Theft of ancient relics robs state of history

Sunday, Oct. 10, 1999 | 10:25 a.m.

The pages of Larry Brundy's history book are disappearing before she can finish writing them.

The Moapa woman's thick album contains photographs and descriptions of hundreds of petroglyphs and pictographs scattered throughout the canyons of Coyote Springs Valley on Clark County's northern edge.

On one page, in the margin next to a photograph of a human figure carved on a gray boulder, Brundy writes:

"In early summer 1997, I went to the Dune Site to check measurements. Someone had removed the stone with the petroglyph at left."

Another ancient relic stolen.

"You know, over the years I've seen a few of them stolen," Brundy said. "Sometimes I just go home and cry."

Across Nevada and the West, urban developers, pot-hunters and vandals are stealing history by lifting artifacts and even the buried remains of American Indians.

This modern trail of tears is gouged from the deserts, mountains and canyons where indigenous people raised families, fought battles and buried their dead.

Pictographs, which are drawn, and petroglyphs, which are carved, tell the stories of these ancient people and how they lived. And each year more of the art, arrowheads, pots and tools they left behind disappears.

"Every time you go up there, something else is missing," Eugene Tom, chairman of the Moapa Band of Paiutes, said. "You know it's going to be gone."

Tom says his tribe's reservation, about 60 miles east of Las Vegas, attracts plenty of weekend visitors.

"I don't know how they find us. I guess they come out to see the teepees and the feathers," Tom said, laughing a little at the stereotype. "They want to see what a real Indian looks like."

Others come looking for much more.

"I get reports that people are digging around looking for baskets and bones," Tom said. "I got a call last week that a guy in the upper Muddy (River) area is digging up bones in his yard. I couldn't believe it."

Stan Rolf believes it. As archaeologist for the federal Bureau of Land Management's Las Vegas office, Rolf sees plenty of such disrespect.

He says the chances of finding a complete pot or a large cache of artifacts in Southern Nevada are slim. Most local relics are the culturally significant landscapes and thousands of panels of rock art found among the district's 3.5 million acres.

Whole panels of carvings can disappear.

"They take rock chisels and cut it off," Rolf said. "You see them at gem shows or you see it on the black market. They even sell mummies on the black market."

But thieves aren't the only ones pinching Nevada's historical legacy. Urban development also scrapes away archaeological sites.

"The urbanization of Southern Nevada -- the 4,000 to 6,000 (people) a month who are moving here -- affect the resources and the ability to manage them," Rolf said.

Brundy has spent 10 years photographing and documenting the thousands of images painted and carved on rocks in the canyons where she grew up. She fears her time is running out.

Construction of a posh golf community northwest of Moapa promises to bring 25,000 residents to within half a mile of the areas where the artwork is found.

She wants to record the rock art that is remarkable to her and sacred to the Paiutes before it is lost to looters and vandals who add modern graffiti next to ancient symbols.

Keeping up with them is hard.

"When I started, most of the damage up there was erosion. But now it's from people digging them out or shooting holes into them," Brundy said.

Pat Barker, the BLM's state archaeologist in Reno, said they settle three to five illegal excavation cases each year and have "many more in the hoppers" at any given time.

Federal officials sometimes settle rather than prosecute because people often come by relics innocently, he said.

"People don't know any better. They take it home without knowing that it shouldn't have been moved," Barker said.

"Then there's a hard-core group of pot-hunters. They are people who do this for a living," he added. "There's a huge industry -- millions and millions of dollars in looted artifacts. You see them at gem shows, gun shows, antique shops. I know of several Internet web sites."

In Nevada there is no law against possessing or selling artifacts taken from private land unless they are burial remains or items associated with burials.

"Whoever owns the land, owns the artifacts. They can do whatever they want to with them," Barker said.

No artifacts may be removed from federal or Indian reservation land.

It's easier to prosecute people for destruction of burial remains than it is to nab them for taking other relics, Barker said.

In order to arrest someone for selling an ancient pot an investigator has to prove the item came from an illegal dig site. That's pretty close to impossible, even when investigators know the dealers' names and know what they are up to. "I know people who are actively collecting, and we cannot catch them. There are 10 or 12 in Nevada," Barker said.

About 10 percent of illegal diggers who are caught are caught in the act, and another 10 percent are nabbed in sting operations, Barker said. The remaining 80 percent are discovered through informants.

Woe to the digger who jilts a partner. An Oregon man who stole hundreds of Nevada artifacts -- including the 2,000-year-old burial remains of two American Indian children -- was turned in by his ex-wife, Barker said.

Federal officials still are trying to recover $2.5 million in civil damages from Jack Harelson, Barker said. In 1996 the Grants Pass man was sentenced to 18 months in jail on criminal charges and fined $20,000 for possessing items swiped from a site north of Winnemucca during the 1980s.

And Nevada State Museum workers in Carson City still are identifying more than 300 artifacts donated by a woman whose son unearthed them illegally along the Utah-Nevada border during the 1980s and early 1990s.

The man and his girlfriend were on a pot-hunting expedition in 1995 when their pickup mired in Utah's Silver Island Mountains. They froze to death, federal officials said.

The looted relics will remain indefinitely at the state museum, an official curator for the BLM, or until a tribe claims them.

Nearly every Nevada site archaeologists examine shows signs of previous digging by amateurs, said Paul Buck, an assistant research professor with the Desert Research Institute. The Las Vegas-based institute is supported by the state's university and community college system.

"A lot of sites in Nevada people have known about for years," Buck said. "In some areas it's a family vacation to go out and dig stuff up. They go out on a weekend and bring a picnic and dig stuff up. It's just a hobby."

Southern Nevada has no ruins like the cliff city of Mesa Verde, Colo., or the elaborate kivas of Southeastern Utah, Buck said. But there are plenty of crude rock shelters and natural caves that served ancient people and American Indians.

"There are places where people have lived for 10,000 years, and pot-hunters know that," he said.

About the safest resting place for a Nevada relic is on federal land with highly restricted access like the Nevada Test Site.

"Many of those sites are in far better shape. From that standpoint, it would be better if the Department of Energy owned the whole state," he said.

Public building projects and private projects built on land acquired in swaps with public agencies are to be excavated for archaeological significance before they are developed, Buck said.

"The greatest cause of of destruction to (Indian cultural) sites is development. There's so much going on at once in a place like Las Vegas," he said.

And the speed of the construction makes thorough surveys difficult.

For instance, a survey crew isn't to look beyond a proposed highway's right-of-way. A burial site that begins a few inches beyond the boundary can easily be missed, Buck said.

Then the houses, businesses and frontage roads creep over the landscape. Pretty soon that burial site is on a spit of land surrounded by development, if it isn't destroyed or covered.

"It has people going over it, dumping trash on it and bulldozers going over it when they move from place to place," Buck said. "In the last 10 years we've lost thousands of acres."

Richard Arnold is a Southern Paiute and executive director of the Las Vegas Indian Center, a private, nonprofit social service organization for all American Indians.

He says artifacts left behind by his ancestors are "all over Southern Nevada," and people can harm them just by admiring them.

"There are petroglyphs and pictographs. People don't realize the oils in their hands damage them in just touching them," he said.

Most hobbyists go looking for arrowheads, Arnold said. Occasionally someone hunting for small stuff will run across an ancient pot and take it home for display or sale.

Arnold recalled a hobby digger who came to the center and asked workers to identify a pot unearthed outside of town.

"He wanted to know the value. They refused to give a dollar amount because it perpetuates this," he said. "The reason (relics) are there is because we left them there. We believe people should look at them and leave them for the next person. Once you've picked these up and taken them, you've broken that cycle.

"There's a context of where these things are," Arnold said. "The entire Spring Mountain Range is extremely important. Certain parts of Mount Charleston are where the Southern Paiutes originated. There are stories all along that range."

Every time someone picks up an arrowhead or a shard of an ancient pot and takes it home, it changes the story. It turns an important cultural link into a meaningless coffee table trinket.

"It's very tragic to us because we see ourselves losing more and more every day," Arnold said. "Just because it was revealed to you doesn't mean it's yours to take."

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