by Craig Childs
We took a side canyon back to a hollow space where the land boxed itself in. We ditched our packs and carried the jar by hand. We spotted a niche in the rock and climbed to it, passing the vessel from one person to the next. The space was free of dust, out of the weather, and practically invisible, a slender-shadowed aerie in the rock. I intended this vessel to outlast the hardiest searchers, its craft glue and masking tape slowly dissolving, the jar eventually falling in two in the land where it was made.
I held it for one last moment, sorry to see it leave and glad all the same. Then I reached the jar into its shelter and left it there. I had no words prepared, no ceremony, had never done anything like it before and was damn sure I would not do anything like it again. Robin Hood, my ass. I felt I was making more of a mess out of an already intractable situation. By picking it up and bringing it here, I had claimed the jar as my own. The only thing this theft-and-return stunt did was make me more uncertain of how to strike a balance.
CHAPTER 3
TREASURE HUNTERS
It is our hands. They want to touch everything. With fingers like these, the kind that turn pages and pick up the head of a pin, how could we ever call them off?
It is our bodies, our eyes, the rivers of senses. We relate to the world physically. The rest is just talk.
A man, a registered nurse from Phoenix named Robert Schroeder, wanted to see a boulder in Arizona so heavily embellished with rock art it is known as Newspaper Rock (one of many in the Southwest). This one, though, is off limits because over the years visitors have damaged it. Too much touching. Now you can approach it on a trail and look over a railing (a spotting scope helps for detail), but Schroeder wanted to get closer.
He and his girlfriend left home in the dark on a Christmas morning, figuring no one would be there. He parked his car at an inconspicuous location and walked in. Along the way, they found many boulders covered with rock art, more than he had ever imagined. He was jubilant. He took note of patterns of sand frozen in a wash along the way and marveled at how it snowed that day, his first white Christmas ever. It was one of the most magical days of his life. At least it was until he ran into two federal rangers with sniper rifles and a bullhorn. He had not realized there were motion sensors they had tripped.
Schroeder and his terrified girlfriend hid behind dry brush, which only made matters worse, while the rangers waited them out. Soon enough they were handcuffed, and his camera was confiscated. He was embarrassed and angry. He certainly knew he was doing something illegal—thus the hiding—but he felt that with earnest effort and a delicate touch, one should have the right to visit a rock art–covered boulder. He said he saw so much rock art that morning, it was a testament to the people who lived here. What most visitors see beyond the railing is one boulder marked up with images. They don’t realize the much larger context, the entire landscape an ancient book. His cost: apprehension and fines.
Schroeder told me, “When one looks at pictures of petroglyphs, say in a book or on a computer, they simply become aware of them. But to stand in front of one, to see it up close and realize the amount of skill and effort and time it took to make it, that’s when one appreciates the petroglyph as opposed to simply being aware of it.”
One wonders how to balance our deeds. How vivid must our appreciation be? How close do we need to get? A site meant to connect people with the past by means of informative displays and closed-off areas gives a picture of a lonely petroglyph-covered boulder when it is actually one of hundreds. But allowing greater access goes far beyond budgeting for parking pullouts, trails, law enforcement, and conservation. Humans being what we are, rock saws would come out and people would start carrying pieces home.
I have paused in museums at ancient religious sculptures with their lips and feet worn away from centuries of being kissed and knew that if I leaned too close, an alarm would sound or a guard would stop me, and for good reason. We would kiss these things out of existence. There are so many of us now that we threaten to devour the world with all our touching, starting with the things we adore most. At the same time, we obviously yearn for contact, and I fear what would happen if we were cut off from a distinctive, on-the-ground relationship with the past.
I belong to a gang of relic hunters. For one solid decade we spent seasons scouring the wilderness, climbing in and out of every piece of ground before us, lowering and raising our gear on ropes. We were looking for unaltered archaeology, sites still crisp after centuries or thousands of years of quiescence. No railings, no trails, no signs, no glass. That is the treasure we were after. If Schroeder had been with us, he would have seen plenty of rock art. But we were after portable artifacts more than anything: baskets, pots, and sandals left behind, precious belongings that people cared for, then cached away. Mostly we found clean desert boulders and many long months of walking. We touched so much of the country, at times our fingerprints wore clean off. Part of it was the rush of discovery, the surprise of a sugar-white spearhead or a thatched cradleboard half submerged in dust. It was about being human, moving like a human, finding what humans left behind. You would come to a place to sit and rest, and then realize someone else had done the same a thousand years earlier, knapping an arrowhead and leaving a ring of flaked stone at your feet. Then you would glance around, looking down corridors of horizon and at the shape of the sky, your body taking the perfect place of someone long ago, as if you were the shadow. That is the kind of privilege we were after.
We did our best to leave hardly a footprint, priding ourselves as sort of cat burglars of the desert, the kind of people who would break into your house, look in your medicine cabinet, uncap the spices in your kitchen to smell each one and put them back. No one would ever know we were here, nothing taken or out of place. There was one time we moved an artifact—a ninth-century ceramic canteen—and two days later buried it twenty feet away in hopes that no one would steal it. But even that felt awkward. I returned some years later to put the small round jar back, tipping it under the shadow of a rock outcrop just the way we had found it, as if putting the moon back in the sky. I wanted it there because it was what Schroeder had risked his freedom to see: a thing just as it had been for all those years.
One late autumn a few of us were trekking through the banded red-and-white sandstones of southeast Utah. My wife, Regan, had split off one morning to explore for ruins. She was five months pregnant, just beginning to show, and she said she wanted some time alone. We said we would meet back up in a few days, and I left with Dirk, a former street cop gone wilderness, a midforties Hayduke. Dirk and I knew each other’s moves as if we were twin monkeys leaping and crawling through this stony wonderland.
“We’re looking for a wrinkle in the land,” said Dirk when we stopped for lunch, his back leaning against a rock, a rubber-gripped knife unfolded on his knee for whittling a hard block of cheese. “Something out of place, a notch or a crack, just enough to catch the eye.”
He cast his voice from our balcony of rock jutting hundreds of feet above a canyon floor. The region had already been picked over by other artifact hunters, cleaned like roadkill. But even here we found routes that looked untouched, and ruins left to their own decay. We were constantly searching for the keys to these inner houses. When we stopped talking, we listened to the stiff sound of wind through bristling ephedra bushes.
We closed up lunch, and I hoisted my pack onto my shoulders, dodging around a crooked boulder to start up a route to the canyon rim. Dipping my head I noticed an arc of shade beneath the boulder five feet from where we had been sitting. I dropped another inch, just enough to see the outside curve of a jar beside a stone metate. The jar was half buried in a drift of sand. The metate, an old grinding stone, was placed beside it, and they looked as orderly as a fork and spoon on a table.
“Bingo,” I said and fell to my knees. “It’s a pot.”
“The hell you say,” Dirk said.
A smile filled my face as I looked at a delicate seed jar with blow-sand up around its si
de, its mouth a willing little O aiming into the air. “It’s right here.”
Dirk was immediately beside me kneeling in red dust. I had my pack half off, crooked on my back, too amazed to finish my business.
“No shit, there it is,” Dirk said.
Like the barbarians we were, Dirk and I locked forearms, grinning wildly. It takes years to come across something like this, a perfect jar beaming before us.
The sting of discovery slowly settled. I did not pay much attention to the metate. I had seen plenty of metates. It was the jar that had me, an early type known as Deadman’s Black-on-Red. It had a broad hip and a restricted entry, one that would allow only your fingers to scoop seeds. This design dates back to the very beginning of pottery in North America. In local excavations, seed jars like these are generally found one per household. They were family heirlooms passed generation to generation. Thinking back to my own household, my father even left me a seed jar when he died, a rare Pueblo piece made by Acoma potter Lucy Lewis that now sits on my desk and collects sewing needles. Even Regan came to our marriage with her own seed jar, a red narrow-mouthed vase from her Korean grandmother. If not a jar, it might be a favorite platter or a polished jewelry box handed down. It is what you grab when your house is burning.
I could see it happening here a thousand years ago, a village emptied on the mesa top, people moving away with whatever they could carry. It was a time of intertribal warfare and migration, some settlements abandoned gradually, others burning as people ran. What could not be carried was either left for pillage or hidden in the canyons.
One side of the jar and the entire lower half were buried. Dirk used his fingertips to delicately flick sand away, just enough to reveal the extent of black paint scrolled around its mouth. Doing this, he exposed a tiny crack, and then two small drill holes to either side of it. A tight, weathered braid of yucca fibers had been laced through both holes. It was a repair job. The crack had formed while the jar was still in use, and its owners had drilled holes (probably with a bone awl), then cinched the crack tight. They had cared for this jar. It had been loved.
Time squeezed tighter for me. Rings between years touched until they became almost transparent as I saw a hand guiding these artifacts under this boulder, sliding them out of sight. I did not want the setting changed. After taking a pot to put it back, I was not so comfortable with inserting myself freely into the much longer life of any other artifact. I preferred to back away, nothing altered, no one notified. We were never here. No longer would I open any shrine.
Unexpectedly, Dirk said he wanted this one moved, “just far enough that we can protect it.” We had noticed hairline cracks, which would eventually cause the jar to come apart like a dead flower, ceramic petals dropping in the dust.
“Look here, there’s a drip that lands on it,” Dirk said. He traced a finger to the jar’s backside where maybe five or ten drops of rainwater got in every year, wearing away a hole. He said we could give it another several hundred years of life if we got it to better shelter.
I countered, “What, we hide it someplace else so that nobody will see it for another eight hundred years? Why not leave it where it is? At least let it die here.”
I liked the clutter of the land and the pathways secreted inside it containing pinpoints of human memory. I liked the way the jar was sitting here, telling its small story to no one for all this time. And now Dirk wanted the story changed.
He said I was being a sentimental pansy.
He was right, but I saw it first, so it was my call to make. Finders keepers. I told him it was staying. Disappointed, Dirk said he was at least going to cover it with a rock so it would not be seen by anyone else, thus preventing it from being stolen. He came back and fitted a plate of sandstone into place, but it looked terrible, just what I’d expect from someone trying to hide something. It felt like a railing. Dirk’s inner cop, the guy with the bullhorn and sniper rifle, was coming out. He did not want any unscrupulous soul touching this jar.
“Get that out of there,” I said.
“It needs something,” he objected.
“It doesn’t need anything, Dirk,” I said. “It’s been here for eight hundred goddamned years!”
The curator in me agreed with Dirk, while the fatalist happily watched this jar sink into oblivion. We didn’t solve our problem right there. It was late in the day at that point, and we agreed to come back in the morning. We backtracked into the next canyon before nightfall and found Regan. She appeared a few hundred feet above us, her head poking over the red bulb of a cliff near where she was camped. We shouted up to her that we had found something beautiful that she must see.
Like a Neolithic Romeo I called to her, “Meet tomorrow in the notch between canyons!”
With cracked lips, she blew a kiss.
The next morning we found each other. Dirk and I took Regan to the boulder, where she paused before noticing the jar and gave a great smile. Waddling slightly from pregnancy, she dropped her pack, hoisted up her belt loops, and squatted. She went down on her knees, then elbows as she crawled beneath the boulder, running her eye along the jar’s rim. For a good ten minutes she remained down there, face to face, admiring our discovery with soft, diagnostic words.
She hauled herself out, wiped off her hands, and said, “Did you guys notice it’s shattered?”
“We saw the cracks,” we said.
“But did you see it’s completely come apart?” she repeated. “The only thing holding it together is the sand.”
Dirk and I knelt down for a closer look. She was right. The jar had already fallen apart but was packed in place by what the wind had blown in. If we had tried to move it, it would have crumbled in our hands like our own breaking hearts. We would have destroyed it.
I told Dirk, “See.”
Dirk still wanted it saved. He found a new rock to wedge into place, blocking the view. He complained, “Some monkey’s going to come along and take it.”
“So?” I asked.
Dirk snorted, weary of my whimsical liberalism.
Regan let us go on for a few rounds. Then she said flatly, “You guys need to stop arguing and leave the thing alone.”
We looked up at her. She was serious, and you do not deny a pregnant woman anything, especially on your knees before her. The jar was not ours. It belonged to someone who died long ago, who put it here so that no one else would take it. We got what we came for, evidence of the past that we could get up close to and surround with our senses. Our job here was done. We did as Regan said, packed up and followed her out of there, Dirk’s rock dropped to the side, a mark of dispute now part of the story. Like those before us, we never returned.
CHAPTER 4
UNSEEN THINGS
Long ago people lived on the eroded surface of a region known today as the Four Corners, their horizons studded by abrupt rock towers and faraway blue mountains. The people now have many names, for no one recalls what they might have called themselves. The Hopi have one word for them, Navajos another, archaeologists yet another: Hisatsinom, Anasazi, Ancestral Puebloan. Around the tenth century, these people went from smaller sites and scattered hamlets to constructing monumental architecture, ceremonial features up to five stories tall that took up acres on the ground. They were domesticating animals, relying heavily on agricultural surplus, and were not far from early metallurgy.
Based on the languages of their living descendants, it seems that at least seven different tongues were spoken among the people. Some had completely different roots, which implies that they came from distant places to make a cohesive prehistoric culture. In this dry and formidable landscape the people once numbered around 20,000, near carrying capacity for the marginal growing climate of the Four Corners. Some years they produced an abundance of corn, squash, pumpkins, beans, and amaranth. In other years they nearly starved.
They made beautiful ceramics, pendants, fetishes, and loom-woven textiles—millions of objects that now fill shops and decorate museums and private
collections around the world.
The teeth of these people have been found worn down and glassy due to the amount of sand in their diets, the result of frequent dust storms and the ubiquity of sand across the entire region. Since life expectancy was tied directly to dental health, the average person lived only to around thirty. When their teeth were gone, they were dead.
Those who died either went into the ground or were scattered upon it, and those who were buried usually went with an array of offerings: jars, mugs, weaving tools, weapons, and jewelry.
Their presence in the Four Corners was abruptly truncated late in the twelfth century. The reason: increased population, a debilitating drought, violent social upheaval, and a penchant for cultural mobility. Within a period of ten years all construction stopped throughout the region, and the people were gone. Most left for other lands in the south, where they became the modern Pueblo tribes. In the walls of the kivas they left behind were ritual items. In shrines on hilltops and in caves they planted centuries of offerings. The apparatus of an upstart civilization became buried in red sand, the very sand that had blown into their mouths, weathering them back into the ground.
This is how an archaeological record is formed.
What you do or don’t do with it from there is well worth considering.
There was a woman named Susan, a senior writer for the Los Angeles Times. She wanted to do a story on the way we traveled in this storied landscape. A few of us were heading south from Utah into Arizona. We told her to come find us at a resupply, a grocery store in Blanding, Utah, where we arrived wild and unshowered. Susan showed up in tennis shoes and a backpack. She had a sleeping bag, a jacket, a notebook. Other necessary equipment we loaned her out of our own gear.