Antiquity Theft

"THE LAST GRAVE"

SAN CARLOS Arizona: - In the dead of night, looters are destroying the history of America, desecrating sacred Indian ruins.

An estimated 80 percent of the nation's ancient archaeological sites have been plundered by amature shovel-toting looters or professionals using trenchers or backhoes.

Above is a San Carlos Apache tribal archeologist holding a sherd of pottery at an 800 year-old ruin that has been destroyed by looters. 

The San Carlos Reservation covers 1.8 million acres of high desert, pine forest, canyon lands and archaeological sites - a wilderness patrolled by 10 rangers who spend most of their time protecting game and fish.

The enforcement story is equally grim elsewhere in the West: too much country, too many diggers, not enough officers.

Enforcement is complicated by a plethora of overlapping agencies. Depending on where a ruin is, it could be the jurisdiction of U.S. Forest Service rangers, National Parks officers, Bureau of Land Management investigators, tribal police, BIA agents or state investigators.

There are more than 100,000 known archeological sites in Arizona, most of which have not been inventoried. The BLM is responsible for 261 million acres nationwide (86 million in Arizona), but most of the land is not surveyed.

Archaeologists and enforcement officers generally estimate that eighty to ninety-five percent of known sites have been looted at one time or another.

How looters work

Typically, the digger arrives in early evening, hiding his truck in bushes a distance from ruins. After retrieving tools from a nearby stash, he hikes to the site using a GPS device. A pro can read the landscape and quickly map out a 1,000-year-old village that has eroded into the earth. He recognizes the burial mounds and debris exposed by rain. He follows rock lines that mark foundations. Wearing a headlamp in the darkness, he probes the earth with a long metal pole. A ball-bearing welded to the point enables him to feel the soft soil where a body was buried or a building eroded over time. He works methodically, like a child playing Battleship, knowing that he will hit pay dirt eventually. When he senses an air pocket or feels the crunch of pottery, he turns to a narrow-bladed shovel to dig straight down, periscoping into the earth to see what's there. If the site is promising, a larger shovel cuts into the soil, sometimes many feet deep. Screens filter the dirt for smaller artifacts.

When an area is tapped out, the looter moves on. Some ruins are left resembling minefields, full of holes and piles of dirt.

Hard-core looters school themselves in archaeology and zealously defend their right to dig. They know archaeological sites as well as the experts. For many of them, it's a generational thing. They did it with their fathers and grandfathers, and they think it's a god-given right.

Buyers and sellers
The commercial value on an indian relic is based on its uniqueness, artistry and preservation.  A plain Navajo bowl may bring $100. A good polychrome pot from the Salado people fetches $5,000.  Ancient Hopi yellow-ware pottery may be worth $80,000.

Besides the diggers, there are so-called "doorknockers" who roam the Indian reservations like old-fashioned buffalo traders. Going door to door, they buy artifacts and heirlooms from Native Americans. But it is illegal to traffic in objects that are considered religious or patrimonial.

Looters and doorknockers get to know buyers by visiting shows, sharing contacts and researching artifacts. They offer their finest merchandise to wealthy collectors who pay top dollar for one-of-a-kind items in pristine condition. More modest objects are sold to galleries. Mediocre antiquities go to bulk dealers or are offered on eBay.

Prosecuting looters is nearly impossible, because authorities must prove that the collector knew artifacts had been looted.

Some artifacts are sold with provenance papers, listing where and when they were recovered. But there is no way for consumers or government agents to know whether objects were legally excavated from private property, looted from public lands or handed down by family members. Once a stolen relic is on the market, enforcement is next to impossible.

Artifacts didn't even have value until the 1960s, when Americans began to romanticize Indians and their history. Suddenly, ancient Indian relics became worth a lot of money to Asian, European and American collectors.  This demand created incentive for diggers to search for and plunder ruins. Looting became an occupation as did the manufacture of fake or replica antiquities known as "ghosts."

Legal loopholes
Authorities have charged only a handful of people with violating the key federal laws designed to preserve historical sites and items which are: the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) and the National American Graves Repatriation Act.  The Arizona state Attorney General's Office has been even less busy prosecuting violators of the Arizona Antiquities Act and the Burial Protection Law of 1990.

The lack of enforcement is one of the factors for the low number of prosecutions but wiggle room in the law may be even more significant. Simply put, it is legal to unearth archaeological relics on private property, except burial sites and it's legal to purchase items from others who have obtained them lawfully or by inheritance.

You have to prove the pot came from federal or Indian land. When law enforcement confronts grave robbers, they simply claim that the articles came from private property, and ask for a lawyer.

Even when thieves are caught at a dig, court rulings may insulate them. In 2003, two men used a winch to haul rare petroglyph boulders from Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada. They were found guilty of theft but acquitted on a looting charge. Then the convictions were overturned in June because, judges ruled, federal agents could not prove the defendants knew they were stealing something of archaeological worth. Some interpret this to mean that only archaeologists who violate the law face prosecution, because they are the only ones who know the scientific value of artifacts.