Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  For Varien, as for most archaeologists, sites are a nonrenewable resource, the legacy of human occupation on this planet that, once taken from the ground, is forever changed. He calls his science imperfect, admitting it actually destroys the in-the-ground record by removing it, something pothunters are frequently accused of. “But we document what we find,” he emphasizes. “Through this documentation what has been destroyed is preserved, hopefully in perpetuity.”

  Frederick Matthew Wiseman, an author, archaeologist, and member of the Abenaki Tribal Council in Vermont, sees this sort of preservation as a one-way street. An artifact is taken from its source and carried up through a chain of hands, where it ultimately enriches a community far from the source, a community he sees as the “ultimate consumer.” But what about back at the source? Wiseman writes that “viewed from the perspective of the elder who has lost legal control of her life story, the backfilled hole that was once a site, or the plant crucified on acid-free paper in some paradichlorobenzined herbarium cabinet, this may seem exploitive to say the least.”

  The federal field archaeologist Glade Hadden once told me it is “an act of silliness” when archaeologists remove artifacts. “I don’t take things anymore unless I have to, if it’s at obvious risk of being destroyed,” he explained. “The argument ‘if we don’t take it somebody else will’ doesn’t work for me. If you’re really a scientist, why would you need to possess the object itself? It’s just an object. It’s just stuff. For what archaeologists purport themselves to be, all they really need is context. After that you’re just a collector.”

  The crew took a break for lunch at the edge of the dig site, rifling through a bag of chips and eating sandwiches. Before us lay the theater of northeast Arizona, a parched expanse capped by the enormous blue shell of the sky. We talked about digging and taking, and when I asked, some of the students admitted feeling a twinge of violation in their work. Why them? they asked. Why now? Why should anyone have the right or not to excavate someone else’s history? I ventured a story and told them about the pot I once returned to the wilderness. (I carefully left out the part about how it came into my possession, a difficult omission, for fear they might turn on me.) To my surprise, they enjoyed the story. It seemed to reflect their own ambivalence about removing artifacts in the first place. “It’s a good question,” the dig boss said. “Do we really need all of this?” Another chimed in, “It is kind of strange what we’re all doing out here digging up dead people’s things.”

  Then, nobody said anything. We looked across the view, listened to the sky.

  As we returned to the trenches, people taking positions on hands and knees, I thought back to something I read from Charles Bowden, a dry and brilliant desert writer. While wandering in intense sunlight, surrounded by the remains of the dead, he said that a set of rules came to him, rules that define what we must contend with as we explore this land. They are:

  “1. You are in the right place.

  2. You do not belong here.

  3. Deal with this fact.

  4. Time’s up.”

  Archaeology is one of the younger core disciplines, dating back to the late 1800s (although some argue that it goes back to the likes of the caliph al-Mamun, a ninth-century Arabian scholar and philosopher who oversaw crews tunneling into the Great Pyramid of Giza and was incidentally frustrated to find he was not the first, that the tomb had already been emptied).

  In 1891, just before Stein’s journeys along the Silk Road, a young Swedish scholar named Gustaf Nordenskiöld came to the Southwest to seek his scientific fortune, and he has been credited with laying the foundation for North American archaeology here. Born to a family of Nordic scientists and adventurers, son of famed polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, he was expected to do great things. By his early twenties he had already ventured to the Arctic and there collected plant fossils that he proudly carried back to the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Now he needed something more substantial to make a name for himself, a find of dramatic and personal merit. Racked as he was by tubercular coughing and terrible night chills, he found the aridity of southwest Colorado a haven. Here he donned a cowboy hat and posed in front of a camera, his fists planted on his hips, his hat brim tipped as if he thought himself Jesse James.

  Nordenskiöld soon met the Wetherill brothers, ranchers who had been publicizing their discovery of mysterious cliff dwellings hidden deep within a place called Mesa Verde. At Nordenskiöld’s behest they saddled horses and took him to the edge of a precipice where he looked down on a palace of ruins, its towers and rooms half standing, circular ceremonial chambers gaping under collapsed ceilings, property of no one, exactly what an intrepid young explorer would have dreamed of. These were the remains of a cultural zenith in the ancient Southwest, a time of high Anasazi architecture and refined ceramic production. The brothers said the mesa was riddled with such places, each ruin concealing hordes of artifacts inside this canyon-cut mesa. Though his background was in geology and chemistry, Nordenskiöld’s skills could be applied equally to what was then the fledgling discipline of archaeology. Back then, science was science.

  Nordenskiöld announced his plans to assemble a crew and perform excavations to study this crumbled and virtually unknown civilization. He would go on to publish the first archaeological treatise in North America, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, Southwestern Colorado: Their Pottery and Implements.

  The Wetherill brothers had already been eagerly exploring the mesa, digging and collecting in a fashion that would be considered reckless by today’s standards. They showed Nordenskiöld where he would find the best artifacts, teaching him how to spot prehistoric graves under rubble and dust that were often rich with pre-Columbian offerings. In turn, Nordenskiöld impressed upon the brothers the need for methodical techniques in their digging, cross-sections and layers of superposition, a newfound scientific discernment that would lay the foundation for future researchers. The Wetherills took quickly to his nuanced work, and together they dug the hearts out of several ruins, pulling up skeletons, necklaces, painted pots, and woven sandals. Soon seventeen crates were packed tight with artifacts and reams of notes, the finest singular haul ever to leave Mesa Verde.

  In town, though, there were rumblings. Locals did not like what was happening. The cliff dwellings seemed destined to become one of the country’s first archaeological theme parks, if not a source for artifact sales, and no sickly Swede was going to hinder their gravy train. Letters calling Nordenskiöld a thief began to appear in local newspapers as no-trespassing posters went up, his name in bold letters. Who was this man, this baron they called him, who came from another country and took whatever he wished? Granted, the same could be asked of them, the mostly Anglo settlers who had no direct kinship with these ruins. But as far as they were concerned it was finders keepers, and this early archaeologist was a latecomer. As wanted posters of Nordenskiöld started going up, the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad halted his outgoing shipments of artifacts bound for Sweden. On a September night in Durango, Colorado, a mob gathered outside the Strater Hotel, where he was staying.

  At midnight a U.S. marshal with a writ of trespass in his hand banged on his door. Nordenskiöld was put under house arrest, the bail set at a punishing $1,000. Ordered not to leave the hotel, Nordenskiöld remained in his room, waiting for his future to unfold.

  Top levels of both the U.S. and Swedish governments got involved as Nordenskiöld became a matter of global diplomacy. The U.S. attorney general was finally forced to admit that there was no law at the time preventing a man from taking whatever piece of archaeology he found. Nordenskiöld and his artifacts were allowed to leave. (You can visit the largest Mesa Verde collection outside the United States at the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki, where Nordenskiöld’s artifacts are now held.)

  Nordenskiöld went into the Southwest thinking himself a scientific hero and barely made it out with his skin. What is legal, allowable, or even ethical changes very quickly, and this reali
ty has continued well after Nordenskiöld’s time.

  Considering their historic track record, it is no small irony that archaeologists have become so vocal in their opposition to privateers taking artifacts. Attempting to separate themselves from their treasure-hunting origins going back before Nordenskiöld and Stein, they have spruced up their profession with rigorous methodology, focusing on comparative studies and literature reviews more than on straightforward excavations. The science is steadily becoming more about ideas than about things. Many practitioners have made themselves ethically untouchable, writing sanctimonious commentaries about what is right and wrong.

  Furthermore, academic fieldwork is more frequently turning to surface surveys and electronic imaging that can see into buried sites without digging. Fieldworkers may have ultrasonic sensors that automatically map the position, shape, size, and orientation of artifacts in situ, so they do not have to be excavated by hand. It would seem this method moves toward solving many ethical dilemmas of archaeology, but is taking a hands-off approach really the answer for a science born of touching?

  Replacing old-fashioned field knowledge with a heavy reliance on technology and floating data may someday be branded a mistake. Subtle relationships, the way the sound of a scraping metal trowel changes when you move out of dirt and into adobe, are lost when you stop digging. No longer will you look up from a half-excavated jar to study the horizon, assimilating an awareness of where you are that no chart or instrument can ever reveal. If archaeology becomes nothing but remote sensing, it risks losing what the discipline tries to forge in the first place, a physical connection to the memory of ancient people. In her alluring book A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman wrote, “There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.” Sense is what gave birth to this science, the act of reaching to the ground and picking up an arrowhead, wondering Who left this here?

  I once knew an archaeologist named Bruce Anderson who headed digs and surveys for the government across the Southwest in the 1970s and ’80s, an era that even now is considered old-school and thought by some to be backward in not conforming to modern techniques. Anderson was the classic field man: bristling mustache, cussing western drawl, a favorite wood-handled trowel. A decade after he retired from digging he pulled his trowel out of a storage box to show me. Its steel blade had originally been as long as his hand, but he had worn it down so short you couldn’t use it to flip an egg.

  “Now, there’s some digging,” Anderson had said proudly.

  Anderson’s work fills volumes. The archaeologists he trained are still awed by his knowledge, his tenacity, even his irreverence. (Out surveying in the desert summer, he would pause to say, “It’s hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.”) Though Anderson was exhaustive with his documentation, he was likely to spit on academia for its procedural smugness. He wondered how archaeologists could expect the public to appreciate and preserve these things when they were described as little more than sterile scientific commodities.

  Anderson personifies the link between the early days of enthusiastic digging and the upright professionalism of the current discipline. When, in the winter of 2008, he was felled by a stroke, I stayed with him, fetching water and coffee. One morning in the dark before dawn, we sat in his living room, me on his couch, he in his cat-scratched lounger. He said he thought archaeologists were turning overly political and embarrassingly self-righteous. He found their papers increasingly arcane, nearly impossible even for him to decipher. They seemed to be saying that archaeology is not about treasure hunting but about the meticulous assembly of data, a vacuum sweeping the countryside for information. He said they were forgetting the reason for archaeology in the first place.

  What is that reason?

  “We wanted to find out what was in the ground, what cultural groups were physically made of,” he said. “When we were digging there wasn’t a question about what we were doing. And we didn’t have to put on these goddamned airs.”

  Only weeks before his death Anderson leaned over to me and said, “Fuck ’em.”

  Bruce Anderson would have liked this dig on the hill, sun past high noon, dust devils kicking around the site. This is archaeology at its unapologetic heart: we were in the very place where antiquities originated, our lips cracked with the same dust that blanketed an early civilization. This is what the science has long stood for, a cluster of students at the end of a dirt road digging in the heat. It is what collectors rarely get: real, live context.

  The undergrad folded her body around what was left of the jar. Pieces kept coming up to me, and I gladly kept sliding them into their sack. Over the hours, I moved around the trench following the shade of my hat brim, and though the work was slow, I remained attentive to every new scrape, leaning in closer to watch her pry off chunks of dirt revealing a new surface. I felt grateful for her patience and doctoring care. This way of working engages far more of the “radar-net of our senses” than the blast holes I have seen elsewhere.

  Of all the removers vying for the past, archaeologists are the ones I tend to side with. If an artifact has to be taken, these people keep the most accurate connection with the ground through their documentation. But as gingerly as they operate, this taking of artifacts brings to mind the iconic movie scene where a dusty adventurer carefully weighs out a bag of sand, then switches it with a golden idol. The character’s cry—“That belongs in a museum!”—rings out through the science, leaving sand where there was once a key piece of history. Things have been moved, changed, and with them their stories have invariably been reshaped. It is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applied to archaeology: you can’t touch old things without changing them. Robert Layton and Gillian Wallace, two scholars in the field from the UK, wrote, “Indeed, even when documented, a piece of material is subject to new and different labels when it is placed in an archaeological display.”

  I noticed a woman creeping toward me, moving along the trench on her hands and knees at an almost imperceptible pace. Her subject was a tree root as thick as her forearm. It grew from an emaciated juniper on the side of the hill, an apocalyptic bonsai, and it had broken into the buried settlement by following a moisture gradient along the floor. The root had met the jar and wrapped around it like a tentacle.

  The woman digging the root finally met up with the woman digging the jar. Together they divulged an underground affair. Seeking anchorage, the root had slowly encircled the vessel and then in black silence crushed it.

  When the last piece of jar came out, the root described a perfect, ghostly hole. It was the only remaining evidence of what had happened here. The jar-digger kept scritching at the soil with her trowel, on her way down to the next level and not looking back. The root-digger went to her pail and pulled out a hacksaw. What was she doing with that? I watched her take it over to the root and with ten swift strokes cut the thing out of the trench and throw it over the side. I was aghast. I tend to obsess inappropriately about things like this, so I tried not to say anything. God forbid I should make a fool of myself in front of professional scientists, saying, They’re in love, the root and the jar, can’t you see?

  CHAPTER 9

  SALVAGE ARCHAEOLOGY

  It is a job. Workers go out and dig. They pull up every artifact they find. Perfectly legal and not entirely academic, it is a workingman’s science. Plats and blueprints tell where to excavate. Practitioners are known as “salvage” or “rescue” archaeologists. In informal circles, they call themselves “shovel bums,” toiling through cities and along pipelines, where they remove all pertinent archaeology in the way of development.

  There is a growing demand for this particular brand of archaeologist. Backhoes are digging up slave cemeteries and ancient pagodas, forcing cities to cough up their dead, and somebody has to deal with it. Roman burials are cropping up in London while archaeologists in downtown Miami ponder a circle of postholes that were cut into bedrock a couple of thousand y
ears ago, doing so on behalf of a frustrated developer who has been planning luxury condominiums for this spot. After thousands of years of traffic, a marketplace in Cairo recently revealed a temple containing a four-ton statue of Ramses II that had been right under people’s feet. Even in the slums of Mexico City, pieces of the fallen Aztec Empire keep showing up. In 2006, construction work exposed a thirteen-ton stone carving of an earth goddess, and when salvage archaeologists went in they discovered it was topping the tomb of an Aztec emperor. This could be the biggest discovery in Mexican history, as they dig through the city’s wet, mucky foundations to find it.

  Salvage archaeology tends to be inglorious. Big finds are uncommon. Mostly, it consists of bones, charcoal, and chipped stone. Business is usually quick and dirty, and it happens behind construction fences, and in many parts of the world it constitutes 90 percent of active digs and discoveries. It is the largest employer of those graduating with degrees in archaeology. Academics do not overtly frown on this profession; many just consider it a step down from the clean, purely scientific work conducted by universities. Put bluntly, it is paid labor.

  Tom Wright, a friend and longtime salvager, says, “Most cultural resource management firms do perfectly good work, but they are the McDonald’s of the scientific world. They churn out the product, it passes the necessary standards, and the customers get what they want at a reasonable price. The burger-flippers stay gainfully employed doing honest work, and there’s room for advancement, into management and beyond, if they have the ambition and the talent. It’s got nothing to do with the food, though, and anyone who makes that mistake is in for a rude surprise.”