by Craig Childs
I picked up the basket, weighed it in my hands once, twice, and reached it back into the crack. It liquefied into the shade, and I let it go.
CODA
I’ve got this little box of archaeology. It’s a Christmas-card box from the 1940s with a snowman on it, cardboard split at the corners as if somebody had stepped on it. It used to be held together by a rubber band, but that grew brittle and broke years ago and has not been replaced, so when I pick up the box it’s like trying to move a tray of marbles, with arrowheads and pieces of pottery falling out. Because of that, I don’t move it much. It sits on my desk or migrates to a shelf. For a while I kept it in a file drawer. Every few months or so I stumble on it as I’m leafing through a stack of papers or peeling back books, and there it is underneath. I sometimes take off the lid to ponder its contents, either separating out each specimen like a curator or looking at them all at once and wondering, also like a curator, What am I going to do with these? Sometimes I even imagine leaving the box somewhere in the wilderness, a pile of lost pieces, a half-assed gesture of repatriation. I won’t, though. The box contains polished, grooved stones, and, as I said, arrowheads and potsherds, about forty objects altogether. There is also a clay pipe, its rim blackened from smoking, the same kind of pipe that showed up in the 2009 Four Corners bust, when a guy sold a handful of them for just under $3,000. Probably the best pieces, at least my favorites, are three nearly heart-shaped pendants cut and polished out of black slate, a kind of adornment you would have seen in North America several thousand years ago among big-game hunters. They are similar to the Archaic “bannerstones” more common in the East. Each is notched on one side, so they form different-sized mirrors of each other, and I wonder: Were they all found together? Were they all made at once? Did they come a great distance? I’ve thought about stringing one and wearing it, but they don’t feel as if they are mine to wear. They belong together in a box.
I received the box from my father, and he got it from my grandfather, who got it from my great-grandfather. As far as I can determine, my great-grandfather picked up the various pieces when he was living in southern New Mexico, probably strolling out in the dry grasslands or up at the rocky edges of mountains, shoulders bent, eyes to the ground. He was an inventor, a tinkerer, and held a patent on a kind of oil-lamp burner. When he died, he left a house and a shop in the town of Roswell, and it looked as if he had never thrown away a single thing. There were upholstery tools, radios taken apart, yellow-paged books, boxes of buttons, drawers of wires, windowsills crowded with rocks and sticks. Corridors were carved out of his artifacts with barely enough room to pass through. As a kid I used to be enchanted with his place, spending hours in free-for-all exploration, like Howard Carter cracking open Tut’s tomb at every turn. This box of his was one of the few things we saved.
My grandfather died years later, and the box was found in the absurd mess of his garage. When my father died, the box sat in an unoccupied bedroom that looked as if a mad scientist had been living in it for years. Now it travels through my own study, a space crowded with animal skulls, open books, journal articles stacked precariously atop each other, and a stone axe paperweight that Mario gave me in the Sierra Madre. It is difficult for me to part with anything that has a story. Even when a favorite eating bowl breaks, I cannot bear to dump it in the trash, as if it had never contained a piece of my heart. I take the remains into the woods behind my house and I pitch them, potsherds for the future.
I am reminded of an artifact hoard found in a Chicago suburb in the summer of 2009. An old man had died, and his son invited authorities to the home to deal with what looked like up to $10 million in mostly illegally imported artifacts. The FBI went through a living space crowded with boxes stacked five feet high, containing artifacts and documents dating back as far as the fourth century BC. There were parchments and manuscripts from Pope Paul III in the 1500s and Pope Paul V in the 1600s. There were letters from kings, paintings, figurines, sculptures, 3,600 items in all. The son said his father had been traveling to Italy for decades and shipping artifacts home, intending to sell them. But instead of selling, he hung on to the collection. “He fell in love with it, to be honest,” the son said. “He thought it was beautiful. He thought it was history.” The son believed these artifacts belonged to the world, not to an individual; that schism caused a decade of silence between him and his father.
Once the old man had died (after having personally translated more than a thousand of the manuscripts), his son made sure that the most valuable artifacts went back to their sources. Some 1,600 pieces were turned over to the Italian government. Though they disagreed with each other, father and son ultimately acted together, one reaching back in time to make a connection, the other moving it into the future. A collection that previously did not exist was privately assembled and then made public.
Donny George Youkhanna once told me, “If you want to send an arrow a far distance, you pull the bow as far back as you can. As much as you know about your ancestors, you send it forward. You must know what you have, know how it came to you, know where it came to you.”
My own great-grandfather would have been pleased to know I still have his box, his little hoard carried into the future. He was in love with the world. He wanted to touch it over and over, the same kind of involvement I saw in private collectors who paraded me through their antiquities, and in Haskell leading me through the storied artifacts of the Peabody. I saw it in the undergrad kneeling at the jar she was excavating in Arizona. It was in my father once upon a time, as he crouched on the ground, shotgun leaning against his shoulder as he picked up potsherds, showing me how to appreciate something old and in its place.
My dad lived at the edge of Phoenix. In my teenage years we would take walks together through the desert, finding heaps of abandoned appliances, washing machines rusted and riddled with bullet holes, signs of the oncoming city. People had been leaving junk in the desert for a long time, all the way back to pottery that I would spit on to see if it had any painted design. Together, my dad and I found natural shelters pocked in the sides of dry mountains, where ashen dust contained cooked rabbit bones and lithic scatter, and if we had a finer lens, we would have seen pollens of agave and corn from when the Hohokam farmed this area.
Sometimes my dad would stand in his backyard at night, the bud of his cigarette glowing in his hand as he looked at the city burning bright in the distance. He told me that he saw ghosts dancing out there. It was where the Hohokam used to live, all those graves that salvage archaeologists had yet to reach. I think he really believed he saw them. I think I believed him, too. Maybe it was just the brightness of the oncoming city he saw. Within ten years, the city would surround his house and pass him by, leaving him stranded among four-lanes and diamond-bright car dealerships.
I sometimes wonder what happened to those ghosts, now reduced to pieces of pottery and arrowheads nabbed from the ground, little boxes stuffed with artifacts we keep because we cannot bear forgetting.
Time was never meant to last. It couldn’t. It has no shape. It threads through your fingers like water, no stopping it for any longer than you can cup your palm. Beyond the small memories of our generations, there are artifacts, the substance of history.
Though there is a beauty to letting it go, opening your hand and letting time spill out, I am not immune to a desire that seems to be human through and through: grab something from the past and hang on to it as if it were all there ever was. One cannot fault the desires we have to hold on to these artifacts. But having every last one is overkill. Items become discolored by violation, issues intractable. Problems appear with no solution. This is why I embarked upon this book, looking for an answer.
Where did this journey ultimately lead? To the side of a road in New Mexico near where a salvage archaeologist I know had once cleared the way. I came walking alone along a gravelly shoulder under a big strip of sky, singular cliffs and buttes stretching into the distance. Whenever the sound of a car rose miles o
ff, I drifted away from the shoulder so they would not mistake my intentions. I didn’t want a ride. I was here to walk.
Pottery appeared on the ground, little gray sherds broken up by highway work. I walked a circle until I spotted a small red arrowhead. It was perfect. I picked it up, a fine piece made of jasper stone, for which I had named my first son. I held it against the sky, a fine little bird-point no bigger than a dime, something a person had knapped with great skill. You don’t see many of these. Finders keepers, I thought. Even after all this soul-searching, this was still the first thing that came to mind. It felt as natural as a greeting: Hello, you’re mine. You feel it when you see a coin on the sidewalk, a pearl in the sand. You reach for it and suddenly it is yours.
The arrowhead was road fill, a lost object. I knew right away that it would be a memorable marker for this day, this place on the side of the road, something I could take home. I had seen plenty of arrowheads, and they all cried out with their small voices, but this one especially. I could take it back to my son and give it to him as something to remember, a gift from his father.
Relishing it in my hand, I remembered having picked up something else that I once wanted to take home. It was a mani stone, an inscribed prayer from Tibet. I had found it a couple of years earlier a hundred miles from the nearest road in northeast Tibet, while navigating a remote river. I had risen early by the river’s edge where our rafts were tied off, and hiked up the flank of a 17,000-foot mountain. There I found a ruined monastery, something left from hundreds of years before. Walking through its shadowy interior, among crumbled adobe walls, I came out on the other side to a shrine that was stacked with thousands of mani stones. The pile was chest deep, each stone a smooth, flattened river cobble about the size of a fist, with one side painstakingly carved into a prayer or a holy illustration. I picked up one that bore the image of a bodhisattva and studied the round and plump face carved there, two slits for eyes and a classic little Mona Lisa smile, something a person had scratched by hand long before my arrival. Then I picked up another, a delicate style of calligraphy reading Om mani padme hum, a mantra to compassion. Judging by the age of the nearby monastery, these had been gathered here over many centuries. Each felt almost warm in my hand, like a small bird.
I wanted one. What harm could there have been? They were, after all, everywhere, prayers cast into the world. I thought I could do Buddhism a favor by carrying one home, spreading the word. I had been seeing them all over the countryside, so many they tumbled down creeks. I even found them scattered among bars of natural cobbles along the river, washed downstream where they formed faint outlines of script and strokes of lotus flowers at my feet.
I let myself do it. I chose the perfect mani stone out of the pile, a small sunset-colored oblong with daggered Tibetan script. It was a pocket-sized masterwork. But I could not help thinking of where I was, a visitor in a region where China had recently made its big sweep, melting down artifacts so the people would forget their past. Who was I, stumbling into their history with my grabby fingers? Where did I want to put my weight in this world?
After standing still for a moment, I slid the stone back into the pile and left it there.
The story of taking or leaving artifacts is as big as China and Tibet, and as small as an arrowhead on the side of a road that I now held in my hand. It is a shared, singular longing. I was aware of what would happen if I took the arrowhead. It would likely end up in a drawer with my son’s socks. It might go into my family box, clutter added to clutter, as likely to disappear as to make it through one more generation. I decided it was better here on the ground, where a person might come along and notice it, maybe next month, maybe 10,000 years from now. If those who find it leave it, the arrowhead could show itself again and again, a piece of time in a place.
I have considered the gamut of opinions, from archaeologists to dealers, from conservators to collectors, and no one has convinced me there is a better thing to do at this point than this: I flicked the arrowhead away with my thumb, and it landed back in the dirt. I left it there, wishing the earth to be populated with memory, a stone on the ground as bright as blood.
It’s late and it’s raining, my friends;
let’s go home. Let’s leave these ruins
we’ve haunted like owls.
—Rumi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude goes to friends and helpful readers, Laura Paskus, Angus Stocking, Adam Burke, and Tim Goncharoff. Thanks to the editorial direction of Geoff Shandler and Junie Dahn at Little, Brown for helping me break on through, and to my agent, Kathy Anderson, for the right suggestions at the right moments. I extend my deepest appreciation to my wife, Regan Choi, who, whether intended or not, informed every page of this book, if not every line. Finally, I am indebted to the scientists, amateurs, dealers, buyers, smugglers, conservators, curators, and diggers who trusted me, who listened, and who talked. Your candor has been critical to telling this story.
Parts of this book first appeared in different form in High Country News.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
The Matrikas of Tanesar appeared in Patrick Radden Keefe’s article “The Idol Thief: Inside One of the Biggest Antiquities-Smuggling Rings in History,” The New Yorker, May 7, 2007. Keefe reported on the movement of these statues, mentioning a trio of museums, including the Met, now in possession of three of these Matrikas.
CHAPTER 1: AMATEURS
Mention of shell trade in the prehistoric Southwest appears in much of the regional archaeological literature, and Arthur Vokes at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson is perhaps the most knowledgeable on the shells themselves. Discussing these shells, I relied on data from John W. Foster, “Shell Middens, Paleoecology, and Prehistory: The Case from Estero Morua, Sonora, Mexico,” Kiva 41, no. 2 (1975): 185–193, and Howard Ann Valdo, “Marine Shell Artifacts and Production Processes at Shelltown and the Hind Site,” in William S. Marmaduke and Richard J. Martynec, eds., Shell Town and the Hind Site: A Study of Two Hohokam Communities in Southwestern Arizona (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Research, 1993). I also counted on personal communication with Michael Foster and Douglas Mitchell, both archaeologists who did field studies at the main shell source along the coast of northwest Sonora. Their findings are reported in “Hohokam Shell Middens Along the Sea of Cortez, Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico,” Journal of Field Archaeology 27, no. 1 (2000): 27–41.
Discussion around James O. Young comes from his writings in Chris Scarre and Geoffrey Scarre, eds., The Ethics of Archaeology: Philosophical Perspectives on Archaeological Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). I directed follow-up questions to Young by e-mail, and in his responses he expounded on the level of cultural value one might ascribe to an arrowhead.
Contents of the cave were inferred from the late Emil Haury’s book The Stratigraphy and Archaeology of Ventana Cave (Tucson and Albuquerque: University of Arizona Press and University of New Mexico Press, 1950).
The case of Jack Harelson appeared widely in the press; the most detailed investigation comes from Bruce Barcott’s feature “The Strange Story of Jack Harelson,” which appeared in the October 2004 issue of Outside magazine and online at http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200410/native_america_artifacts_1.html.
The late Julian Hayden, one of the dusty and sunburned greats of Southwest archaeology, did much of the fieldwork on the Patayan culture. Background on the Patayan can be found in Jerry Schaefer’s article “The Challenge of Archaeological Research in the Colorado Desert: Recent Approaches and Discoveries,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 16, no. 1 (1994): 60–80, and in Randall H. McGuire’s mainstay book Hohokam and Patayan: Prehistory of Southwestern Arizona (New York: Academic Press, 1982).
One of the key resources for San hunting rituals is J. D. Lewis-Williams and M. Biesele, “Eland Hunting Rituals Among Northern and Southern San Groups: Striking Similarities,” Africa 48, no. 2 (1978): 117–134.
CHAPTER 2: THE DESTINY J
AR
There is a wealth of research and academic writing on the Salado culture in the prehistoric Southwest. One of the clearest descriptions comes from Linda Cordell’s Archaeology of the Southwest (San Diego: Academic Press, 1997).
The story of Sheng-yen and the Buddha head is, of course, far more involved than the version presented in this chapter. During my interview with him, Sheng-yen’s translator explained, “He says he is also a lover of artifacts. In his travels to India and China he has been to many caves and temples, and often he has seen statues where the body is whole but the head is missing, and he says it is really sad to see that. He feels that they are actually a reflection of the beliefs of the followers of that time, and the artists. When Sheng-yen’s followers gave this head to him he thought about people of that time, how they made sculptures to venerate the Buddha, and it made him sad that this head was not with its body.” At the ceremony unveiling the remounted head in China, Sheng-yen had addressed the crowd: “Many people claim that ‘starvation leads to theft.’ In reality, this is not entirely true. People’s covetous deeds and desires stem from their minds. Moreover, spiritual starvation needs to be addressed and dealt with even more than material starvation.”
References to colorfully painted pottery come from Patricia L. Crown’s book Ceramics and Ideology: Salado Polychrome Pottery (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). The archaeological relevance of these polychromes was conveyed to me by personal communication with Crown (University of New Mexico) and Barbara Mills (University of Arizona).
