Soil testing also seems to hold a good deal of promise for successful prosecutions. Soil is taken from an artifact and from the site where agents suspect the pot was removed. Through laboratory analysis the soils are
”fingerprinted.” If the ”prints” match, officials claim, they can tell with certainty where a pot came from. The method, however, has yet to be tested in court.
To date the best way to obtain a conviction, most officials agree, is to have someone testify that they`ve seen others steal federal antiquities. In the case of the recent search warrants, Earl Shumway (a distant relation of Devar Shumway), a convicted Blanding pothunter, agreed to provide information against others in exchange for two years probation instead of a prison sentence. Federal agents also have launched an undercover ”sting” operation in southeastern Utah; to date no arrests have been made.
Fred Blackburn works at the White Mesa Institute in Cortez, Colo., an auxiliary of the College of Eastern Utah. In the late `70s he was the BLM`s chief ranger at the Grand Gulch primitive area, an archeologically rich canyon popular with visitors. He was responsible for patrolling the entire San Juan Resource Area, 2.2 million acres that includes San Juan County (and the town of Blanding) in southeastern Utah. He claims that while he was a ranger, he repeatedly pointed out the need for two things: increased law-enforcement funding to stem pothunting and a program to educate people about the value of what is being lost to vandals and looters. His memos from that time bear him out. ”We were there to make it appear as if we were doing something,” he says. ”But the BLM constantly undercut our effectiveness by telling us there were places we couldn`t go or things we couldn`t do.”
Yet it was only in 1984 that the two BLM rangers who came after Blackburn in the San Juan Resource Area received law-enforcement authority that allowed them to make arrests. Even U.S. Atty. for Utah Brent Ward says the problem came to his attention only in 1984 after he saw newspaper articles on it.
In spite of the recent attention paid to enforcement of federal antiquities laws, Blackburn says the BLM still is doing relatively little to enforce the law. ”They simply have not budgeted enough money,” he says.
Frank Snell, chief of the BLM`s Division of Recreation, Cultural Resources and Wilderness in Washington, D.C., says Congress is partly to blame. ”The BLM has only had law-enforcement authority for 10 years,” he says. ”We couldn`t have done anything before then.” Since that time, however, he says, ”There has been a great reluctance to go overboard with law enforcement. It`s easy to sit back now and say, `Why don`t we have more agents?` The fact is, there was great reluctance to do even what we were doing with regard to law enforcment.” He says BLM officials do not feel that the agency should handle law enforcement. However, he agrees that other arms of the federal government should be given more money for that task.
U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici (R., N.M.), a member of the Public Lands and Reserved Water and Resource Conservation Subcommittee of the Senate Energy Committee, also believes there is a problem with enforcement. After hearings on the antiquities issue last October in Albuquerque, he said, ”In my opinion, the hearing showed that there is not a problem with the law but with its enforcement and implementation.” GAO investigators will say only that they are looking into a broad range of allegations concerning federally owned antiquities.
Winston Hurst, an archeologist in Blanding who works at the Edge of the Cedars Museum there, says the recent searches were merely window dressing and not a serious attempt to stem the problem. Moreover, he thinks heavy-handed police action may cause residents to damage sites out of anger. Indeed, there were threats to dynamite the sites shortly after the raids. Meanwhile, other arrests have been made in Arizona and New Mexico.
Though Blackburn and others are pleased with the recent crackdown, they agree that the effort will have little lasting effect on the overall black market. They say a long-term undercover investigation is needed to ferret out major antiquities dealers, who, because of the prices they pay, are the people who make looting a lucrative pastime for local pothunters.
Brent Ward and San Juan County Sheriff Rigby Wright, who also enforces laws against pothunting, acknowledge the need for a major undercover operation. The problem, however, is a familiar one. ”Who`s got half a million dollars lying around?” says Wright.
Ronald Weber of the Field Museum comments, ”I think it`s very difficult for the government. It would be like stopping the cocaine trade. It would be extremely expensive. The most important thing is to get to the museums (that are buying the illegal pieces) and discourage their purchases. You have to eliminate the market. As long as there`s a market, it will be supplied.”
Whatever the criticism, Rich Fike, BLM archeologist in Utah, insists that his office is committed to the protection of archeological resources. ”We definitely have a commitment to the resource,” says Fike. ”Our problem is we have 23 million acres and 12 archeologists. We just don`t have the money and resources to do it.” Similarly, the federal Office of Surface Mining has only two archeologists to oversee cultural resources in coal mines in 22 Western states.
But some critics say that law enforcement is only one area in which federal land management agencies have neglected cultural resources. In some arms of the BLM and the Forest Service there seems to be an unwillingness or inability to recognize the importance of archeological resources when carrying out development projects, they say. Federal agencies, by their own admission, have undertaken development projects that have destroyed or led to the destruction of large numbers of sites in the process, although pothunting, by all accounts, takes the most serious toll on artifacts.
”There`s a real `They`re only Indians` attitude that prevails toward cultural resources,” Blackburn says.
Says Chris Kincaid, a former BLM archeologist who now works for the National Park Service at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah:
”(Cultural resources) are one of those esoteric resources that most managers have a difficult time dealing with.”
Utah BLM director Roland Robison disagrees. ”There are thousands of these sites,” he says. ”If we were to attempt to conserve and preserve and watch out for all of them, why, there isn`t enough money in the Treasury to do all that.”
A common land-clearing technique in the cedar, sagebrush and juniper-studded plains of the Southwest is called ”chaining.” A chain with large links is fastened between two D-9 Caterpillar tractors. Dragged over the ground, the chain cuts down everything in its path–trees, shrubbery and, in the case of Alkalai Ridge, in San Juan County, Anasazi sites.
In 1985 a firm called Woods Canyon Archeological Consultants prepared a study for the BLM on cultural-resource damage on Alkalai Ridge in southeastern Utah. The area is important archeologically, as well as for energy and livestock development.
The consultants identified 99 sites in a 400-acre sample area, the majority of which were Anasazi. Forty-seven of those 99 sites, according to the report, had been disturbed to some degree. Fourteen of the sites were disturbed by energy development, including road building and seismic line construction. (Oil exploration uses sound waves from underground explosions to read subterranean formations, a technique similar to sonar.) The most disturbances were from chaining, the report says, 34 of 99 sites having been damaged to create areas for livestock grazing, which is marginal at best in this dry, sparse country. Twelve sites on the Alkalai Ridge study area were damaged by vandals.
Jerry Fetterman, one of the two archeologists who did the Alkalai Ridge study, says destruction of the sites from chaining is not unusual. ”Alkalai Ridge was one of many mesas they chained,” he says, ”and they disturbed quite a bit of stuff.”
BLM archeologist Rich Fike points out, however, that the chaining on Alkalai Ridge was done in 1969, before a moratorium on and study of the practice. Chaining is still practiced in Utah, Fike says, but the technique
”is not near the problem it used to be because they leave islands of trees
(around the sites to protect them),” he says.
Utah BLM director Robison agrees that the BLM has come a long way since it chained land indiscriminately. ”In the earlier days there wasn`t the concern, sensitivity and awareness of cultural resources,” he says.
But the protection of sites can be only as good as the archeological survey of each area before it is chained. Adele Smith works with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in Springdale, Utah, a public-interest group that monitors and lobbies for the protection of wilderness and cultural values on public land. She believes surveys are all too often hasty and incomplete.
”Because (areas to be chained) are in dense pinyon forests, the sites are difficult to count,” she says. ”So surveys are difficult to do prior to chaining. And there`s no way you can go in afterward and get an accurate count.” She believes many surveys are cursory and that as a result many sites end up being destroyed.
Even if the sites are properly marked and preserved, there is still a problem. ”In a county as sophisticated as San Juan,” she says, leaving a site with an island of trees around ”is an open door for vandalism.” The solution is to leave ”decoys,” she says, islands of trees in areas with no sites to confuse the pothunters.
Although the value of an archeological site is diminished by disturbance, it is not totally lost–depending on what happens after the disturbance. If a site is closed up and protected from erosion and other destruction, it still can yield material for archeological interpretation.
On the Arizona Strip, a large area north of the Grand Canyon and south of St. George, Utah, vandalism and theft of prehistoric material has escalated recently–largely, some speculate, because of the crackdown in San Juan County. Pothunters have moved west.
Greg Woodall, of Hurricane, Utah, who has worked for the BLM in the past and as an archeological consultant, is now working as a volunteer to try to stem some of the vandalism in the area. Provided with a federal truck, meal money and a credit card, he has patrolled some of the hardest-hit sites. One of Woodall`s biggest complaints is that after the sites have been looted–he estimates those to be in the hundreds–they simply are left to deteriorate further. Even after numerous memos to superiors, Woodall says, nothing has been done to mitigate the losses. ”Disturbed sites have not been reclaimed
–at all,” he says. ”Human remains have not been reinterred. And it`s all subject to erosion.” The situation is the same throughout the Four Corners, archeologists say.
Woodall adds that there has been no baseline study of what Anasazi sites exist. And since the vandalism started in earnest–which he thinks is linked to an influx of people following a uranium boom on the strip–much of the stuff will disappear, and no one will ever know what was there.”
”That`s correct,” says Jennifer Jack, resource area archeologist for the Arizona Strip, and Woodall`s superior. ”There`s no money to do any of that. Period. It`s frustrating for all archeologists.” Responsible for 2.7 million acres, Jack has a budget of $50,000 this year, excluding her salary. She says it is the highest budget ever.
