by Craig Childs
I once spoke with an old Zen master named Sheng-yen, who had returned a stolen seventh-century Buddha head to its shrine in China. He had been given the head as a gift by lay followers (purchased for around $1 million on the New York antiquities market), and when he saw fresh cut marks on its neck, he knew that there was a grotesquely damaged statue somewhere. Sheng-yen invited archaeologists to study this gift until they determined its source, and he took it back. At a Chinese monastery, in a crowded ceremony, the head was returned to the shoulders of a serenely seated statue known as Akshyoba, the Imperturbable Buddha.
Speaking through a translator in Taiwan, Sheng-yen told me he returned the head out of sadness. When it was in his possession, he thought about people who had seen this statue centuries before him and how they made sculptures to venerate the Buddha, and he could not bear leaving things broken the way they were.
It was a reaction similar to mine in Salado territory and at the display case where I first saw this jar. Something had been terribly severed.
I took the jar to the Apache reservation. I had a place in mind, a network of canyons. Dark of night, several days into the reservation, I was awake listening to the breathing of two companions in nearby sleeping bags. They were along to help me with this journey, dead asleep after another long day of walking. I crawled from my bag, went for my pack, and pulled out the jar. I took it behind a boulder and flicked on my headlamp.
I could not hear anything but the rub of my clothing. It was silent and winter cold. The three of us had been walking many miles of cascading, boulder-filled canyons to get back this far.
Squatting with a headlamp, I studied the jar’s broad, open mouth, its round body meticulously painted with designs. I wondered if all the hands that had ever passed across it were somehow stored in the clay in the same way solidifying liquid holds sound waves. Somewhere in this vessel there was a room inside a cliff dwelling—a firelit space with a hard-packed floor, low ceiling, smoke-blackened beams. I’d seen enough to imagine what it would have been like.
The jar came from a time when this area was both a contested landscape and a cultural melting pot for most of the Southwest. It was before Cowboys and Indians, before Apaches and Navajos. This is older history: the famously disappeared Anasazi in the north had just disbanded, vacating most of their settlements and sending an exodus of migrants outward. It is believed that many took up residence in this part of Arizona and mixed with local groups to become the Salado, using secluded canyons for guard posts and high citadels. Population centers erupted across the countryside, large, red-walled pueblos ringed by moats of canyons. It was a Tolkienesque scene of masonry compounds and fortresses in the cliffs.
As I slowly turned the jar I searched back beyond the pothunter and his shovel, back to hands setting it into a grave near the head of a corpse stretched out beneath turquoise and shell offerings. Before it had been buried, I imagined a woman setting out this jar at a meal, the painted designs an attractive addition to the room.
Colorful, decorated vessels are not just pretty pots, they are pieces of social architecture. In their designs and styles you would have known who the owners were trading with, what region their family came from, and perhaps even what societies and phratries they belonged to. (Women buried in this area have been found with an abundance of northern wares, which suggests that they married their way south, bringing ceramics with them.)
In my years of traveling the Southwest, I would read messages on the ground in potsherds and in partial vessels exposed in open washes or spilled from high doors of cliff dwellings. I was always struck by how they changed from one physiogeographic region to the next: in the north were bold black-on-white ceramics in tight-painted geometry and to the south reds and buffs with highly stylized figures of humans and animals. These objects are calling cards from home landscapes. When they are removed, the markers of those places are lost. We look down to see who has been here before us, the knowledge not simply for our own edification but for a transmission from the past, a voice for those who once occupied this land. When we look down and they are gone, so are the people.
With almost every last marker taken, I wanted to bring one back. But I was starting to have doubts. I was no Zen master. This pot had not been given to me. I had stolen it.
“Am I doing the right thing?” I whispered.
The jar told me nothing. For all the significance I attach to artifacts, they are notoriously silent.
Something made a noise down the canyon, an animal moving through brush. I set down the jar, flicked off my lamp. It was an animal of size, a black bear or mountain lion coming to drink from a rock pool a hundred yards away. I stared into the dark, my skin cold. I tucked the pot back into my pack and returned to my sleeping bag. The animal must have smelled our camp or heard me, because it did not come any closer. I lay awake, unable to sleep as I watched stars arc between canyon rims.
Remarkably, the tide has been slowly turning. Native groups have been increasingly seeing repatriations from institutions around the world. The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) has required the return of the dead and the funerary objects dug up with them, which is a major feat, considering that the Smithsonian alone had been holding the remains of about eighteen thousand individuals.
It feels like trying to pick up after a war while the war is still ongoing, the digging still happening. Many tribes are facing complications because they have no ceremonial framework for returning the dead and their many offerings to the ground. Few had considered it even possible. Who could think of their past being dug up and then slowly regurgitated back into their laps? It is a messy process, one of unexpected transgressions.
When, in 1995, a group of Hopi working on formal repatriations visited the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, they noticed in the card catalog a reference to poisons used on artifacts. As a regular preservation technique, museums had used an assortment of particularly volatile toxins to saturate perishable items in order to prevent decay. It was frequent practice up until the final quarter of the twentieth century, and nobody thought much about it even as NAGPRA was going into effect and tribes were getting these objects back. Kachinas and other small items were already being sent back to the reservation in Arizona and had been reintroduced into ceremonies, handled by the elderly and by children. Meanwhile, museum guidelines clearly warn, “Unless you can confirm that an object is safe, handle all museum objects as though they were treated with a toxic compound.” But nobody had told the Hopi their ceremonial objects had been poisoned. How do you even say something like that?
The ones that had gone back were tested as soon as the problem was revealed. They showed dangerous levels of arsenic and mercury. Artifacts repatriated to another tribe then came up with unhealthy levels of DDT and PDB (fumigants for killing fabric pests), naphthalene (mothballs), and lindane (neurotoxic insecticide). A tribe from New York decided to check fifty-seven medicine masks, and found all were contaminated with arsenic.
Tests continued, and other tribes began finding their objects impregnated with ethylene oxide (which can cause seizure, coma, lungs filling with fluid), methyl bromide (which can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, convulsions), and sulfuryl fluoride (which can cause respiratory irritation and neurological symptoms). When the Elam in northern California found thirty items laced with such concoctions, a tribal leader said, “When our dance regalia are worn out, our tradition is to send them back into the water. If they’re toxic, how are we ever going to get rid of them?”
It is alarming to open a drawer in a museum looking for ceremonial objects such as feathered rattles and woven sashes, and find them sealed inside plastic bags with bright red warning labels reading POISON. The irony is that nobody meant any harm by doing this; these preservation techniques were done by the book. In trying to preserve sacred artifacts, museums perverted them into death carriers. Trying to do the right thing and to follow the law, they then gave them back. Mistakes pile o
n mistakes. We often do not even know what we have done until much later. How many wrongs could it possibly take to make a right?
As I traveled with this jar in my pack, I could not help imagining the mistake embedded in my action, perhaps a researcher in the future finding the display case and bemoaning the one missing pot, a key to some unforeseeable mystery. I had broken a whole grave assemblage. Wherever I left the vessel, it would say a hell of a lot more about me and my ideal than it would about the lives of the people who made it. As Cornelius Holtorf, a radical and forward-thinking archaeologist at the University of Lund, in Sweden, put it, archaeology is significant “not because it manages to import actual past relics into the present but because it allows us to recruit past people and what they left behind for a range of contemporary human interests, needs, and desires.” I was putting this jar back to push against the flood, which means I was recruiting it for my own desires. I had made myself another player in the artifact wars. Good intentions or not, I now felt like a looter.
I tried to shake these thoughts from my head, focus on navigating my feet through shadowy fields of boulders, but they stayed with me. Once the artifact is out of the ground, it’s pretty much nothing but trouble.
Already on this journey I had fallen and broken two fingers on my right hand and splinted them with dirty bandages. After that I had taken a harder fall when my boot slipped and I tumbled, popping three ribs on the side of a boulder, the dislocation making the sound of a gunshot in my head as I hit the ground. I cut a strip of fabric and tied it around my chest, wincing to breathe. Usually I am not so clumsy. Walking canyons like this since childhood, I had never before broken a bone. Maybe it was this monkey on my back, this jar messing with my head.
I had made a thief of myself, and my moral compass was spinning. Before this I had come to treat archaeology delicately. I strived to be a ghost. But now I had stepped into a trap, a double bind. I had made a new mistake to correct an old one. Welcome to the ethical morass of archaeology and repatriation.
Years later I spoke about these issues with an archaeologist, a Navajo man named Will Tsosie from Arizona.
“My upbringing and my culture say we only let go once, only put people away once, and hope no one will disturb them,” Tsosie said. “We hope they will slowly return to the earth. The objects we study are also in the process of returning. Everything lives, everything has a spirit—grass, rock, vessel—and at some point they turn back.”
Tsosie told me that once while visiting a museum, he noticed Navajo ceremonial masks on display, and they struck him as very out of place. He said, “It was just like when my father was young, when he was part of a relocation program to get jobs in cities. He got shipped off to Chicago, where he went to the Field Museum, and there he saw the same thing. He spoke to the masks, asking them, ‘Why are you here?’ saying, ‘You don’t belong here.’ I didn’t know it then, about him, but I did the same thing. I said to the masks, ‘What are you doing here? You probably miss the voices, you miss the songs, you miss the landscape. You should go home.’ It made me very sad. People don’t realize that certain things have power. They have spirit. They need to go back.”
I explained to Tsosie that I once returned a jar to the wilderness, and he laughed, a bit uncomfortable with my confession. Was I a hero for what I had done or a fool? I did not dare ask him.
Peering up a ravine in the midafternoon, we could make out wood beams high over our heads, hints of a ruin. Dumping our packs, we went up one after the next, picking our way along a steep chute. It was not a death-defying climb, just hard, exactly what the original builders had in mind when they chose the spot. It was a small outpost, a turret inside the canyon. The structure was made of stone and mud, walls half dumped in on themselves. It had just enough purchase on the cliff to maintain a one-story building the color of the rock behind it, its entryway painstakingly engineered into a number of small interior rooms. We ducked in.
Pothunters had been here. Graves lay upended around us. By the looks of things, the pothunters had camped here for a night or two. Off in the corner was a cache of their garbage, fish tins and glass bottles. I picked up a Texsun grapefruit juice can punched with two triangular holes. They had been here in the 1960s. If they had left candy bar wrappers and twist ties dating back a few years, I would have considered it trash, fisted it all into my pack and hauled it out of here. But a Texsun can with its brittle paper label was just a bit older, its story stretching almost a generation out of my reach. That made it worth something: not a full-blown artifact in my mind, but not entirely rubbish. I set it back in the bed it had made for itself over the past few decades. It was now telling the story of pothunters, another layer of history in this ruin.
There is no getting around the fact that age gives objects value. What is your high school yearbook worth? Right now, next to nothing. But bury it in a vault, then dig it up in a few centuries, and it will be precious, a tangible, almost private record of the past. Keep it for a few thousand years and it will be priceless. Why? Rarity and time. Year by year our possessions vanish. We lose the bows and arrows, the buffalo coins, the rotary telephones. Only a select, sometimes accidental few make it through the breach, and those few take on meaning from the stories they carry.
Even the pothunters who had been here were a piece of history in themselves. They were probably like me: adventure-seeking archaeology nuts, the sixties version. Back then, you could hardly sell a pot for more than $25. Digging would have been motivated by raw curiosity more than anything.
This was not the place to leave the jar. Modern diggers would reach this ruin soon enough, screening out the old spoil piles, picking up whatever the sixties pothunters had missed. In a modern market where artifacts from around here go for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, the game has changed. I wanted to put the jar someplace where no one would see it for many years, maybe centuries, maybe never, make it part of the landscape and take it out of the loop of ownership.
I had no documentation to tell me where exactly the jar had been unearthed. Putting it “back” was my own notion. I could get it close to the original spot at least, adding a bit of color to the land. We traveled in a canyon bottom, a sinuous cut through solid stone not designed for human movement. Everything was large, boulders the size of elephants, steps too big for stepping. Coming to a twenty-foot plunge, the other two threw their packs over the edge, let them sail and land with a cavernous humph on the gravel below. My pack was handled differently. We set up a rope, sent a climber down, and lowered it into outstretched hands.
These canyon bottoms were wearing us thin, a hard way of travel. It was feeling more and more like trespass every day. I did not want to be seen by anyone. How would I possibly explain my cargo? Usually on reservations I would run into someone on horseback, or sit with an old man in his hogan drinking coffee, discussing options for foot travel. Usually they would tell me allowable routes to follow. This time I made sure we did not meet anyone: we were going on instinct into the shadowy interior. This made for challenging travel—roping packs through gorges, climbing hand over foot.
We decided to go up in elevation, put a few miles under our belts in higher country, maybe find some ruins to explore up there. We just wanted a break from what was so far about sixty miles of dogged travel. We climbed through a side canyon into sunlight, and there we saw him, a man silhouetted against the sky about five hundred feet above us. With a .22 rifle slung on his shoulder and another guy standing near him, he looked like he was out hunting. We must have made an impression, three travelers wearing behemoth packs springing up in the middle of nowhere. When we gave a friendly wave he pulled the rifle and with one hand hoisted it over his head. He looked like a beacon, the classic Apache pose. We stared at him for a moment. Seeing that we did not get his point, he sighted his rifle and popped a few bullets into the boulders above us.
We got the message, darting like deer down the nearest exit. We clambered over ledges and across fallen debris. He kep
t shooting behind us, aiming at the sky for all we knew, fastening the locks on a door we were not supposed to open. We had permission to be here, a stamp from the tribal council, but paper is not worth much in the reservation interior. He did not want us dead. He just wanted us gone. We obliged, returning to the depths.
The shooting revived us. Springing on each other’s heels, we flew down into a deepening gorge. At the hard stone floor we jogged to a halt. Panting, we glanced at one another.
A nervous laugh.
“What was that?”
“A hunter.”
“He didn’t want us here.”
“He might have had better aim if he knew what was in your pack.”
That night we slept just below a crumble-faced cliff dwelling, the one spot flat enough to camp in a thicket of boulders and mountain mahogany bushes. Again I was awake in my bag until late, my head tilted back so I could see darker shadows inside the upside-down ruin. People have told me they hear drums in canyons like these, something out of the past. I never have, but I do not doubt we each hear something different. I tried not to think of ghosts, just pleasant thoughts, appreciating the richness of stars overhead. But I kept staring at the ruin. I felt like a kid under his covers fixated on a closet door.
I imagined Salado graves in the ground beneath me, skeletons not yet dug, grave offerings in situ. It changes a place to know that it still has physical ancestry, its most vivid human recollection more that just shovel marks and Texsun cans. Even if you don’t see it on the surface, you feel the oldness in the ground, artifacts buried and untouched. I thought that if there were such things as ghosts, I was stirring them by passing through here with this jar, as if moving through a curling fog.
In the morning we swept up our gear, brushed away the marks of our sleeping, and left. This was far enough. One more day of walking beyond the pothunted ruin and past the man with the rifle had brought us through miles of twists and turns. This was the right terrain for leaving the jar: plenty of cliffs and hiding places, and deep enough into the reservation to weed out most casual travelers.