Tribes must speak up on artifacts, remains

In 1989, a rancher stalking a mountain lion in the Book Cliffs region of Utah, southeast of Salt Lake City, discovered a network of Fremont Indian community sites dating to 900, though they may be up to 4,500 years old.

It was one of many such sites Waldo Wilcox had stumbled across since purchasing the 4,200-acre ranch in 1951. Up until Wilcox sold the ranch for $2.5 million two years ago to a San Francisco land trust group, which turned it over to the state of Utah, he withheld knowledge of the sites and chased off the occasional hiker or the wayward lost.

He kept it so well hidden that modern American Indian tribes that claim Fremont ancestry in Utah and the surrounding region, including four New Mexico pueblos, didn't learn of the sites until early this summer, when about 50 reporters were given a tour of the prehistoric settlements by state archaeologists.

What has saddened and angered tribes is that they were not included in any decisionmaking on the handling of artifacts and human remains before archaeologists and anthropologists began exploring the sites. Already found have been clay figurines, shell necklaces, arrows (some decorated), arrowheads, rock art (petroglyphs and pictographs) and mummified bodies (men buried in beaver skins; women and children in cedar bark).

In short, it's a monumental amount of data and artifacts priceless both to scholars and the modern tribes that are related to the Fremont, including the Goshute, Ute, Shoshone, Hopi and Paiute.

The Fremont dated from 400 to around 1350. They were a smallish people, with men 5 foot 4 to 5 foot 6, and women from 4 foot 8 to 5 foot 2. They hunted deer, bighorn sheep and rabbits, fished and farmed and were contemporaries of the Anasazi and Mogollon of New Mexico, with whom they bartered for corn seed and probably raided.

They lived in pit houses among the cliffs, had flood irrigation — the ditches of which are still visible today — for watering corn, squash and beans, and granaries stashed among the rock accessible only by ladder or rope. Shell evidence indicates trade with tribes off the Pacific coast in present-day Southern California.

What is good about the Utah situation is that no one is making hasty decisions, and the state seems determined to preserve the sites and the rock art, calling the finds a "national treasure."

True, archaeologists have performed preliminary work, but they have yet to uncover bodies or otherwise remove any objects, which Wilcox never touched — only covering some artifacts that became exposed to the elements over time.