Utah\u2019s U.S. senators say they want Congress to investigate the actions of federal agents who arrested two dozen people — four of them older than 70 — June 10 in an investigation of the \u201ctheft\u201d of ancient artifacts in the Four Corners region. <\/p>\n
A day later, one of the men arrested, a prominent local doctor, committed suicide. <\/p>\n
Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, both Republicans, say the raid was overkill. <\/p>\n
Bruce Adams, a commissioner in San Juan County in southern Utah where many of the arrests took place, said there have been reports of \u201cregular neighbors\u201d being roughed up and confronted by agents in bulletproof vests with weapons drawn. Some 300 federal agents — about half from the Bureau of Land Management — were involved. <\/p>\n
Sen. Bennett called the raid outrageous, saying agents shouldn\u2019t have searched one person\u2019s home for 10 hours for a single item, then handcuffed the suspect. <\/p>\n
Were authorities after armed desperadoes who had blown open the safe and opened fire at guards at some archaeological museum? <\/p>\n
Actually, that\u2019s not the kind of \u201ctheft\u201d that\u2019s alleged, at all. <\/p>\n
Federal indictments accuse the suspects of stealing, receiving or trying to sell artifacts belonging to Indian tribes that vanished from the area centuries ago. But the artifacts — bowls, stone pipes, sandals, arrowheads and pendants — were \u201cstolen\u201d only in the sense that they were dug up from the desert sites where the Anasazi Indians abandoned them, perhaps more than a thousand years ago. <\/p>\n
Many have described such raids as a \u201cclash of cultures,\u201d which is a fair description. Such \u201cpot hunting\u201d has been a common hobby around the Four Corners area — and other sparsely inhabited parts of the Southwest — for generations. On Sunday picnics, Mr. Adams recalls, one or more folks would generally lug along a shovel. Any such relics that had not been recovered in time from the north bank of the Salt River, down in Arizona, were eventually bulldozed to make room for the city of Phoenix and its Sky Harbor airport. Nobody got indicted. <\/p>\n
The objection from archaeologists is that such artifacts lose much of their informational value if they\u2019re removed from their original sites without being carefully mapped and documented. <\/p>\n
The amateur pot hunters reply that museums and archaeologists have more of these artifacts than they know what to do with. <\/p>\n
Indeed, were the areas from which these artifacts were removed scheduled to be mapped and professionally excavated next summer? The summer after that? In 15 years? Never? <\/p>\n
If left untouched after being \u201ceroded out\u201d by wind and rain, what would most likely have happened to these artifacts? Might they have been trampled by cattle, chewed by wildlife, washed away in the next rains? Who would have benefited from that? <\/p>\n
\u201cPot hunting\u201d is legal on private land; it is considered a crime on lands controlled by the government. <\/p>\n
But the Constitution allows the central government to own and control lands within the several states only for \u201cerection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards and other needful buildings,\u201d and then only when \u201cpurchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be.\u201d <\/p>\n
Can the federal government show valid bills of sale for the vast lands in question — bigger than many Eastern states — pursuant to a sale approved by the appropriate state Legislature? They cannot. <\/p>\n
The percentage of land which the federal government claims to \u201ccontrol and manage\u201d in the Western states can approach 90 percent, most of it God-forsaken desert. Few Americans can conceive of that heavy-handed a regulatory presence, unless they happen to live on a military base. <\/p>\n
No one is endorsing wanton vandalism of such sites or artifacts. It would be useful if a cooperative — rather than an adversarial — approach allowed quick surveys of such sites, with the most archaeologically promising being set aside for near-future professional excavation (set a date within the next decade, please), with area townsfolk then told to \u201charvest what you can from the rest; we can\u2019t dig \u2019em all.\u201d <\/p>\n
How do all such artifacts — even those unknown and undiscovered — automatically become the property of absentee archaeologists? Isn\u2019t that a bit like saying all mineral deposits become the property of some government-certified mineralogist in far-off Washington City, rather than those who actually find and develop them? Didn\u2019t we fight a war, back in the late 1770s, over such presumptuous assertions? <\/p>\n
Kate Fitz Gibbon has addressed such issues in her book \u201cWho Owns the Past?: Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law\u201d (Rutgers, 2005.) Attorney and coin collector Peter Tompa also maintains a \u201cCultural Property Observer\u201d Web site, which he \u201chopes . . . will provide a counterpoint to the \u2018archaeology over all\u2019 perspective,\u201d at http:\/\/culturalpropertyobserver.blogspot.com\/. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Utah\u2019s U.S. senators say they want Congress to investigate the actions of federal agents who arrested two dozen people — four of them older than 70 — June 10 in an investigation of the \u201ctheft\u201d of ancient artifacts in the Four Corners region. A day later, one of the men arrested, a prominent local doctor, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,25,46,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-history","category-law-enforcement","category-private-property","category-public-land"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-47","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2415,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/2415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}