Atop the great inland desert known as the Colorado Plateau, a new breed of pot hunters roams the mesas and arroyos in search of lucrative bits of American Indian antiquity.
The ancient clay cups, bowls, plates and water jugs that the raiders take from archaeological sites not yet explored sell for $5,000 to $20,000 and more on the black markets of Los Angeles, Bonn, New York, Chicago and Tokyo.W. Max Witkind, an archaeologist with the U.S. Interior Department, parked his pickup on a deserted side road just outside this national monument and led the way a few paces through the juniper bushes to the latest looting place for the pot hunters, whom novelist Tony Hillerman calls "thieves of time."
Perhaps a dozen pottery shards, some 6 inches across and decorated with the black geometrical figures characteristic of the vanished Anasazi civilization, were scattered in a jumble of knocked-down stone walls and 4-foot-high piles of earth still showing shovel marks.
A rock-walled, subterranean, circular ceremonial structure called a kiva had been split open like a melon and a few potsherds lay about. The looters had removed the possessions of a village of perhaps six or eight families that had lived in the buildings.
"This is a classic example of the large-scale looting we're facing today," said Witkind, who noted sadly that each time one of these latter-day wrecking crews strikes, "another page is yanked from the book of history and lost forever."
"When they leave behind big pieces like this it means that they had so much better stuff that they probably couldn't carry any more," Witkind added.
The looting of Indian artifacts dates back to the first white settlers who moved onto the Colorado Plateau in the 1800s to farm and ranch. Congress outlawed the practice in the 1906 Antiquities Act.
Pottery collectors nevertheless remain active, working graves and abandoned village sites everywhere from the north end of Anasazi country to the deserts around Phoenix and the ancient pueblos of New Mexico.
The current violators often are well financed, likely have made advance arrangements to sell what they find to galleries and display a grasp of scientific techniques for finding potential sites to rival that of trained professionals, Witkind said.
Pot hunters face felony charges and stiff fines - up to $100,000 - when they plunder on public lands, as was the case with the site Witkind displayed. But many of the nation's richest archaeological sites are on ranches where Interior Department officials say pot hunters pay owners for permission to dig through the landscape.
On June 29, the Arizona Legislature passed a law that prohibits ranchers in that state from charging outsiders for the privilege of digging on their property. The bill was passed even though lawmakers received petitions from 500 Arizona property owners objecting to the loss of such a lucrative sideline.
A similar law is on the books in New Mexico, but leasing land to pot hunters remains legal in Utah and Colorado.
Loretta Neumann, Washington representative of the Society for American Archaeology, reluctantly acknowledged that particularly well-made artifacts of tribes like the Anasazi, who vanished around 1300 A.D., as well as those of the ancestors of existing tribes such as Hopi, Zuni and Utes can bring prices between $5,000 and $20,000 on the world market.
She said archaeological looting is under way on public and private land all over the United States, from the Indian mounds of the Midwest to the totem poles of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest.
In response, the society, which represents amateur and professional archaeologists, is lobbying Congress for stronger legislation on antiquities.