Artifact looters a grave concern

Thursday, April 1, 1999 | 5:25 a.m.

Objects meant to sleep with the dead now drive an international market. The business is fed by thieves who dig by night and loot thousands of sacred sites from the sagebrush ocean of Nevada to the Arctic tundra.

"Western Nevada is certainly getting hit hard by looters," said Garry Cantley, a Bureau of Indian Affairs archaeologist based in Arizona. He was in Reno for an archaeological resources protection training program last week.

Nevada U.S. Attorney Kathryn Landreth, Indian tribal officials, archaeologists and federal and local enforcement officers attended the seminar, which featured the latest techniques for preventing, detecting and prosecuting looting cases.

For hundreds of years, American Indian sites and other historic places went unprotected and treasure hunters looted at will. Within the last 20 years, Congress passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, giving tribes and law enforcement a tool to stop the robberies and protect historic and prehistoric places,

JoLynn Worley, Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman in Reno, said the most recent ARPA conviction in Nevada involved Jack Harelson from Grants Pass, Ore.

For more than a decade, she said Harleson systematically excavated a cave in the Black Rock Desert, removing artifacts and human remains. His sentence: 18 months in jail and a $20,000 fine. A civil case for more than $2.5 million is pending, based on restoration and damage estimates, Worley said.

"You can get into felony territory real fast," Cantley said. "Looting is a very big deal to us. Stopping it is a federal priority."

Severe damage was done before Congress passed ARPA in 1979.

On the Great Plains and in the Rock Mountain states the artifacts of the Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Blackfeet and other tribes vanished in the 1800s.

"It's a nationwide problem," said John Welch, an archaeologist who works with the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona. "Heritage sites are vanishing. People trespass and help themselves to the late 13th and 14th Century pottery located throughout the tribe's Fort Apache Indian Reservation.

"In order to find the pottery they dig into the graves. That's where the finest pottery was left to see the deceased through their next lives."

And, the looters know their way around.

"We've got a lot of sites in Oklahoma but it's a battle to keep an eye on them," said John Northcutt, a BLM archaeologist attending the training sessions. "They can sneak in and out quickly and are very hard to catch."

Norman Harry, chairman of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, said