by Craig Childs
Midday on one of these excursions we found a rocky alcove out of the sun and the six of us piled into its shade. We lowered packs off our shoulders, uncapped water bottles. Right away the place looked familiar, lived in. Sharper rocks had been cleared out of the way, and the low ceiling had a bit of fire-black, a sign that the shelter had been used by fire builders. I ran my hand across the ground where I found dry, hard nuts of bighorn sheep droppings. Between them was a small seashell, a little Olivella like a curl of white paper.
A seashell in the middle of the desert means a lot. The nearest place to pick one up is the coast some 150 miles away in Mexico. For well over a thousand years people had traveled across dunes and arid horizons to fill baskets with shells. They were a primary trade resource for the prehistoric Southwest, moving along organized routes where traders lived off of water caches, globelike ollas they had left in the sand, or rare natural waterholes that they decorated with rock art. The shells they carried were traded inland sometimes as far as 600 miles. This one was left behind.
“Check this out,” I said, holding it up for all to see. “Dead people.”
The others gathered around the shell as if I had found a diamond. It just takes one little thing to send my mind reeling. I saw copper-skinned people filing between isolated mountains, baskets weighted across their foreheads on leather tumps. They had bare legs, hard footsoles, and spun countless generations of themselves before asphalt or steel ever came to this land. They used to pour shells into graves as offerings and made them into jewelry. In good times, when civilization was running high, these shells passed through by the millions (at one Southwestern archaeological site researchers counted 3.9 million imported shells). Certain villages acted as production centers where artisans worked them into pendants or fetishes, carved and polished them, decorated them with precious stones. From there the shells moved into high-profile pueblos built like citadels across the landscape. All of this you see in one object, something small as a thumbnail.
We each began combing the ground. I found a few more shells. Bone beads started coming up, each hardly bigger than the polished head of a pin. One guide was methodically picking beads from the sand, crouching and hopping from one to the next, resting them two at a time on the skin of his thumb before cupping them and hunting for more. He collected a handful, then stopped to count them, quietly thrilling to his addition.
I watched him for a while, then asked, “You aren’t going to take those, are you?”
He looked up at me from under his wild, blond mop. From nights spent in Yuma together I knew him as a boxing drunkard, and from the field as a competent, intuitive traveler. We had stayed up nights talking about stars and miracles, and he was a good few inches taller than me.
“Aw, man, don’t start that,” he said.
“Come on,” I complained. “They’ve been here forever, just leave them.”
The others said nothing.
Gut reactions do not come from reason or deliberation. They are an instant reaction of the heart. Mine said the beads should stay. I felt that the cave would lose a bit of its magic if he took them.
“They’re beads,” the blond man said. “You know, trade beads. It’s what beads are for. They go.”
“What about their context—this shelter, this desert? They belong here.”
He closed his fist on the beads and said, “I am their context.”
I sighed. I had to let go. Arguing any further would just create animosity, not something I wanted on a walk with friends.
I waved my hand in the air, saying, “OK, OK.”
He retired to the back of the alcove, admiring his find, and I watched the sun move outside, wishing I knew the words to put the beads back.
To truly unravel the dilemmas of archaeology, there are many parts of the equation to understand. Why do we take things? Why do we leave them?
James O. Young has written eloquently on the competing claims over ownership. Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Young takes a frank and principled approach to archaeology, saying that artifacts ultimately belong to the cultures that made them. That is, they belong to these cultures if they are proven to have had a genuine, substantial, and enduring significance to the people. If they aren’t so significant, it’s finders keepers. For instance, a member of the Hopi Cultural Protection Office says that even a digging stick, one that might be found in a cave, is culturally significant, sacred in fact, and belongs in Hopi custody. Young contends that cultures cannot rightly claim every single thing produced by past members.
It would be untenable, a flood coming out of museums, private collections, and all those who bought trinkets at roadside stands or found them lying on the ground. We would all have to shake out our pockets to return what has been picked up.
In Young’s view, smaller or less important artifacts—like a random bead—are subject to the discretion of whoever finds them (depending on local laws, of course). Young writes of an arrowhead that his mother dug from her garden in suburban Vancouver, one now on his mantel: “It has no particular significance to any aboriginal culture. If it were a rare and unusually beautiful example, or had considerable ritual significance, the situation might be different. As it is, I do not act wrongly in keeping it. I own it.”
When I asked about his decision to keep the object, Young replied, “The arrowhead was in a state of nature. Keeping it would be no different than picking a flower that grew wild in my garden. If it were an item of huge cultural significance, the situation could be different.”
But huge cultural significance is not easily quantifiable. Who decides? He continued, “If I found the artifact in a park or other public property, I think that I would offer it to some public body.”
This is almost a universal response: find something and pick it up, and if reasonable ethics prevail you turn it over to the proper authorities, handing it to a park ranger who is likely mystified as to why people keep grabbing objects and handing them in, filling so many drawers and boxes it seems a waste. It is as if we cannot stand to leave things the way we find them. There is a widespread assumption that removing an artifact is preferred, whether you take it for yourself or not. Jimmy Carter, when he was president, amended a crucial antiquities act so that it would have a loophole for arrowheads. Being an arrowhead collector himself, Carter wanted to make sure you could still scratch one out of the dirt and take it home, connecting yourself with the history of your country by owning a piece of it. (Carter’s clause does not legalize arrowhead-hunting on public lands, but merely says that one cannot be penalized for it under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. One can be penalized under other laws, however, meaning it is still illegal.)
I took the question of ownership to Randy Cohen, who writes a weekly ethics column for the New York Times Magazine. Cohen answered smoothly: “In ethics, truly abandoned property, by which I mean something deliberately abandoned or that can’t be reunited with its owner, is in fact up for grabs. It follows the finders keepers rule. So, if you see a $20 bill on the street you’ve got as much claim to it as anybody, if there is no way you can reunite it with its owner. But if you find a guy’s wallet and it has some ID in it, you can’t keep it. You have to make a good faith effort to return it. And so the question with antiquities then becomes well, is there a legitimate owner? And in my view there is. Cultures have a claim on their significant objects.”
And when the bloodlines that made the artifacts are long gone, as was arguably the case for the beads in the rock shelter? Cohen argues that there is a kind of continuity that makes the locality where the artifacts are found a stand-in for the owner. They should remain in place. He told me, “There is much to be said for keeping archaeological works in the location where they are found, because their meaning is often very much tied into place. It’s a really good thing that the pyramids are still in Egypt. Our understanding of them is aided by that, deepened by that. So that becomes a kind of argumen
t for keeping it there.”
Cohen asked what I do with my finds, and I told him I leave them there. I might take a picture or make a sketch in my journal, but I don’t tell anyone where they are. I prefer to walk away and let time fill back in behind me. Too much has been taken already. We don’t need any more. I have been in the bowels of museums around the country, and the sheer volume of artifacts sitting in dark storage is overwhelming. Enough is enough.
“That’s an interesting way to look at it,” Cohen said. “I don’t have a counterargument to that. Once there’s an excess of this kind of stuff it gets very tricky. What do you imagine happens to what you leave behind?”
“If somebody else finds it, it’s probably gone,” I said.
When the heat of day drifted off, we emerged from the cave and walked. The sky fell to sunset. A gibbous moon passed over us into the evening, unveiling pale shadows of saguaros and cholla. We traveled across vacant magma fields, dark rhyolitic char brought up from inside the earth. When the night grew too long, we set a scattered camp. The bead stealer and I sat up and watched the stars.
Though it was not what I wanted, I said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the beads were meant to travel.”
After all, I tried to convince myself, they were only beads, perhaps a small thing to quibble over. I certainly didn’t find Young at fault for keeping an arrowhead his mother found in the garden.
“Maybe,” my companion agreed.
Neither of us really knew.
Legally, he was not allowed to take those beads. In the United States, it has been illegal to remove artifacts without permission from public lands since 1906. That 1906 law reads that in order to “appropriate, excavate, injure, or destroy any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity, situated on lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States,” one must have government permission.
In the open desert, however, other laws applied. Older laws. Conscience and gut reaction. There was no government but the elements, no secretaries but us.
In the morning we broke camp and flushed into the desert like birds. We moved quickly, coming down from mountains into boulder-bottomed arroyos. Shadows cleared out as the afternoon heat came on. Our movements slowed. The sun seemed to have halted, a marble stopped in the bowl of the sky. As our rest stops became longer, I scanned the horizon with a pair of field glasses and spotted a bit of shadow rippling half a mile away.
“There,” I said. “A cave.”
We changed course, crossed a field of bony ocotillos over a ridge. The cave was up a slope of broken rock, hard to spot, just a wink of shade. When we climbed inside, it was as if we were stepping into a ballroom. Our shadows danced into an enclosure much larger than I had expected. One of the guides set off running, making gymnastic leaps with her arms thrown outward. Elegant scarves of dust sailed behind her.
“We could live in this place,” another said, his voice boosted to echo through the room.
The ceiling was made of domed bedrock that emitted a faint hum, an echo of dust devils riding across the desert far away. I walked in and crouched over beetle tracks in the dust, tiny notations. It was an undisturbed space, centuries of powdery accumulation. Beneath the dust were subtle shapes, as if a deep snow had fallen on sleeping figures. As I walked farther, I tested my weight, pressing into a desiccated sponge of buried wood-rat droppings and cactus needles. Below were muted spaces, loose fill. It was in caves like this that people used to live and bury their dead, not just a day’s stopover but an actual habitation site.
“People are buried in here,” I said.
The others stopped, looked around, let their eyes adjust. Judging by the size of the cave, it must have been an important place, a grand shelter probably used for 10,000 years, and beneath us lay unseen graves, skeletons supine, surrounded by whatever offerings were given to them. Usually you would find a cave like this and it would be a war zone of looters’ pits, yet there was not even a quick cathole in here.
In the 1930s, the eminent Southwest archaeologist Emil Haury and his field-hardened sidekick Julian Hayden excavated a similar-looking place, Ventana Cave, also in southern Arizona. They came out with Stone Age utensils and textiles, Neolithic pottery and jewelry, all highly preserved by the region’s aridity. Ventana Cave dates from Paleo-Indians to Indians, a rare view into continuous human history from the eighth millennium BC onward. They found the skeleton of an infant bundled inside a twine bag and placed in a nest of grass, and near that more adult burials with quivers and arrows, shell pendants, necklaces. A mummified man was unearthed with earrings still hanging from the flaps of his earlobes and a clay plug piercing his nose. It was not just the dead that came out. One of the cleanest records of North American occupation was exhumed from that cave, its contents painstakingly illustrated, measured, photographed, and installed in museum storage.
Emil Haury isn’t the only man who explored caves like this one. There are also men like Jack Harelson, a former insurance agent who fancied himself an amateur archaeologist. His house was heavily stocked with illegally obtained artifacts he had either picked up or dug, including one of the oldest pair of sandals ever found in North America (around 10,000 years old).
Harelson’s biggest dig was Elephant Mountain Cave, an expansive natural shelter in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, its mouth partly obscured by scrub and boulders. He excavated the site in the 1980s, spent several years privately removing the floor with shovels and screens. It was his own personal Atlantis. Among the many hundreds of artifacts he recovered, Harelson dug up a 2,000-year-old sealed torso-sized basket, heavy with objects inside. Showing at least some restraint, he left the basket unopened until he got it back to his garage, invited some friends over, and peeled it open before them. He pulled out a bowl, a knife, and a net used to catch rabbits. Under that was a mummified boy who had been about four years old when he died, and below his leathery corpse was another mummy, that of a girl about ten years old with long black hair, her body tucked knees to chest.
At a later point the mummies’ heads were pulled off, the bodies bagged and buried in Harelson’s backyard.
For his part in this Harelson was caught and jailed in 1996, hit with eighteen months in prison. Two thousand objects were confiscated from his house. Harelson defended himself by saying he was an amateur archaeologist and that he intended to hand over the material to a museum when he was finished. (He had produced other finds before—mammoth bones donated to the Nevada State Museum, for example. But turning over artifacts would have implicated him in a crime.)
Harelson’s fine was a record-breaking $2.5 million—$750,000 for restoration and repair of the cave, and $1.75 million for the scientific and cultural value destroyed by his excavation. As he passed down this heavy sentence, the judge in the case was heard to say, “You are not an amateur archaeologist. You are a common thief.” (Harelson, incensed, later hired a hit man and made a list of those he wanted killed: the judge, the lead officer in the case, two former business partners, and his ex-wife, who had handed over incriminating evidence. Harelson paid for the first kill with $10,000 in raw opals, but the man he hired turned out to be an undercover agent. Harelson was sentenced to a further ten years in prison.)
I walked the breadth of the cave we had found, well aware of why Harelson is vilified and Haury and Hayden have been celebrated. One made collection a private pleasure, taking history for himself. The others added their finds to a greater body of knowledge, now accessible through libraries and museums. The distance between these two ends of the spectrum seems like forever, but it is not.
In the back of the cave was an oval-shaped enclosure, a natural vestibule. I stepped into it and found Irvin, a fellow guide known for digging up grubs for eating. He was standing before a pyramid of stacked rock. The pile was waist high and slowly being reclaimed by the earth, flushed in centuries of dust. I walked up beside him.
“Kind of out of place,” Irvin said.
“Shrine,” I sa
id. Why a shrine? Why else would people put a neat, tall rock pile back here? It was something special, ceremonial, as many archaeologists would say.
“Well, let’s see,” Irvin said. He rolled up his sleeve, got down on his knees, and shoved his arm into a wood-rat burrow at the base of the pyramid. He went nearly up to his shoulder, his cheek pressed into soft blow-sand.
“Rattlesnakes,” I warned.
He puffed dust away from his mouth and said, “I know.”
“What’s in there?” I asked.
He was concentrating, feeling around. I wanted it to be my hand reaching into the ground, but I did not have the brazenness. He came out holding a fistful of dust and a short wooden rod only slightly longer and fatter than a pencil. It had sinew wrapped around it. Irvin looked at the object for a moment and then handed it to me before sticking his arm back down the hole.
The sinew had turned brittle. There were stripes of red paint, a hematite pigment.
“It’s a painted arrow shaft.” I laughed in surprise. The Patayan people, who likely put it here several centuries ago, were no-nonsense desert types, rarely dabbling in decoration. This was a rare find. Irvin’s hand was rummaging around in the archaeological record, looking for more, upsetting the lay of strata that would help a researcher if this place were ever excavated. But it was a wood-rat burrow, and I figured rodents had already been churning up the record, probably denning in coils of baskets down there.
The other guides started coming around, asking what we were doing. I passed them the arrow.
Next Irvin came out with a wooden stub. He passed it up and I blew off dust—another painted projectile. This was a hunting shrine, had to be. Rituals would have been held in this cave, maybe a particularly potent hunter buried here.
In many of the old cultures, hunting is a sacred act. Among the San people of South Africa, when a man shoots a poison arrow into an eland, he bridges himself into the animal. It may take days to track down the dying eland, and during that time people are quiet around the hunter so that the prey will not be startled. He drinks little, tries not to urinate so that the animal will also not urinate and expel the poison. If it is a first-time kill, a young hunter will start a fire and use its ash to draw a circle on his forehead and a line down his nose, the same markings as those on the face of the eland.