Internet auctions get into sticky business of ancient artifacts

Sunday, Oct. 10, 1999 | 10:36 a.m.

An Internet connection and $1,200 buys you an 1890 Nez Perce necklace made of beads and shells.

An antique Plains Indian beaded doeskin doll goes for about $350, and a rare Sioux eagle feather headdress costs $5,000 -- all available with a credit card and home computer.

Selling American Indian relics isn't new. But now those hoping to get the most from their relics are expanding the buyers' pool with the Internet.

A collector back East has a better chance of finding ancient artifacts from Southwest dealers. And that Easterner will pay top dollar, said Stan Rolf, archaeologist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Las Vegas.

"A black and white Anasazi bowl would sell for $20,000 in New York City," Rolf said.

However, if the bowl came from federal land or any Indian burial site it's illegal to own, buy or sell it. That's where Internet sales can get sticky. Experts say it's hard to tell where the stuff comes from.

Online auction houses and trading posts claim to obtain their relics legally. But old jewelry, clothing, baskets and pots can be found in burial sites, said Gene Hattori, an archaeologist with the Nevada State Museum in Carson City.

"It's portrayed as being legal, but there's a fair amount of potential. It's certainly concerning to professionals that you're increasing the exposure to people who don't know whether it's legal or illegal," Hattori said.

At least 30 web sites hawk American Indian relics and fossils. Paleontologists recently have said they fear even legal Internet sales could inspire illegal excavations.

People have been digging up American Indian artifacts illegally for decades, experts say. A diligent pot-hunter can turn up hundreds of artifacts in just a few years.

The Carson City museum is holding more than 300 items a Utah digger pulled from the mountains and deserts of Utah and Nevada. The man's mother donated the collection to the museum after he died during an illegal dig in 1995.

"There's a book out there that shows the going prices for this stuff, and it's available in bookstores. That's distressing," said Kerry Varley, an archaeologist with the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas.

The institute, part of the state's university and community college system, is an official curator for artifacts collected on Nevada's federal land.

"Once people collect it they hang it on the wall, and it means absolutely nothing," Varley said. "It takes a big chunk out of our history."

Gary Fogelman, editor of Pennsylvania-based "Indian Artifact Magazine," says the Internet is not the first place he would look for artifacts because there's no telling where things come from.

"It's being bought by a lot of people who don't know what they're buying," Fogelman said. "It's happening in all kinds of hobbies -- wherever anybody can dupe somebody else."

His collector-oriented publication emphasizes finding such items legally, which is easier to do in the East because it doesn't have the vast swaths of federal land found out West.

"There's enough out there" without digging illegally, Fogelman said.

Some items are easily tracked to a specific region or location. Anasazi pottery or old Zuni Indian pieces are found only in the Southwest, he said. Most of those regions are owned by one federal agency or another, so any of those items could be suspect.

But it's tougher to pinpoint origins for flint arrowheads, tools and other items that are common to many tribes or may have been carried long distances, Fogelman said.

Some of it is just plain fake. "There's no way to tell where that stuff comes from," Fogelman said. "There is lots of fraudulent material out there. All that stuff they made for 'Dances With Wolves' is out there now."

Rolf said he spends most of his time protecting panels of ancient rock carvings and paintings scattered over his district's 3.5 million acres. People will chisel off whole panels of rock art.

For collectors, the panels make a nice decoration or bring a good price. But the images hold real meanings for ancestors of the Indians who created them, Rolf said.

"The key to management is sitting down and rolling up your sleeves and getting to know the native peoples so they will tell you (the meanings)," Rolf said. "It takes time. You're trying to overcome 260 years of lies, deceit and holocaust."

The proliferation of illegal sales has strained the relationship between collectors and archaeologists, Hattori said. Many archaeologists don't want to identify items for collectors anymore.

"The identification is used as verification to increase the (sale) value," he said.

Eugene Tom, chairman of the Moapa Band of Paiutes, said he doesn't understand the industry to begin with. It shouldn't matter whether the relics come from "legal" places.

None should be touched.

"It's not right," Tom said. "How would you like someone to go dig up your father or your grandfather?"