by Craig Childs
How far does that right extend? I know a Navajo pothunter who picks Pueblo Indian pieces off the land and moves them into the market, and though he is deeply possessed by these objects, he is not related to those who made them. His claim is that they are on his reservation, part of the landscape he and several hundred years’ worth of his ancestors have occupied. His defense probably would not hold up in court.
Then what about Anglos, descendants of families that have been in the same place for more than a century, each generation going out with shovels to connect with the past in its own way? This goes well beyond James O. Young keeping an arrowhead his mother found in her garden. Many diggers go for prime artifacts regardless of what culture made them. The threads of continuity diminish, tangle, fray, and soon you are far from St. Lawrence Island. The removal of artifacts unravels into chaos, evasion, betrayal, and even death. The place to go for this end of the story is San Juan County, Utah.
I was crouched, trying to make myself invisible, as an airplane swept in from a desert sky as clear as glass. From under my hat brim I watched a twin-engine Cessna head toward a red-dust hill at my back where a fifty-foot-wide circle marked a buried prehistoric ceremonial house. Nine centuries had collapsed its ceiling, had sent the whole place into the ground with nothing remaining on the surface but a shallow depression strewn with broken pottery. I had found the site only hours earlier, and already it was in someone else’s sights.
The plane rushed over my head with a crescendo of propeller roar, and I quickly stood and watched it pass over the hill. It made a sharp upward arc to clear a red palisade beyond it. I was down inside an arrangement of cliffs in a corner of the Navajo reservation, not an easy place to drop a plane into. The pilot was good, though, banking through the summer blue. The noise cut out as the plane slipped behind a butte and returned as the pilot swung around for another approach. For this pass I remained standing, but I still don’t think I was spotted. Pilot and passenger were focused on the hilltop, where the buried ruin would have been perfectly visible from above.
It looked as if someone was showing off an investment, money in the ground. Things have come to this: archaeology sold to order. You can look at an untouched mound and put a dollar value on it, say it’s going to have at least $10,000 of artifacts inside. This sort of thing happens around the world. A looter in China will show prospective buyers photographs of artifacts in an insufficiently guarded museum, and once a price is agreed upon the objects will be stolen and prepared for transport.
Coming in from the air is easier than on foot. A helicopter had recently been spotted in and out of canyons around here, a bubble-nosed, sunset red Eurocopter (tail number N296SL). It had been seen dipping its tail rotor near the ground and blowing off surface dust to reveal whether there was anything below.
This lower right-hand corner of Utah is an archaeological mecca, one of the richest zones in North America if you want to walk around picking up pots and baskets. Over the past century, with a shovel you could have found anything your heart desired—sandals, skeletons, turquoise ornaments, carved shells. A local pothunter once said that when he found a plain gray pot he would throw it up in the air and chuck a rock at it just to watch it shatter. Considering population estimates and mortality rates, and accounting for several centuries of burial practices, probably half a million graves lie within 25,000 square miles. Upon this terrain you’ll find well over 100,000 abandoned, dust-buried settlements ranging in size from once-prosperous pueblos to humble family farmsteads. They leave the earth lumpy and heaved, and in places their fallen timbers stick up like busted telephone poles. I have found evidence of explosives, where old-school pothunters detonated sticks of dynamite under cliff dwellings, blowing them up to more easily access burials underneath. Imagine skeletons tumbling over each other in a disarticulated cascade of pots and turquoise.
It is a race to see who can find the last remaining objects. Anything left in situ is a sitting duck. Land agencies are pulling artifacts from the field, housing them in museums and storage facilities to prevent them being stolen, while pothunters are becoming more sophisticated: lean ones who travel fast and light by foot; belly-fat, gun-heavy ATV folks ramming probes into the ground to find the loose fill of graves; and the in-and-out helicopter types. The highest market value goes to the most serious diggers, those who move quickly from site to site, those backed by investors with their finds sold before they are even discovered. Methamphetamine addicts now make up part of the pothunting demographic. Small-town trailer-park labs keep popping up around the Four Corners. In one trailer, agents found a pound and a half of meth (street value a few hundred thousand dollars), five loaded firearms, sixteen pounds of marijuana, and at least thirty to forty intact prehistoric pots. The jittery obsession elicited by meth goes perfectly with running around in the desert looking for artifacts. It is an ideal pastime for people going out of their minds looking for some cash to keep the drugs flowing. But this is not how it started.
People here grew up hunting arrowheads and digging for pots. There was seemingly nothing wrong with it. The law? Hardly anyone even knew the law. For a long time pothunting was not considered a crime around San Juan County. It was more a tradition than a wrongdoing. Even though the country’s core antiquities law had been on the books since 1906, it was rarely enforced, a nonentity. A woman who grew up here told me her grandfather would send her to find artifacts just to get her out of his hair.
Sunday picnics in San Juan County often included shovels and buckets as Mormon families came out to enjoy the canyons and mesas under the clear breadth of the sky. A picnic and some digging, a thermos of coffee, maybe a screen to sift the dirt—what could be wrong with that? There was a time when the country seemed overloaded with abandoned artifacts, when you could not walk without stepping on one. Kids used to rifle through spoil piles for beads or pretty potsherds, while their elders put craters in red soil to make big finds. You used to see human skulls set on the side of the road, hollow eye sockets watching Jeeps and GMCs buzz past. Some diggers sold what they found, but most held on to their prizes, which were worth more as spoils of the hunt. A painted eleventh-century olla in perfect condition granted its discoverer monumental bragging rights in town.
This tradition gained prominence with a little outside help. In the 1920s an archaeologist named Andrew Kerr from the University of Utah in Salt Lake appeared after he heard that an entire quarter of the state was filthy with archaeology right near the surface, graves practically springing from the ground.
Kerr hired local residents to dig; his head diggers were members of the Shumway family, who had already done a good deal of private excavation. The Shumways did most of the work while Kerr sat back. They showed him how to locate the best caches of artifacts, how to dig without breaking pots. Meanwhile, Kerr encouraged them and paid them to become even better at it. Showing little regard for scientific method, he wanted only the most visually stunning artifacts, which he shipped back to the university’s museum.
Julie Hollowell once told me a very similar story from back on St. Lawrence Island, where early archaeologists arrived to dig and for the first time impressed locals with the value of what was buried under their feet. She said, “It became obvious to me that the interface with both museum collectors and archaeologists had totally commoditized these objects for them.” This phenomenon has been repeated around the world: archaeologists alerting people to the value in the ground, even paying them to find it, starting a momentum that is now difficult to stop.
By the time Kerr was finished in southeast Utah, local residents had gained a taste for relics. When he left, people kept digging to see what else they could find.
Laws against this kind of thing began stacking up in the late 1970s. But members of the Shumway family, among others, stood forth in righteous defense of their God-given right as free Americans to loot and pillage in the tradition of their ancestors. They kept digging.
Enter Earl Shumway, who made a notorious name for
himself as a professional pothunter. He is credited with ruining the tradition by drawing the eye of the law, turning a pastime into a rebel sport. During the height of his digging career in the 1980s and ’90s he claimed to have dug 10,000 archaeological sites, turning them into sloppy messes where he left behind calling cards of Mountain Dew cans and cigarette butts (his claim to so many sites has been refuted by those who say he could not have come close to that number, yet there is no doubt that he did his share, even employing bulldozers). Heading into the backcountry well armed, he shared a local Dukes of Hazzard mentality that grew from the Sagebrush Rebellion, a general antifederal atmosphere in the West. Archaeology was a convenient vehicle.
Multiple branches of law enforcement were after him for years. In that vast and mostly empty country he was hard to track or pin down and evidence against him was difficult to gather. Whenever he returned home to the small town of Blanding, he was full of bravado as he romanced reporters on the phone, boasting that he was armed and dangerous and making a handsome and very illegal living off the black market.
Most people who knew Earl well would not talk to me about him (on the record at least). He was said to be mixing drug deals and pothunting, a common merger in the underworld of global antiquities but new to rural southeast Utah. A filmmaker who followed him in the late 1980s called Earl charming as could be, a boisterous storyteller who enjoyed an audience. On the other side of the coin, when he last got out of prison, he publicly stated that he would kill any federal officer he encountered in the backcountry. A ranger who worked the region in the 1990s told me it was because of people like Earl that she wore a bulletproof life vest when running rivers. She carried a SIG Sauer 9-mm sidearm with forty rounds on her person, kept on hand a 12-gauge shotgun with an extended chamber and extra rounds, and occasionally traveled with an M16 rifle with extra loaded magazines. She had a few run-ins with Earl and told me that if he got within fifteen feet of her again, even today, she would shoot him. She called him a sleazebag, then said she did not want to be quoted by name. She feared retribution.
When I reminded her that Earl had died several years ago, she told me simply, “He’s been dead before.”
Twice Earl got caught pothunting. The first time, in 1986, he revealed that he would do just about anything to avoid the consequences of his actions. To escape conviction he ratted on a handful of people around Blanding with pothunted material, some of them distinguished residents, some his own family members. They all had one thing in common: Earl had a grudge against them. He went free while federal agents raided the people on his list, sort of a deal with the devil. More than three hundred pre-Columbian vessels were confiscated, and people in Blanding still tell stories about doors crashing in and the flash of guns. An agent who was part of the sting shrugs at that. He remembers it differently, saying, “We were hardly jackbooted Nazis. We were all in sports jacket and ties; no doors were knocked down. If it was locked, we got a locksmith.”
The second time he was caught, however, Earl was not able to deflect the charges. This time he was saddled with a five-year prison sentence—then the biggest antiquities penalty ever handed down in the States (a cigarette butt bearing his DNA was found at one of the digs, and it proved to be his undoing).
The last I heard of his working career, Earl had gotten out of prison and was digging up north, in Labyrinth Canyon in the Green River area. He was supposedly running a mining claim, but with the many prehistoric weaving cultures that used to live in the area, it is easy to guess what he was doing. A couple of years later I heard he had died of cancer. Nobody I knew seemed to know exactly when. Though I’ve not seen the actual death certificate, a relative of his working at the San Juan County health department vouched that Earl is indeed dead.
Culture moves slowly in the old and mostly Mormon farming and mining communities scattered around the Four Corners. Something as significant as the 1986 raids takes decades to settle out. Winston Hurst is a local archaeologist who has had to deal with the aftermath. Raised Mormon in Blanding, Hurst traces his mother’s local lineage back to 1880 and his father’s to 1910. When he talked to me, he looked tired.
“I’m never sure whether to laugh, cry, or puke when I think about this stuff,” Hurst said.
A sun-weathered middle-aged man, Hurst was at the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, where he spends many of his days engaged in research. In one of the storage rooms where confiscated artifacts are kept, he led me down aisles of shelves explaining that the pots, sandals, and fired effigies around us once belonged to his neighbors.
Like so many here, Hurst also grew up pothunting, but his parents expressed a quiet dislike for unruly excavation. They were sad to see old and familiar sites destroyed. Still, as a kid he pothunted a couple of graves and kept entire human skeletons in the pantry next to the canned peaches. (His mother, not surprisingly, found this vulgar.) He said, “At the heart of it there’s always been this explore-and-discover treasure-hunt sort of thing. I think it’s fundamental to human instinct.”
Over time, Hurst’s inquiries became more scientific. He and his brother even employed a microscope to study artifacts they had collected, though he now admits he had not the slightest clue what to do with the microscope. It at least looked scientific. Hurst went on to study archaeology at Brigham Young University, taking classes along with a childhood friend from Blanding, a pothunter with a similar interest in the past. In the end, his friend returned to quiet pothunting while Hurst took the path of professional archaeologist, publishing papers and cataloguing sites. He has since become a leading field scholar, one with a unique, ethnographic knowledge of his landscape.
Hurst said, “When things are done right and an artifact is collected with its context documented in some detail, that documentation travels with the artifact. The information is curated, and the museum maintains it in perpetuity. The connection between the object and the ground is saved. That’s a whole different thing than when you take it and stick it on some shelf or you sell it to a stockbroker in New York. That just pops that connection between object and ground. It sterilizes the ground and strips the artifact of its information.”
Hurst sees artifacts as pixels on a screen. If you have enough pixels you can make out the picture, but if many are missing the image fades.
He pointed out a black-on-red jar above eye level on a shelf. Tall and somewhat slender, painted red like blush, its ceramic handle was shaped into an animal, perhaps a coyote, and for eyes it bore two striking turquoise beads. He said it had been confiscated from the man who had attended Brigham Young with him. It was a pothunted piece, one of the lost pixels. The jar had been a prize, a lifetime achievement for a digger who passionately scoured the canyons looking for hidden and enchanting objects. Hurst looked at it with a resigned expression. He said people still felt deep animosity about the 1986 raids.
There are those in town who say the museum is in cahoots with the government, taking away people’s collections in order to fill its shelves, and that archaeologists are simply another layer of agents who break down doors. Those who had the money fought in court and got some of their prized possessions back. Those who did not have the money lost everything.
“It’s painful to me every time I see an artifact leave the ground and go anywhere,” Hurst admitted. “Whether it’s into somebody’s private collection or even into a museum. At this point, I’d rather see it in the ground.”
Hurst’s desire goes beyond science. He considers how one should treat the history of a place. You don’t just take whatever you want. He believes these artifacts belong not to private individuals or even to a discipline, but to a landscape and its past. I once walked with him through a local canyon where we paused to look at the deep oval shadow of a cave overhead. It was called Baby Mummy Cave and had been dug illegally. A mummified infant was left exposed. Dead babies, it turns out, make for rewarding digs. You can pretty much guarantee that a baby will be wrapped in a woven blanket, which on its own can fetch $4,000 (a
ssuming you are in with the local network of black-market buyers, who can either launder it over to a gallery, put it up on eBay, or hang it behind glass on their own wall). The blanket is just the start; dig a little more and you will often come upon an assembly of lovingly crafted necklaces and vessels that can elevate one burial to $10,000 for a savvy pothunter.
Hurst told me that he had gone up to the cave shortly after the looting. He said coyotes had gotten to it, and parts of the baby mummy had been torn off. He swept the pieces together and tucked them back into the dust so they would at least be buried. It was all he could do. I did not ask him why, as a scientist, he resisted moving the remains to a more secure location for study. We both knew why.
After the 1986 raids, pothunting continued in the Four Corners, but more quietly. Diggers backfilled their holes, smoothing over evidence so it would look as if no one had been there. The swashbuckling capers of Earl Shumway eventually faded; no one wanted to attract suspicion. But the digging was still not quiet enough. Federal investigators kept a close, undercover eye on what was happening in Blanding and the surrounding area. They sent in an informant who moved freely through the local network, wearing a wire while purchasing 256 artifacts over a two-year period for a total of $335,685. The informant (under contract with the FBI and paid $224,000) was a friend of many of the pothunters, so trusted that they openly admitted where the digging had happened, getting out maps and producing photographs, something they would never have done for a stranger. That information made for damning indictments that far exceeded Earl Shumway’s testimony from 1986. This time, twenty-six people in Blanding and surrounding communities were targeted, their privacy shattered by 132 secretly recorded conversations that are disturbing in their frankness. Old men impassioned by archaeology told their heartfelt secrets. Discussing where to park a truck so it wouldn’t be seen, one pothunter was taped saying he thought they were being paranoid. Another replied that when you’re doing something illegal, it’s probably good to be paranoid.