Trump Demonstrates the Need for the Antiquities Act: Fighting for the Bear's Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante

It's not complicated. It's called the Antiquities Act, and the law has but four sections, and no subsections. You can read it in its entirety below. It lays out the process by which the president of the United States can establish a national monument to protect endangered historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States. The law was passed in 1906 because of the wholesale destruction of archaeological sites taking place across the western United States at that time.

American Antiquities Act of 1906 

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Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who shall appropriate, excavate, injure, or destroy any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity, situated on lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States, without the permission of the Secretary of the Department of the Government having jurisdiction over the lands on which said antiquities are situated, shall, upon conviction, be fined in a sum of not more than five hundred dollars or be imprisoned for a period of not more than ninety days, or shall suffer both fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

Sec. 2. That the President of the United States is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments, and may reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected: Provided, That when such objects are situated upon a tract covered by a bona fide unperfected claim or held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government, and the Secretary of the Interior is hereby authorized to accept the relinquishment of such tracts in behalf of the Government of the United States.

Sec. 3. That permits for the examination of ruins, the excavation of archaeological sites, and the gathering of objects of antiquity upon the lands under their respective jurisdictions may be granted by the Secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture, and War to institutions which the may deem properly qualified to conduct such examination, excavation, or gathering, subject to such rules and regulation as they may prescribe: Provided, That the examinations, excavations, and gatherings are undertaken for the benefit of reputable museums, universities, colleges, or other recognized scientific or educational institutions, with a view to increasing the knowledge of such objects, and that the gatherings shall be made for permanent preservation in public museums.

Sec. 4. That the Secretaries of the Departments aforesaid shall make and publish from time to time uniform rules and regulations for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this Act. Approved, June 8, 1906 

It might be hard to believe, but there was a time when certain people thought the Grand Canyon was not worthy of preservation as a national park. There was a time when the protection of Zion Canyon was controversial. It was the same for Olympic National Park. Arches National Park. Death Valley National Park. Joshua Tree National Park. It may be hard to believe, but it took the actions of a president to save these crown jewels of our national park system from destruction by using the Antiquities Act. It sometimes took time for it to dawn on people that these lands were national treasures and worthy of protection. At a more mercenary level, it took time for some people to realize that more money could be made by protecting the land than could be made by consumptive uses like logging or mining. Eventually Congress named these monuments as national parks, and they are the most precious parts of the American landscape.

The history of the Antiquities Act has thus been controversial at times, but in the end, the monuments that have been established by presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have ultimately been recognized as important parts of our national heritage. These lands are the best of what our country has to offer. And that is what makes developments in the last few months so distressing. Our country has been hijacked by robber barons who think only in terms of personal profit from public lands at the expense of our citizens. Ground Zero lies in southern Utah and northern Arizona at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and Bear's Ears National Monument. We have a president who is illegally trying to undo the declarations of earlier presidents.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, It was controversial because it was established in part to preclude strip-mining for coal on the Kaiparowits Plateau. The park protects 1.8 million acres of spectacular plateaus and slickrock canyons, and has come to be recognized as one of the most important paleontology parks in the nation. New dinosaur species continue to be discovered within lands protected by the monument. It seems ironic to me that towns and villages adjacent to the park have prospered because of tourism in this park. If they had built the coal mine, the coal itself would be giving out by now, and the towns would be in decline. Instead, as long as there is a monument these towns will do well. Given the issue of rampant overcrowding in nearby Zion National Park, Grand Staircase-Escalante provides a lot of wide-open space and recreational opportunities.

Bear's Ears National Monument is a special place. It had been proposed for decades, as it has the largest concentration of archaeological sites in the Four Corners region. Negotiations had gone on for years, and local tribes were unified in asking protection of the region, as were numerous environmental organizations. Grazing and certain other historical activities were to be allowed to continue. But greed won out and the negotiations faltered. President Barack Obama stepped in and established the monument, which was smaller than the most ambitious proposals, but which still included 1.4 million acres.

Cedar Mesa, the central feature in the southern part of the monument, was a critically important part of the "fertile crescent" that supported Ancestral Pueblo communities for more than a thousand years. Earlier cultures have lived in the region for thousands of years, and archaeological investigations have only scratched the surface of the stories to be told here. This land is sacred to the Native Americans who live in the region today, and many of their cultural activities take place in the monument.

Unfortunately, many of the present-day inhabitants of the region have no appreciation or respect for the cultural value of this region other than the price that they can get on the black market for pottery, fabrics, and other artifacts that they are stealing on an ongoing basis throughout the monument. The rangers of the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service have been threatened with violence for doing their job of protecting these lands, and they are overextended. Trump and his Interior Secretary Zinke don't care that this is going on. They are now working to undo the work of decades of negotiation and compromise, and are trying to open these lands to even more exploitation and damage with their efforts this week. Most residents of Utah are in support of the monument, but they are being ignored by their own government.

I have a personal connection to the Bear's Ears. I have been bringing students into this region for thirty years, guiding them to understand the geology, archaeology, and natural history of this incredible region. All of these pictures were taken on these trips. Besides the cultural and archaeological value of this region, it is also a land of incredible vistas and spectacular scenery. With parks like Arches, Zion and Grand Canyon bursting at the seams with visitors, we need more protected lands, not less.

The president's actions are clearly illegal, and I hope that anyone who loves this country will oppose him in this terrible venture. I cannot accept that this land will be given back to the pothunters and grave robbers. The local people who argue that these lands should be given over to the state because they and their ancestors have lived there for a whole century rarely note the irony of their attitude. The local people whose ancestors lived here for thousands of years want this land protected.

Even more, I hope that more people from other parts of the world will visit, explore, and make their own personal discoveries. People who love a land will fight to protect it from exploitation. If these issues concern you, please consider contacting your own representatives in Congress, and if they don't listen to you, consider working hard to replace them in coming elections. Government officials in Utah should also be hearing from us. They need to know that losing tourism dollars may hurt more than any short-term profits to be gained by destroying the monuments.

Yes, I'm angrier than usual tonight. These lands that I love more than almost any other are under attack, and I fear that greed and money will win out over what is right and good. Trump and Zinke are proving the wisdom of the Antiquities Act, as they the exploiters the act was meant to stop.

The Other California: A Chance to See a Unique Piece of our State, our local Galapagos Island

Santa Cruz Island in Southern California. Here is your chance to explore this dynamic and unique ecosystem! Source National Park Service

I work with some pretty incredible people. Modesto may be not be the most exciting place to live, a Central Valley town with a depressed economy and limited opportunities, but the professors and teachers I work with are fighting to provide our students a chance to reach their dreams (and even to give them an idea of what to dream about). Many of our faculty are doing world class research, and we have nationally known poets and writers. They could live anywhere, but they've chosen to live here and work to build their community

It's also important to know that despite our limited resources, our administration recognizes the value of field experience not just in geology, but also biology, archaeology, and anthropology. Students who have pursued their education at our school have had opportunities to explore far-flung parts of our world, including Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Baja California, and all eleven western states. It is a challenge to put such trips together, and they can be expensive, but the experience and knowledge gained is priceless.

Which brings us to today's topic. Early on in my blogging career (in the Pre-Pleistocene year of 2008), I had a regular feature called the "Other California" which describes those parts of our fair state that don't always show up on the postcards and travel brochures, but which display incredible geology and natural history. Our state is rich with landscapes and species that are found nowhere else. And so today I want to let you know about a marvelous opportunity to see one of our most unique landscapes, the Channel Islands.

The Channel Islands are the oceanic extension of the Transverse Ranges in Southern California. Structually, they've had a strange history that includes being a part of the Earth's crust that has rotated more than 90 degrees from their original orientation. They have been compressed and faulted, and isolated from the mainland for several million years. That means that fauna and flora have been isolated as well, and they have undergone selective pressure in order to survive. There are more endemic species here than anywhere else in the state. There is a species of bird, the Island Scrub Jay, that is found nowhere else, as well as a canine, the Santa Cruz Island Fox. As recently as 10,000 years ago there was a race of Pygmy Mammoths who survived on the islands for some time after their relatives had died out on the mainland. And...humans lived with and occasionally hunted them! The islands have a rich archaeological heritage of the Chumash people that goes back thousands of years. 

You have a chance to explore Santa Cruz Island with an archaeologist, Professor Susan Kerr, and a biologist, Professor Teri Curtis through the auspices of Modesto Junior College. The class is Archaeological and Biological Field Studies of the Channel Islands (Anthropology 155 and Biology 155 for a total of 2 semester units) and it will take place on August 7-12 on Santa Cruz Island. Cost includes registration fees for the class and $480 for housing, transportation, meals and activities, including kayaking and hiking. There is an information meeting on May 19th for those of you who live in the Modesto region, at 6 PM in Science Community Center room 212 on the west campus of MJC. If you can't make it to the meeting, contact Susan Kerr (kerrs -at- yosemite.edu) or Teri Curtis (curtist -at- yosemite.edu). I hope you can join them!

A Modesto Junior College Field Studies Opportunity: Geology and Archaeology of the Hawaiian Islands, June 1-13, 2016

This might be of interest only to my Modesto area readers, but anyone who is interested in learning about the natural and human history of the Hawaiian Islands may want to investigate this field studies opportunity June 1-13, 2016.

Imagine yourself on a journey exploring volcanoes, coral reefs, deep mysterious canyons rivaling the Grand Canyon, tropical rainforests, tropical deserts, ancient foot trails and petroglyphs while learning geology and archaeology in one of the finest outdoor laboratories on the planet! The Hawaiian Islands are scientific and cultural treasure! Our MJC summer field studies course  will be a multidisciplinary study of the Hawaiian Islands, with nine days on the Big Island, and four days on Kaua'i. This will be a dyad class, Geology 190 and Anthropology 190. Cost for lodging, transportation and inter-island flight will be $2,200 (students will need to meet us in Hawaii, and arrange their own food). An informational meeting will be held Thursday, January 28 (5:30 PM in Science Community Center Room 326). We welcome the participation of interested students, community members, and staff members at MJC.

Contact me (hayesg "at" yosemite.edu) for more information. There is a course web page at http://hayesg.faculty.mjc.edu/Hawaii_2016.html, and a facebook group page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/452708258272005/. If you can't make it to the information meeting in person, please contact us; we'd be glad to have you join on this great expedition!

Losing Humanity's Heritage by Fire, But Not From Burning

Mt. Konocti and Clear Lake, an archaeological treasure in Central California

I read this article by Madeleine Thomas in the Pacific Standard, and it was disturbing to say the least. It discusses the looting of archaeological sites in the Clear Lake area, in part by meth addicts. It's truly sad how low some people can go on their life's journey, and meth addiction is one of the worst ways to go. One sometimes wonders if the human wreckage can ever be salvaged, and yet it should be society's highest priority to at least try.

It's the collateral damage to our heritage as human beings that saddened me so deeply as I read more of the article. Huge disastrous wildfires have now become the status quo in California as we enter our fifth year of unprecedented drought. A natural pattern intensified by global warming, the drought has left vast swaths of California brushland and forest vulnerable to fires far more intense, and far more difficult to contain. Three major fires are burning right now, in the Coast Range north of Napa (the Valley Fire), in the Mother Lode east of Jackson (the Butte Fire), and in Kings Canyon (the Rough Fire). More than 450 square miles have burned so far. Between them, the fires have killed five people, destroyed more than 1,000 homes, and we can now look forward to flooding and mudslides if the predicted El Nino weather pattern follows expectations.

The specific problem highlighted in the article is that fire scorched lands can expose archaeological sites. This can be a good thing if the land is protected and patrolled on a regular basis. In Mesa Verde National Park, fires burned something like three-quarters of the park in a decade's time, and several thousand new archaeological sites were discovered in the aftermath. In coming years, these discoveries will provide vast amounts of new information about the Ancestral Puebloan people. It's a treasure, but a protected treasure. Anyone trying to loot sites at Mesa Verde is likely to be apprehended in short order.

California Quail at Clear Lake

Archaeology in California can be far more difficult. The earliest humans in the state didn't make stone houses, so village sites are generally harder to find and assess. In the Coast Ranges and Great Valley where many early groups lived are under private ownership, and in many cases the sites have been deeply altered, for instance by agricultural and urban development.

Clear Lake, north of the Bay Area, is an interesting and little-known part of California. It is the largest natural lake in the state (Lake Tahoe is bigger, but extends into Nevada). It developed because of faulting that formed the lake basin, along with landslides and lava flows that blocked the outlet. Nearby Mt. Konocti (4,305 feet; 1,312 m) is a composite volcano composed primarily of dacite lava that erupted around 350,000 years ago, although the latest eruptions took place only 10,000 years before the present. And people might have been there to see it.

The lake is one of the more important regions for understanding the earliest inhabitants of California. There were a number of good reasons for this. The lava flows in the area provided obsidian for toolmaking. The lake was a secure source of water (and food) even in the most intense droughts. The oak woodlands provided a secure source of food, including the acorns and the animals that consumed the acorns. People have lived in the area for upwards of 11,000-12,000 years, from the end of the last major ice age when Mammoths and Sabertooth Cats still roamed the hills.

Butterfly at Clear Lake

The fires and drought have exposed archaeological sites along the lake shore and in the surrounding hills, and looters have been committing their crimes. It is a felony to plunder an archaeological site, but there is no budget to maintain patrols, and maybe no political will to deal with the underlying problems that lead people to plunder in the first place. I'm enraged that ISIS in the Middle East is systematically destroying the heritage of humanity in Syria and Iraq, but drug addicts and criminals are doing the same thing right here in my own backyard. The despoiled artifacts in the Middle East had at least been studied and documented. Here in California we'll never know what was lost. It's a crying shame.

"Head Smashed In"... um, sounds like a great place to visit...

The High Plains have their quiet times. Sure, there are the vicious winter storms,  the days when the wind blows hard, and the summer thunderstorms. But other times the wind may be just a light breeze through the grass, maybe a hawk soaring overhead. Or a huge marmot standing guard on a sandstone outcrop. But I can also stand in this place and imagine a similar quiet day a few thousand years ago. It's quiet, but then the ground starts to tremble, and a dust cloud rises over the crest of the low hill. The birds startle and take flight, the marmot dashes for cover, and suddenly over the ridge comes a thundering herd of buffalo. They're stampeding, and the leading animals start to shift directions, but then suddenly a strange figure jumps up, yelling and waving limbs. It might be a wolf, it's hard to tell in the panic, so the herd shifts direction once more. The leaders now realize they are headed for a precipice and they try to stop, but it's too late. They go over the edge, pushed by the animals behind. They impact on the rocks and bones below, most of them dead immediately. In a moment it is over. People emerge from their hiding places and start to butcher and process the meat, bones and hides. It has been a successful hunt and they will have enough food and furs to make it through the difficult winter.

There is a seven story building in this picture. Can you see it?

The First Nations people of Canada and Native Americans of the High Plains depended on the buffalo for survival. They made use of the meat, the fat, the bones, and the hides. But anyone who has ever seen one of these immense animals knows that they would a dangerous adversary in a hunt. They can be as long as eleven feet and weigh a up to a ton. They can easily outrun a human, capable of speeds of 35 miles per hour. Though it was done, bringing one down was a difficult and dangerous proposition.

We were in southern Alberta on our Northern Convergence tour of western Canada, and were making our last stop in the country at Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site. At Head Smashed In and similar localities, the geology provided a safer way to hunt the animals.

At the edge of the prairies where the mountains rise from the plains, the land is not so flat as it is further east. The convergence far to the west compressed and pushed up the Rocky Mountains. The soft Cretaceous mudstones and sandstones underlying the high plains were also pushed up into broad swales and low hills. Ice, water, and wind exploited fractures in the rock, and erosion ate away at the edges of the hills, exposing vertical cliffs of sandstone. Just such a cliff is exposed in the Porcupine Hills outside of Fort Macleod, Alberta. For at least the last 5,800 years, people have utilized the cliff here to capture and kill buffalo.

A spring emerged from the base of the cliff, providing water at the kill site (the green watercourse is visible in the picture above). The Old Man River flows in the flats below, providing sheltered sites for villages.

Tipis have become such a stereotype that some might think that most Native Americans lived in them. I groan inwardly whenever I see one at "Indian Stores" or southwest tourist traps. But the tipi at Head Smashed In was an appropriate sight. The tipis were an excellent shelter on the windy plains. They were portable, an important consideration for a nomadic people. I know of paleontologists in the region who tried to camp in modern nylon tents, but gave them up for tipis, which were more comfortable and more durable in windstorms.

The site was declared a World Heritage Site in 1981 for its archaeological value. Excavations 39 feet deep in the cliff show a complex history of buffalo hunting going back 5,800 years (two spear points show activity in the area as far back as 9,000 years. The visitor center was constructed to blend in to the landscape, and does so admirably (see the picture above). There are trails to the top of the cliff where some cairns from the hunts can still be found. A trail also loops around the base of the cliff. One of the nice surprises inside the well-designed center was a hallway lined with numerous paintings and artwork by First Nation students representing the oral histories of their culture.

About the name of the place. In the Blackfoot language it is called Estipah-skikikini-kots. Legend has it that a young man decided to watch one of the buffalo hunts from the base of the cliff. He picked a bad spot, and was crushed beneath the weight of the falling animals. The name doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the site as a destination when traveling in the region, but it is indeed a fascinating place to visit. It's full of history, but it is also a place of wide-ranging views and scenic beauty, and despite the name, serenity.

Northern Convergence: The Mystery Photo Explained

Thanks for all of your conjectures about yesterday's mystery photo! The Earth is such a fascinating place, and there are so many different kinds of strange patterns that have different origins. Let's review some of the guesses (and they were very good, by the way):
a. Sinkholes and karst topography
b. Bison wallows
c. Ground squirrel or prairie dog workings
d. Periglacial patterned ground
e. Dried marshes, evaporative processes
f. Pithouses

Take a look at the depressions from ground level. The rocks are gravel and sand, so karst is not likely (sinkholes most often result from the collapse of caverns in areas underlain by limestone). Something like a buffalo wallow makes some sense, but these are very concentrated, and the region is not really good buffalo habitat (too much mountain slope and not enough prairie). Rodents like prairie dogs or gophers tend to produce mounds (so called 'mima mounds') rather than hollows. The location of the site on a high river terrace tends to rule out the idea of swamps or evaporative processes.

Of the natural processes that could make this phenomena, periglacial processes make the most sense. Freezing and thawing of soils often result in rings and polygons that might resemble what we saw in the picture. The region underwent glaciation in the Pleistocene epoch and continues to have extremely cold temperatures in winter. It makes some sense, but then why are the pits filled with so many artifacts?

So yes, these pits are made by humans. We were paying a visit to the lands of the Xwisten people, a First Nations group whose traditional lands were along the Fraser and Bridge Rivers near Lillooet, British Columbia. This river terrace surface contains the remains of dozens of pithouses.

The former village along the Bridge River is the site of ongoing archaeological excavations by researchers and students of the University of Montana as well as local members of the Xwisten tribe.

We were being led on a tour of the archaeological site by several members of the Xwisten Bridge River Band who had been involved in some of the excavations. The setting was dramatic, with high mountain peaks on all sides.

As is the case with most archaeological digs these days, only a small portion of the site is being studied in detail. There is an expectation that future technology will be able to better analyze the site, so much of the village remains undisturbed for the time being. Only one of the pithouses was exposed when we visited.

The village site was abandoned over a century ago, although many Xwisten live in a modern village just a few hundred yards away. Evidence from the site investigations show nearly continuous occupation of the site beginning about 1,800 years ago. Many of the sites were used over and over, with some of the pits containing 12 levels of occupation.

A few years ago the Xwisten decided to build a pithouse on the site using the knowledge of their elders. One of our guides noted that what took their ancestors several weeks to construct took them more like three years even though they had modern tools. Entry was usually through a square hole in the room, although some may have had side entrances. The ladders, as you can see below were notched logs. With well insulated ceilings the pithouse seemed like it would be roomy and warm in winter conditions.

The Xwisten subsisted in part on salmon, and part of the demonstration was the preparation of salmon for eating and preservation. Our tour concluded with a salmon dinner. The sun was getting low, and we had another two hours of highway ahead of us. We drove into the night arriving at our hotel in Kamloops sometime after ten o'clock. It was a long, but fascinating day. We had left the Coastal Belt and were now making our way through the Intermontane Belt. We'll pick up the story in the next post!

To AF, the commenter in the last post who lives in Lillooet, let me know if I got anything wrong! Our visit was very quick, and I'm just a geologist, not an anthropologist!

The Abandoned Lands: A Compendium of Geology Explorations on the Colorado Plateau

During the summer of 2012, I explored the margins of the Colorado Plateau with a group of geology and anthropology students. I was struck by the way that the land tended to defeat the best efforts of those who wanted to colonize and "tame" the landscape. From this grew a blog series that I titled "The Abandoned Lands". As I prepared to explore these lands again from a different perspective, I realized I had never put together a compendium of the posts that I wrote last year. So with your patience, I now do so. Look for them "beneath the fold"...

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: Walnut Canyon...Would you have been one of them??

A thought exercise: you've lost your house...to foreclosure perhaps. The sheriff kicked you out so quickly that you had to leave most of your belongings behind. Maybe it was the family farm. Your parents and grandparents were buried there in a family plot. You've been locked out and will never able to return.

How do you feel about the new owners who take over the property? Do they have the right to dispose of your things as they see fit? Do they have the right to bulldoze the trees in the family cemetery and put a minimart on top of the graves? (Actually, I think I have an idea for a horror movie...someone call Steven Speilberg). Okay, maybe it wasn't you who lost the home, maybe it happened a hundred years ago, in Ireland, or Scotland, or in Senegal? How long do we have a right to feel like our family heritage has been molested? Is 800 years too much? Say a family castle in southern Europe that was built by your forebears in the 1200's?

Around 800 years ago, the Sinagua People felt they had to abandon their lands. We don't know why...long term drought is suspected as a cause, although that would be ironic for a people whose name means "without water". They often lived in parts of the central Colorado Plateau that did not have secure water sources, including Wupatki (see one of my previous posts), and Walnut Canyon, southeast of Flagstaff. They left behind entire villages in the cliffs at Walnut Canyon, a place that is protected today as Walnut Canyon National Monument.

I visited Walnut Canyon as a 10 year old, and I was fascinated with the place. Here were abandoned homes and villages, it seemed like hundreds of them spread on the alcoved cliffs of Kaibab Limestone. I combed over the floors of each of the small rooms like a young Indiana Jones. I wasn't interested so much in the walls that remained; I wanted to discover things. Things like pottery sherds, arrowheads, the evidence of the lives that were lived here. Somehow I knew that I would see what the hundreds of thousands of tourists who were there before me had missed, if I looked hard enough.

It occurred to me even then that maybe I needed to be looking at the dwellings that weren't on the tourist trail. You could see them off in the distance, their remoteness (and the stern signs prohibiting access) making them a magnet of my desires to search and discover what obviously must be hidden just off the trail. Oh, how I wanted to climb up into these mysterious dwellings!

I found out many years later that in the late 1800's it was a tradition for Flagstaff residents to take a wagon ride out to Walnut Canyon to search the ruins for pottery and other artifacts, and that many thousands of artifacts disappeared into local households. These former homes of the Sinagua People had been plundered of their treasures and destroyed many decades before I happened upon the scene. Sometimes the pothunters used dynamite. Now that I was an adult, the very thought infuriated me. How could they allow such a desecration to take place? It's not even justified to say that the Sinagua People no longer exist. Their descendants live in the pueblos of New Mexico and on the Hopi Reservation (To their absolute credit, it was the work of many citizens in Flagstaff that resulted in the formation of the national monument in 1915. They were horrified at the destruction that was taking place. I am not aware if the descendants of the Sinagua were ever consulted.).

I felt a similar sense of disgust and indignation when a river runner told me many years ago that he had the mummified remains of an Anasazi child in his garage. This was on the same river trip that I was told that the walls of the seemingly pristine ruins that we saw on the San Juan River had been repaired three or four times after pothunters had winched them down to get at burial sites. Pothunters are criminals, pure and simple. If you are having trouble understanding this, imagine if someone was digging up the remains of your grandmother for the purpose of stealing the jewelry she was buried with.

The exhilaration of discovery, whether it involves a gold nugget in a stream, a dinosaur bone in the desert of Utah, a perfect topaz crystal in a rhyolite tuff, or an unbroken Puebloan pot from 800 years ago is like an addictive drug. There is nothing quite like it. It is easy to condemn pothunters who are interested only in selling their finds. Can we judge the people of Flagstaff and other nearby communities for taking artifacts a century ago who were only after the thrill of discovery?

Likewise, how do you judge the little kid who collected square nails at a ghost town in a state park and was enraged when his father told him to put them back? They were just pieces of rusted iron. And what about the kid who finds a beautiful spearpoint high on a mountain ridge miles from any actual archaeological site, and keeps it? What harm could it do? I have to face the fact that the little kid was me. It took me years to outgrow the desire to possess, and I also know for a fact that if I lived in Flagstaff a hundred years ago, I would have been one of the plunderers.

I have not had the rush of finding an intact pot in a cliff dwelling. I like to think that over the years, I've developed the judgement to leave it in place and notify the authorities of the discovery, but I know that won't be my first impulse. What would you do?

Here is the explanation of my "abandonment" theme for this series: http://geotripper.blogspot.com/2012/06/abandoned-landsa-journey-through.html