They can be easy to miss. "They're subtle enough that when you're walking around on the ground, you don't see them, you look right past them."

Among other discoveries are Hopi-style pottery fragments on trails crossing Comb Ridge. They date from a period after the Hopi's ancestors, the Anasazi, had abandoned settlements in Utah.

"We get these stray pieces of 14th, 15th century Hopi pottery," Hurst said. The scientists find "just enough to indicate they were back there on a small scale.

"We're not really sure what they were doing — maybe revisiting old ancestral shrines."

Every Pueblo settlement with significant material "has been looted to some degree, and often to a considerable degree, especially the trash middens where the burials are." These sites have been "really hammered" by looters hunting for pots and other material to collect or sell.

Also, Hurst said, "the surface collection has been just horrific. . . . That place out there has been just collected to death."

All-terrain vehicle traffic also has caused destruction. So have horseback riders. "They're out there in droves these days," he noted.

The horse is a heavy animal, and when a person is on board while it walks through soft sediments, with five or six horses in a line, they can badly damage archaeological remains.

"They can tear up a midden on an archaeological site as much as a bunch of looters out there for a weekend," Hurst said.

Still, the survey is gleaning important information. Although sites that are looted and picked over are not as easy to document, by crawling through sagebrush for hours and carefully studying the bits that remain, crews are starting to piece together the story of Comb Ridge.

"Despite all that," Hurst said, "we're squeezing interesting stuff out of it."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com