A town’s love of Indian artifacts backfires

updated 4:15 a.m. ET Oct. 4, 2009

BLANDING, Utah - High above the spiky sandstone spine known as Comb Ridge, archaeologist Winston Hurst treads carefully through the ancient dwellings, carved into the cave more than a thousand years ago.

To a stranger the puebloan ruins seem breathtakingly intact — walls and windows and rooms still standing, storage chambers strewn with thousand-year-old corn cobs, and brightly colored pottery sherds scattered throughout.

Hurst sees only destruction.

Driving to the ridge across a plain dotted with sagebrush and cottonwood, Hurst points to trashed "pit houses" dating from 500-700 A.D. — distinctive mounds in the brush, where looters have dug for the ancient Indian tools, pottery, and jewelry traditionally buried with the dead.

In the cave, more desecration. Centuries-old rock petroglyphs depicting animals and people are daubed with modern graffiti, from "H.E.E." (the Hyde Exploration Expedition of 1892) to "Liz Jones, age 8, 2003."

A few yards away, another signature: the archeologist's own name, scratched into a rock when he was a 12-year-old boy and scrambling through ruins collecting arrowheads was a way of life.

The name is barely legible, gouged out by local artifact hunters who consider Hurst a turncoat. "I have been where they are ... they have not been where I am," Hurst, 62, says sadly.

Preserving vs. collecting
Growing up, one of Hurst's closest friends was Jim Redd, who went on to become a beloved rural doctor. But their friendship faltered as Redd continued digging and collecting, while Hurst became a champion of preservation.

This summer 150 federal agents swooped into the region, arresting 26 people at gunpoint and charging them with looting Indian graves and stealing priceless archaeological treasures from public and tribal lands.

Seventeen of those arrested were from Blanding, including some of the town's most prominent citizens: Harold Lyman, 78, grandson of the pioneering Mormon family that founded the town. David Lacy, 55, high school math teacher and brother of the county sheriff.

And 60-year-old Jim Redd, along with his wife and adult daughter.

The next day, the doctor killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. Another defendant, from Santa Fe, N.M., shot himself a week later.

The suicides horrified this town of about 4,000 with many bitterly blaming the government.

But the recriminations and grief masked more complicated questions — questions that have dogged the town for decades.

Here, in one of the country's richest archaeological regions — where the ruins of ancient pueblos are tucked into towering sandstone cliffs and "pot-hunting" has been a way of life for more than a century, how should the past be protected and preserved? And who, if anyone, owns that past?

Evil spirits
"Chindi" is how the Navajo describe the evil spirits they believe inhabit the bones and possessions of the dead — spirits that can poison a person or place if they are disturbed, spirits that some believe have poisoned this town.

Ed Andrieski / AP Austin Lyman, 62, reading a poem he wrote called "paradise Has Been Raided Again" in Blanding, Utah, in August.

Even Navajo patients who revered Redd spoke sorrowfully of how the chindi had ruined his life. And though many voiced unhappiness about the arrests, there was little doubt the Redds — who had been charged with grave digging in the past — knew they were breaking the law. After the raids, authorities removed two moving vans full of artifacts from the Redd home. Redd's wife, Jeanne, was sentenced to three years probation and a $2,000 fine after pleading guilty to seven counts of trafficking in stolen artifacts and theft of artifacts on government and tribal lands.

It is a felony to take any artifact from public land. There are also laws requiring the repatriation of human remains and sacred ceremonial artifacts to tribes.

But laws can't change attitudes or traditions or make much of a dent in a thriving black market where prehistoric Indian artifacts can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in the vast cliffs and mesas of these parts, where a handful of rangers from the National Parks Service and the Bureau of Land Management oversee millions of acres, prosecution is practically impossible.

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