Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  Heading west along the rutted back roads of Cedar Mesa, we gave her a crash course in detecting archaeology. Carrying backpacks, we dropped off-trail, leading her along canyon edges and down boulder-choked routes to find potsherds and stone flakes, showing her how you can follow scattered pieces to their source and locate a settlement or prehistoric work area, hunting blind, or ambush spot. As soon as she found her first piece of pottery with her own eyes, she could barely look up from the ground. She could hardly walk ten feet without bending down to pick up something, see what it is.

  Middle-aged, smart, and well traveled, Susan could have made us look ridiculous in print, and she once commented that it was as if we were Lost Boys exploring Never Never Land. Yet she was also gripped by the magnificence of the terrain and the possibility of discovery. Yes, we were a band of smelly yahoos, but we had a point. You start getting an eye, and the land opens up. If you had such a skill, would you not wander through the world peering at the history beneath your feet?

  In the morning, we climbed through the layers of a canyon and entered a spacious natural alcove. A small thirteenth-century household had been built here, masonry footers and the hatchwork of wattle-and-daub construction half standing. On the floor was the carnage of a fresh and precise dig. A pothunter had been here only a few months before us and made a hole in the center of the floor. Pueblo ancestors one or two thousand years ago had dug out an underground chamber, put something in it, and capped it with an adobe plug the size of a dinner plate. The cap was broken to pieces and discarded. Inside there had been a den of soft juniper bark used as packaging material. I lowered my head into the hole and saw about ten gallons of empty space patted down with plaster to keep out moisture and rodents. The digger had pulled out the bark hand over hand and tossed it aside like a kid tearing wrapping paper off a present. What had he found?

  It could have been the mummy of an infant still in its cradleboard. Or maybe it was a loom-woven blanket, a clutch of polished fetishes, a feathered headdress. Whatever it was, the original owners had swaddled it carefully and packed it away, and now it was gone.

  I moved over, gave Susan room to look inside.

  I said, “Most of them got dug out a long time ago. I’m surprised this one lasted so long.”

  “What was in here?” she asked.

  Dirk, crouching at the hole. “Something important. Something they wanted safe.”

  “Who did it?” Susan asked.

  “A pothunter,” I said. “Maybe somebody stumbled on it by accident.”

  “Like one of us?”

  Dirk, knowing he was being quoted, rose and said, “We’re not diggers.” He explained his ethic, saying that we might push away a skim of sand, but we don’t go deeper than that. Deeper makes you a digger. She asked what was wrong with digging, and Dirk answered that some things in the world should just be left unseen. We don’t have to dig up every last thing. He said that artifacts out here are messages. Finding what past cultures left behind is as close as we can get to meeting the minds of the ancients. But you’re respectful of them. You wouldn’t go into a graveyard and start digging. That’s what this whole place is, a giant graveyard.

  Looking at the mess of juniper bark, I thought of stuffing it back inside, then covering it with handfuls of adobe to at least clean up the mess, but putting it back empty would have felt like a parody, a shell game. You don’t just toss the lid back on the box, hoping to shut off its emptiness.

  The rest of us poked around the space, finding broken adobe footers of old rooms and granaries, while Susan remained standing at the hole looking inside like a girl peering down a well, her imagination flying. When we left we had to call her away.

  Early one afternoon Susan and I lost the others in our party. Each drifted away to his or her own discoveries, while the two of us explored the sun-bright south face of a canyon. We shed our coats, tucked them in daypacks. Susan pulled out her notebook and asked me questions about why my companions and I travel so relentlessly, what drives us to look in every crack for the hope of some old thing. I told her it was the same reason she couldn’t look up after her first potsherd. We’re infected.

  A row of stout cliff dwellings appeared around the bend, little buildings mortared into fissures a few hundred feet above the canyon bottom. They were sturdy dwellings, with doors you could barely fit through. I urged Susan not to try the narrower doors, explaining that those rooms are closed, too easy to brush against the wood and plaster, over time wearing out the structure’s integrity. I showed her to a wider entrance, and we ducked inside to find a low ceiling of soot-black wood beams riddled with fresh corks. Each cork had a catalogue number. Susan touched them, puzzled. Archaeologists had been here. They had taken core samples, dating the wood down to the very season it was cut. To fill the holes, they pounded corks into place and smoothed them flush to the wood.

  This was a known site, its floors smooth from traffic, maybe a few hundred people a year. There is no law against exploring sites like this as long as you are careful. You take off your pack so you don’t accidentally brush against a wall, and you move slowly through the dark, rectangular entryways without touching their wooden lintels or smooth adobe jambs. I have learned over the years just to go barefoot. Susan and I drifted apart through the rooms, until I found her several minutes later sitting on a floor in a dim space where wood rats had been living for centuries. It was a blocky room, with a ceiling about four feet high. Daylight reduced to bare shade around her. I could see her face, the red of sandstone reflected in her cheeks. She was sifting her hand through blow-sand, little pills of wood-rat droppings slipping between her fingers. I sat down with her. There was just enough space that we were touching slightly, a comfort that comes between people after a few days in the wilderness. As she greeted me, her hand kept moving through the dusty floor. She sent her fingers a little deeper each time, as if looking for a toy in a sandbox. I was about to remind her that if she was thinking about digging she should stop, but she hit something hard. I stared as she began sweeping away dirt, exposing a flat, round stone. It was flush to a plastered floor.

  She tapped on the stone, put her ear to it.

  “Hollow,” she said.

  I could hear it, too. There was a space beneath.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Looks like a doorstone,” I said, surprised. Given the number of people who had probably visited this room, it seemed unlikely they had missed anything. Maybe they forgot to look, assumed everything was taken.

  “Doorstone?”

  “A hatch, like the adobe plug that guy pulled up.”

  She nodded and kept brushing sand away. I felt suspended in disbelief, as if gravity were beginning to fail. How could this be?

  She ran a finger around the outline of the stone, pressing the dust to reveal a mortar seal, while I tried not to let my mind flood down beneath her, tried not to go shoulder to shoulder with Susan and say, By God, you found something important, not bad for a beginner.

  I did not want to say anything that would cloud this moment for her. She was the one who had found it, not me.

  “Come on, you have all the answers, what do you think it is?” she asked.

  “Artifacts,” I said. “Whatever that guy was looking for in the juniper bark.”

  “They’re still here?”

  “Probably.”

  She traced the stone again with her finger, making its shape clearer, and said, “Would you tell anybody about it?”

  “You mean archaeologists?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. I never do,” I said. “Most of the ones I know don’t want to hear about it. They’d have to make an assessment and probably remove the contents so they wouldn’t get stolen. The ones I know are tired of that game.”

  I could not help watching Susan’s hands, begging her in my mind to cover this back over and leave it alone. Yet I wanted her to open the space, to pry back the stone and show me its contents. My heart was starting to beat too
fast, and I was afraid she could see it through my shirt.

  Whatever lay beneath was offering itself to her, but she was just a tourist, someone passing through. Could all these centuries possibly lead only to her?

  “You could just get your fingers under it and open it,” she said.

  “You could,” I replied.

  “What should I do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Come on, you’ve been in this situation before. What should I do?”

  I shook my head. Having once uncapped a small rock pyramid to see what was inside, I had no right to stop her.

  She let out a frustrated breath.

  I did not want to force my own ethic on her. I had done it before, only to find later that people had defiantly pocketed a pretty potsherd or a wooden bow I had beseeched them not to take. As she kept asking me what to do, the room began to feel smaller. I wanted out. At the same time, I wanted to help her get that stone off. Our craving is what reveals itself in places like this. I have worked at archaeological digs, museum and university projects where crews are on hands and knees slowly scraping out the past by eighth-inch increments as if in a barely controlled mania, and I often feel that if given permission, we would tear the ground apart with shovels and picks in a frenzy to find what is in there. There are truly treasures down inside, keys to the past, ways of seeing an older world. We want to be the first ones to bridge the gap, clearing the dust away and letting in light. But if we opened it, the seal would be broken. It would be forever changed. It would be ours.

  There is a difference between finding and keeping. The two are often lumped together into one action, but there is a blink that comes in between. It is when a thing goes from being its own to being yours. It happened when archaeologist Howard Carter used hot knives to cut off King Tutankhamen’s amulets and mask, which had hardened into the mummy’s resin. It was when he severed the arms and legs of the dead king, split the torso in two, and cut off the head—just to make transporting easier. That part is the taking, when you claim ownership. King Tutankhamen now looks resplendent and vulnerable, both his golden mask and the charcoal-colored ball of his head on traveling display, but resplendent and vulnerable are not what Carter originally witnessed. He saw time cracking open, the shadow of every hand still there in the tomb, poised where each let go of a burial good. When he first broke into the chamber, Carter had peered inside the nimbus of his candlelight, and when someone beside him asked what was in there, Carter replied famously, breathlessly, “Wonderful things.”

  An archaeologist named Glade Hadden once told me, “For me, the thrill of discovery is the juice. I get that juice once with each artifact I find. If I take it with me, it doesn’t add to the thrill of the finding, and if I leave it there it doesn’t take away from the thrill of finding. It does, however, give someone else the possibility of the same joy of finding. And, truthfully? I feel better about myself when I leave it behind. Maybe some perverse form of ego reinforcement, but hey—it works, it leaves things intact, something that’s becoming more and more rare.”

  Susan was not talking about taking anything, but as far as I was concerned the mere act of opening the hatch would break the spell, another mystery cracked.

  I got up off my knees. I wanted no part of this decision. It was her discovery, not mine.

  “I’ll be outside,” I said. “Brush out your tracks when you leave.”

  I walked into the hot midday shine of adobe knowing what Susan would decide, at least hoping I did. When I was far enough away I stopped and looked out over the canyon, clearing my mind.

  We have no single agreed-upon way of treating the past. Behavior varies from person to person. I recall a Polaroid of a pothunter holding up a freshly unearthed human skull and sticking his tongue into its mouth, an act of grotesquely ultimate possession. Where do right and wrong come into play? Where do you draw the line, and is there any way an agreement can broadly be met on that line? Most of us can agree you don’t French-kiss a skull. Yet, what do you do with scrabbling curiosity and a sealed hatch on the floor? To open it would break centuries of cultural stasis, damaging a sensitive site. Leaving it closed is like biting your tongue until it bleeds.

  I would have prevented Susan from digging, or putting something in her pocket to take home, but I could not dictate what she should do with that stone.

  Many archaeologists say that the magnitude of archaeological destruction requires an ironclad ethic, and in the absence of that, harsher laws. They will tell you that every specimen is important. We do not have access to half of our physical history because half (or far more) of the archaeological record has been destroyed, and what has gone into private hands generally lacks the documentation that would define any artifact’s position in the ground. Without a three-dimensional picture of where an artifact is from, it is lost to science. But the dictates of science are not the only reason.

  The quality so often sought among ancient objects is their being untouched, previously unseen, no modern liberties taken that would muddy their ties to the past. Once we get our hands on them, we change them, make them part of our time. There comes a point when it is of greater value to leave things unchanged, not for science but for the things themselves.

  When Susan finally emerged from the room, she stepped up beside me, a hundred layers of horizon before us, a squat row of cliff dwellings and their dark openings at our backs. She had left the doorstone sealed, and she seemed a bit miffed not to have seen what was inside, and annoyed that I had left her. Or maybe she was just perplexed at this whole situation. Either way, I could finally breathe easier.

  PART TWO

  VANDALISM AND OTHER ACTS OF REMOVAL

  CHAPTER 5

  DIGGERS

  The gray-green wind-sweep of St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait is one of the few remaining nonsubmerged parts of the land bridge that once connected Siberia to North America. It has been occupied for the past 2,000 years, since the rise of Julius Caesar in Rome and the zenith of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico. For thousands of years the island has been populated by whale and walrus hunters, their ancient villages now buried beneath the tundra. A shovel in the right place can break into a nest of carved artifacts: figurines, harpoons, net weights, and fire starters. Parts of the island are practically made of artifacts, smaller pieces selling as novelties from a few dollars apiece to a few hundred. Five hundred or six hundred dollars can buy you a knife with a handle made from an ancient sled runner. Sometimes a rare Okvik idol will appear, a human figurine with arched eyes and a thin, elongated nose, fetching $100,000 or more. In 2006 a pair of fancifully engraved snow goggles carved from walrus tusk and estimated to be a thousand years old sold for $216,000 at Christie’s in New York. Wholesale buyers frequently arrive to pick up these raw artifacts, most made from walrus ivory or whalebone, dropping about $1.5 million on the island every year (this breaks down to about $1,000 each for residents). The diggers who supply these buyers are native islanders who speak Siberian Yupik. Unearthing and selling their own ancestry, many say that these are gifts left by ancestors to help them survive in a cash economy.

  Politically, the island is part of Alaska. Although the artifacts are being moved through the United States, which has ample antiquities laws, the transactions are legal. The island is owned as a native corporation and is considered private property, which exempts it from most of the laws. Still, there are those who deeply question the ethics. Some locals say that empty holes left in the ground are the cause of social distress and even spiritual debilitation. A far greater outcry has come from archaeologists, who have called St. Lawrence diggers “cultural cannibals,” saying they are wantonly selling off their own cultural heritage. They say that when these artifacts are taken without detailed documentation showing strata or pinpoint relationships with surrounding features, the record of people who lived here is permanently damaged. The response from many St. Lawrence Islanders is that they, the living, are what links the past to the
present. For them, selling these artifacts continues the tradition of the people who made them, a bloodline of subsistence hunters adapting to changing needs. These people are still very much tied to old lifeways, with half their diet coming from walrus, whale, and seal. Digging artifacts fits easily with seasonal subsistence, as they head to their digging spots in late summer to follow the receding permafrost.

  Julie Hollowell, a candid and gentle archaeologist from Princeton, told me that as she was using a trowel on her own excavations on St. Lawrence Island, subsistence diggers would come by and tell her if she didn’t get out a good shovel and start seriously digging, she was not going to find anything. Hollowell laughed easily at the exchange. Working on St. Lawrence Island since the mid-1980s, Hollowell has reached across the aisle to talk with native diggers as well as the dealers they work with, while her profession has codified ethics that actively discourage such conversation. She has come to see the islanders not as cultural cannibals but as people with personal reasons as valid as her own for probing the ground. When in 2009 she was involved with an exhibition of St. Lawrence artifacts at a Princeton museum, Hollowell insisted that she would participate only if the museum displayed the full story of how they got there, not just scientific context but the economic issues that brought so many artifacts to the surface in the first place. For her, archaeology includes what is happening now. It does not end when an object becomes buried in the ground.

  Hollowell once asked a high school class on the island how many had dug for artifacts, and every hand went up. The people of St. Lawrence are party to the history of these objects. After spending considerable time with them, Hollowell told me she believes these people should be able to make a living from their own material culture. They have a right of ancestry.