Ancient artifacts sacred, not trivial

George Hawkins ("Let ordinary people collect artifacts," June 16) is pretty sure he can make an Anasazi pot, one that he doubts even an expert could tell from an old one.

Hawkins is likely a very skilled artist and I commend the hard work it must have taken to reach that level of skill.

But what he is making is a replica, not an Anasazi pot, because he's not an Anasazi. They disappeared from the region a long time ago.

Hawkins also thinks ordinary people ought to be able to collect ancient artifacts from public land. His thinking reveals that he is missing a large part of the picture of what ancient artifacts are and why we want to protect them.

Hawkins doesn't seem to see what many of us find to be obvious — that the relics he and other collectors enjoy are displayed and treated as trophies, like the mounted heads of elk and deer killed in the woods. Only these are not animal mounts. They are human cultural trophies, plundered from ancient homes and graves, displayed for the gratification and aggrandizement of the owner.

Most of these collectors would likely be repulsed if someone dug up and displayed artifacts taken from a pioneer grave, but they don't see Indian artifacts or graves in the same light. Anthropologists know this phenomenon well. People often dismiss and devalue the cultures and practices of other peoples while revering and venerating their own. The reaction to the arrests in Blanding is a good illustration of this. Many are quick to trivialize the nature of the offenses. Those dismissing the seriousness of the crimes are likely mostly of European descent. Native Americans and tribal members have expressed a very different perspective.

But those artifacts have a deeper cultural value. To be sure, some of them are beautiful, fine examples of art and prehistoric craft, but they should be so much more. An artifact in its original context carries cultural meaning and scientific information that are stripped from them by the collector who tears them from the earth and displays them above his mantel. I know of no collector who has ever taken the time to conduct a thoughtful excavation of an archaeological site, who has gone to the expense of obtaining radiocarbon dates or who has measured and counted and analyzed the animal bones and flakes and sherds found. I know of no collector who has consulted with Indian tribes about the significance of their finds or about repatriating human remains.

These are things archaeologists always do. When an archaeologist places a pot in a museum, he already knows a thousand things about that pot, things that a collector does not even know to ask. The pot placed in a museum, along with the thousands of pages of notes, photographs, sketches, maps and reports produced by the archaeologist will be available for perpetuity. Most of us would rather these artifacts and the sites they come from be protected, studied carefully, and most of all, to not be destroyed by vandals and thieves. Many visitors come each year to southern Utah to see the rock art and the Anasazi sites. They don't want to see a looter's hole in the middle of a kiva, or the bones of a child strewn about and discarded by a pot hunter.

Hawkins thinks that "Gestapo tactics" were used by federal agents in making the 1980s arrests in Blanding. Maybe those tactics were what convinced him to start making replicas rather than seeking ancient pots. In that case, perhaps the raids were a success.

The art of the ancient Anasazi was indeed striking and beautiful. I hope everyone who wishes to have a piece of that art in their home will choose, as Hawkins has, to acquire a fine replica and leave the originals unmolested.

Kevin Jones is a state archaeologist with the Antiquities Section of the Utah Division of State History.