an archaeologist myself, but I do not have the patience for the scientific tedium involved, which would test model-ship builders. Though digging with them felt like a free pass to get underground, afterward I would scrub my hands hard with water, as if trying to wash off blood.

  The woman in the trench asked if I would start a bag for her. I snapped open a brown-paper lunch sack and slid the sherd inside.

  Though most of the site was being left untouched, ostensibly for future scholars with better tools, these trenches in particular were to be emptied down to the last speck. The sterile dirt that remained was then to be poured back in to fill the trenches. Because no one knew what crucial piece of data might be revealed later in the lab, what argument might hinge on the most meager find, all specimens were going to the university.

  Archaeology is like getting into people’s closets, or finding what is lost under the couch, all the dirty little secrets. What hammers did ancient people use, what soup bowls and fire starters? Where did they give birth, and in what holes did they shit (entire master’s degrees are spent on desiccated chubs of ancient human feces). Everything must be known, down to nips of charcoal, strands of old cloth, and gnawed rat bones. From these, the past is reconstructed, as if to remind us in agonizing detail that we are not the only people who ever lived.

  There is a glitch, though. Much of what has been dug remains undeciphered and unreconstructed. Excavation spoils are piling up. Every major public repository in Arizona will have topped out in five to ten years, a problem faced by institutions across the country and around the world, yet more keeps coming in as cardboard boxes and bags of specimens heap onto each other in storage.

  Smaller collections across the country can hardly afford to curate what has already been delivered. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers oversees 50,000 cubic feet of artifacts from field recoveries, and three-quarters of this collection is improperly stored, most of
it steadily deteriorating. It would take $20 million to put it in order. One university kept an annex of anthropological collections in a two-bay car wash, a triage location that was the only place they could find. A windstorm blew the roof off and in came the weather, damaging much of the collection.

  Speaking to what is being called a “curation crisis,” Bob Sonderman, a senior staff archaeologist with the National Park Service, complained of too many chicken bones and fire-cracked rocks he and his colleagues are charged to preserve. He said, “In a climate where space is equated with money, archaeologists must face the hard reality that we simply can’t keep everything.”

  In the United States, we now have over 200 million individually catalogued objects in the public trust. In addition, there are 2.6 million cubic feet of artifacts stored in bulk whose individual pieces have yet to be catalogued, which comes out to about 1,300 semi truckloads of potsherds, beads, bones, shells, feathers, and buttons. This is what institutional obsession looks like. When you wander through repositories with tens of thousands of vessels indefinitely awaiting analysis, you get a picture of what archaeology has truly created: not a diorama of the past, but a diorama of ourselves. It is our own desire for the past stacking on itself.

  Mark Varien, a thoughtful scholar of the Southwest, once said that the science is an effort in preservation, both of the object and of antiquity itself. Archaeology must be either saved in the ground or collected in a professional manner, or else it is lost to us. Varien believes in the authenticity of touch. He heads a research center that frequently brings the public to work at sites, which is where he sees people truly connecting with the past. He told me, “Increasing population, ongoing development, and the forces of nature all destroy parts of the archaeological record every day. Think about the world 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now, and tens of thousands of years from now. Imperfect as it may be, the record of human occupation on the planet, as preserved through archaeological documentation, is important for understanding human behavior now and in the future.”