Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  All Mario needed to know was that this vessel was old. He did not need to hear the detailed archaeological history of the Casas Grandes culture that occupied the area at the time.

  I could understand why Mario had taken the jar, and even why he had painted it. Unburdened by the wider issues of antiquities, he was simply picking up something he found on the ground, even if he had to dig some. With it, he was engaging in his own conversation with history, bringing into his home a human chronicle that reaches back far beyond his own recollection.

  Patty Crown, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico, once told me that objects carried forward could be considered a form of collective memory. Crown was looking at the issue from a scientific perspective, and she was not talking about the likes of Mario. She was studying a cache of artifacts from Chaco Canyon, a thousand-year-old pilgrimage center in the desert of northwest New Mexico. Among a collection of ceremonial jars found there, she recognized signs that they had been repainted and refired numerous times. The tall, narrow jars had originally been painted with painstakingly symmetrical designs that were later whitewashed with a new slip and replaced with another set of painted designs. The vessels were fired once more to seal the new images in place. In some cases this happened more than once, the object retaining its original form while its surface took on a new scheme. In refiring, the kiln temperature had to be the same each time or the vessel would crackle or break.

  “Why wouldn’t you just throw it away and make a new one?” she asked. “There must have been something important about the object itself.” She called keeping a vessel in circulation like this a process of renewal, a way of connecting the past to the present through a physical artifact. It is not just a matter of having the artifact, but changing it.

  Often archaeologists use the term ceremonial to describe objects that are difficult to categorize. Even before Crown discovered the subtle histories of these jars, they were being called ceremonial. Only 198 of their kind have been found in the Southwest—tall and slender as wine bottles with the tops cut off, cylinder shaped with flat, open mouths. They were mostly found together in the same ruin and in the same room, and Crown would later discover that they had contained chocolate, thought to be used in rituals. Maybe their repainting was stimulated by something as simple as Mario’s wife not liking the color. The original paintings on these important jars might have gone out of style, like 1970s avocado green kitchen appliances. Maybe there were elders who were horrified to see the repaintings and railed that the past was not to be altered. It seems there is a tug-of-war between not touching the past and putting our signature all over it.

  I went to New York to see some of the cylinder jars Crown had studied, down in the vaults of the American Museum of Natural History, where they were kept in storage. They lay in deep wooden drawers, and when I lifted them out I could barely see what Crown had deciphered. Beneath their surfaces were the faint lines of ghost paintings. I noticed on each of these vessels small catalogue numbers that had been written in black ink. The perfect, tiny penmanship struck me as yet another layer, a way of ushering these jars into the next era. Now they belong to science.

  At some point we draw the line and decree that such actions are vandalism, but I found I could not come to that judgment with Mario. He was not a vandal. Sitting on the table with flowers in it, the jar seemed to me to be back in circulation. This is what this ancient utility vessel was made for to begin with: a good kitchen, a man and a wife, healthy children.

  At the table Mario and I drank Nescafé, and when we were done I set down the thin white porcelain cup and excused myself, saying I had many miles to go. I thanked him for all that he had shown me.

  Knowing that we would never see each other again, Mario and I did not share addresses. Friendships are brief on the road. At the door Mario said he had a gift, in gratitude for my visit. He held out a stone axe head, a rough piece of rounded basalt. He had dug it up near the jar. A notch ran down its middle where the wooden handle would have been attached. With my interest in archaeology, he figured this was a good choice.

  I declined as politely as I could, saying it was too muy excelente a gift. He kept pushing it toward me until I felt my refusal might be taken as rude. I finally accepted it, and was surprised by its weight—it was heavy as a brick. I gave Mario a small, grateful bow, praising him, his wife, and their beaming children as I backed out the front door with the gift in my hand.

  The axe head was not mine, though. I did not want the commitment it represented; I did not want to escort it through time. My mind ran circles of logic around it as it sat on the floorboards of my truck. I thought of pulling over and leaving it on the roadside, returning it to the general country it came from, a quick thank-you and good-bye. But it was an honest gift from a family with few but precious belongings, one not to be treated lightly. What could I make of it? A doorstop maybe, a paperweight, an offering on a makeshift altar?

  I felt I was now at the very root of the antiquities continuum, the bottom of the ownership scale, a range that starts with an axe head (or a spray-painted jar) and ends with eight-digit purchases of Greek artifacts carefully touched up for auction. It is all about moving pieces of the past into their new locations, their next in situ.

  When I reached the border I rolled down my window and a man with mirrored eyes looked in. He asked if I had any illicit things in my vehicle—artifacts, specimens, contraband. I looked back at him and said no.

  CHAPTER 11

  HOUSES OF OBSESSION

  There was an old man named John Eaton who could not stop collecting. His house was a ramshackle array of coins and knives and nearly everything else he had ever found or bought or dug out of the ground himself. He was a self-proclaimed pothunter who said he had grown up doing it because he loved having things around that took him back in time. In his eighties, he almost giddily showed me from room to room, through piles and stacks, opening cabinets, pulling out drawers. He wore a starched white shirt buttoned at his wrists, his skin a powdery white, as if he were preparing himself for a coffin. With jittery hands he pressed objects into mine, arrow shafts, Confederate bills, a Navajo squash blossom of silver and turquoise. You could hardly move through the house and its claptrap miscellany. Sometimes you can understand why archaeologists might see people like this as an abomination, bereft of scientific values. All they do is collect.

  If you read the voluminous academic literature covering archaeological ethics, you will notice an almost unanimous chant of private-collectors-are-bad. If you happen to read the much smaller body of literature put out by the collectors themselves—including letters to the editor and the volatile ramblings of numismatists—you might tend to agree with the assessment. Collectors can be a bit odd, mentally sideways and occasionally brilliant. At the same time, every one I have met has offered a spark of inspiration. They have their own window into the past.

  Mr. Eaton had invited me over to show off the pre-Columbian portion of his artifact collection. Some things, he told me, he had gotten with a shovel, and some he had purchased. But he could not seem to remember where they were. In his living room, which looked like a collision between Pier One and an antiques rummage sale, he was resting on a couch, while I sat in a chair across from him. Nothing in the room was more than a century and a half old. He seemed to have forgotten why he had invited me over. Senility appeared to overtake him, his memory draining away almost by the minute. I asked again about the artifacts.

  “They’re here, aren’t they?” he asked, looking around in confusion.

  His son, fifty years old and beginning to gray a bit himself, sat down on a nearby couch and said, “Dad… Dad… you sold the last baskets a couple months ago.”

  “Sold?” Mr. Eaton asked, surprised. “Oh, yes. What was it?”

  “Somebody called, you remember? An art collector. He came down and paid two thousand dollars each.”

  Mr. Eaton gave a small sound of recognition.

  The son, who is person
ally opposed to pothunting, having left behind a pot he and his son once found in the desert, looked at me. “Is that a good price, two thousand?”

  “What kind of baskets were they?” I inquired.

  Mr. Eaton began describing them, his lifted hands forming baskets bigger than his head, coil weave by the sound of it. Although much of his mind had been lost, he maintained an astonishing memory for certain details. It struck me that his artifacts will probably be the last thing he recalls. When names and faces finally fail him, he will still see the spiral coil of a woven basket that he once lifted out of the ground with his own hands, uncapping someone’s burial.

  The style of basket sounded as if it had come from a couple of thousand years ago, made by people who buried their dead with baskets on top of them. Some of the finest weavers in North America, they were a well-looted bunch. I told the son, “You could have gotten more.”

  He said, “I didn’t want him to sell them. It’s hard when I don’t live here.”

  Mr. Eaton was still looking perplexed. “Are you sure they’re not in the house somewhere?”

  The son shook his head. “They’re gone.”

  His father’s collection had been steadily leaking away over the years. Sold? Given away? Lost? No telling where the pieces all ended up. The son explained to me that his father would die soon and all this would be his. “I know so few of these stories,” he said. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this.”

  Mr. Eaton levered himself up from the couch and managed to find his ledger, a book press-labeled “The Silent Secretary,” circa 1960. He handed it to me open to his own illustrations of artifacts he had found, roughly copied designs from ceramic vessels, the flourish of early Pueblo pottery. I thumbed through pages of jars, bowls, axe heads, projectile points. A scribble of notes accompanied each illustration but no mention of context, location, anything that would tie the artifact back to a place. He was an archaeologist at heart, not just a voracious, hard-assed consumer of antiquities but a methodical searcher with almost scientific inclinations, but he had no training.

  Mr. Eaton explained that he had been collecting since he was a kid growing up in the Four Corners. All his life he was drawn to antiquity, and people would even bring their possessions to him as if he were a repository, a safer place than their own homes.

  He reminisced, “They were everywhere. You hardly had to dig. You’d just see a pot sticking out of the ground. Of course I took them. Who wouldn’t? They were treasures.”

  The last of his treasures were now drifting through the antiquities market in a much larger world, joining the goods of Africa, Europe, and Asia, and leaving him alone with his ledger.

  This is what happens to collections. They eventually fly apart. They are held as long as possible, but the owner’s grip loosens. It is a principal dilemma of archaeology. Objects so much older than ourselves are bound to outlive our fascinations. Author Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death, proposed the notion of “immortality projects.” According to Becker, these projects are what we create to outlast what he sees as the meaninglessness of our own deaths. Politics, philosophies, institutions, statues, anything we can pull together that will live longer than we do, are a bid for a kind of immortality. Artifact collections perfectly fit the bill. They are a way of reaching far beyond our era, into both the past and the future.

  Sitting with Mr. Eaton felt more like a mortality project than an immortality one. Nothing says “your fragile life will blink out” like an old man who cannot remember what happened to all the ancient things he collected. When I said good-bye to him at his front door, we shook hands and I felt the bones of his fingers, his soft, cool skin thin as vellum.

  Imagine having your own private collection of artifacts, museum-quality stock. You are the sole authority decreeing who can see them and who cannot. They are yours to admire at your leisure, a slice of history at your fingertips, an obsession all your own.

  While this may be a fantasy for many, it is a reality for a select number of collectors around the world. Art Cooper is one. A retired physician, he has turned his ranch-style home into an artifact repository for pre-Columbian ceramics.

  “I have visited many of the great archaeological sites in the world,” he told me when I visited him. “To own something of a past civilization is to better understand it and put the present in perspective. To live with something from that civilization is to have a spiritual connection with it.”

  Neighbors were unaware of the wealth of antiquities stored in this house. Besides some Mayan ceramics and a handful of early-Pueblo pots from the Four Corners, the bulk of the collection consisted of colorful northern Mexican wares from around the fifteenth century.

  We were in the living room, the space around us loaded with pots—walls, shelves, tables—categorically arranged into monochromes, polychromes, effigies. As he plucked down the finer ones to show me, his wife, Betty, stood back watching with a pleasant air of circumspection. It was not often they let a stranger into their home. I don’t blame them; they had nearly three hundred vessels in their house, the highest-valued piece worth $50,000, probably half a million dollars in total for the collection. They guarded it assiduously, with deadbolts and a commercial security system.

  Some of their vessels came from an art museum that was selling overstock but most were purchased from dealers. Some came directly from a man in cowboy boots who lived in southern New Mexico (guaranteeing that they were unearthed on private land). Although they swore he was not a pothunter, he certainly fit the description.

  A large man but not fat, hands clasped before him, Art said they used to lend their best pieces to museums for exhibitions, but it no longer feels safe to do so. Private collectors they know have gotten nailed as soon as they put their pieces on display. Questions pop up, federal agents come knocking at their doors.

  Not surprisingly, Art does not like how things have turned out, with private collectors now the pariahs of the archaeological community.

  “Few are allowed to touch or even cherish these ancient objects,” Art argued. My head nodded involuntarily.

  “There have been collectors from time immemorial,” he said. “Archaeologists are but johnny-come-latelies with an attitude that only they have a right to collect and interpret the past.”

  I nodded at that, too. But knowing that this is not a clean business, I could not help having reservations. Private collectors are on their own: they have no rules, no agreed-upon principles. Most operate below the radar, their artifact sources shady. Many enter the market without any awareness of what may have been destroyed to bring them their treasure. Trace any of these objects back through time and there will always be a boot and a shovel—and likely there is scant or no scientifically useful provenance.

  The principal argument against private collection is clear. For every object on the shelf there is a hole in a grave, an emptied tomb, a ransacked archaeological site with no record to be followed. In June 2008, 929 pre-Columbian artifacts, not unlike the ones the Coopers own, were returned to Mexico after being seized by customs agents in Texas, Arizona, and Toronto. They had been smuggled out of the country. This is a small sample of the more than nineteen thousand objects that Mexico’s National Anthropology Institute says have been sent back to Mexico from the United States and Canada over a five-year period.

  I have traveled in the source region of most of the ceramics the Coopers hold. It’s why I had come to their house. I wanted to see where the pots had gone. All along the flanks of the Sierra Madre Occidental the looting damage is difficult to miss. I found one canyon full of big adobe cliff dwellings that looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to them. I dubbed the place Rape Canyon. Doorways were busted open, elevated granaries were cut down one after the next, their contents spilled as if they were piñatas. Only top-shelf material had been taken, the looters leaving junk heaps of decayed textiles and bone-dry corncobs. To get to their precious polychromes, they had disfigured other remains in the way, putti
ng their shovels straight through skeletons and plain-ware ollas, laying waste to history.

  When I asked Art how he felt about this end of the problem, he said he buys only objects that have been on the market for so long that it hardly matters. His collection was the end result of long-past transgressions, the looters’ pits already healed over.

  The tide of professional opinion, however, is against him. Museums are urged not to display private collections unless their provenance is unassailable. Scholars are being pressured to avoid any study of them. If an artifact gets a nod from a PhD, its price shoots up. The American Institute of Archaeology refuses even to publish or review work that involves undocumented artifacts like many in the Coopers’ collection. (You may be able to determine by inscriptions on a vessel that it came from Paquimé in Chihuahua in the fifteenth century, but if there is no literal account, no record of the grave or room it came from, it is rejected.) To modern science, what the Coopers have is virtually worthless, but to the Coopers, it is a source of another kind of knowledge, a personal way of comprehending the past. In the years they have spent studying their vessels, they have gained a deep familiarity with them, which they feel has given them insight into interpreting the meaning behind many of their design elements.

  Art picked up a bold pre-Columbian effigy jar the size of a coffee mug. He said he had bought it on eBay a few days earlier, a startlingly fine example of Ramos Polychrome, especially for an Internet buy. It was a richly painted Neolithic figurine, a woman with fat legs and skinny arms in a seated position, her vagina a slice in the clay surrounded by the rise of her vulva. Judging by the style, she probably came from within at least a couple of hundred miles of the raped landscape I had seen.