Artifacts Related -- BURIAL GROUND DESECRATIONS,ETC.

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Date Posted: 09:16:25 04/09/01 Mon
Author: Dutch
Subject: Artifacts Related

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?s
lug=artifacts07&date=20010407

BLANDING, Utah - As he raced his pickup south from Moab toward the red
sandstone canyons here, Rudy Mauldin kicked himself for not thinking of it
before.

He and his partner, Bureau of Land Management special agent Bart Fitzgerald,
knew priceless artifacts had been looted from a remote Indian grave site. A
burial blanket had been stripped off the remains of an infant and the skull
tossed on a trash heap. They had a suspect but no link to the crime.

Then they remembered the backfill, the pile of dirt the digger left. They
sped back to the crime scene at Horse Rock Ruin. As sunlight faded from the
remote canyon, they found their tiny but mighty evidence: a cigarette butt.

Antiquity-theft DNA evidence

After a crime lab extracted DNA from the filter tip, Mauldin and Fitzgerald
got their man - perhaps their most-wanted archaeological thief.

The 1995 prosecution of Earl K. Shumway was a watershed for the little-known
Archaeological Resources Protection Act, enacted in 1979. His case was the
first in which DNA evidence led to a conviction for antiquities theft.
Shumway's 5-year sentence was the longest for such a crime.

More ARPA crimes are prosecuted in Utah than anywhere else in the nation.
American Indians are fed up with thieves rooting around in their ancestors'
graves, and authorities liken it to looting the National Archives.

"It just makes you sick," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Wayne Dance, who has
won more felony convictions in ARPA cases than anyone. "I view this crime to
be highly important to society, because of the irreplaceable nature of the
loss."

Experts estimate more than 80 percent of American Indian archaeological
sites, some 17 centuries old, have been looted.

A grave robber from youth

It falls to U.S. Park Service and Forest Service employees and BLM agents to
find the remote crime scenes, cull clues from sand and rock and track the
thieves.

Any lawman looking for looters crosses paths with Shumway, 42, who once
bragged to authorities that he had been robbing graves since he was 3. His
father worked the family's hardscrabble uranium mines, and little Earl often
would tag along, poking into caves and burial mounds. They took what they
found and considered it theirs.

That sense of entitlement, investigators say, stems from the belief that the
artifacts are abundant. Archaeologists often catalog sites but don't
immediately excavate them, which can lead the public to wrongly conclude
that they are not historically important.

There also is the sheer volume of objects to be found with little effort:
pot shards, arrowheads, cave walls crowded with pictograms and petroglyphs.
In Utah's San Juan County alone, there are an estimated 20,000 known
archaeological sites on BLM land. More than 90 percent have been looted. In
the Four Corners area, "if you walk 20 feet and cannot find something, you
are not looking," BLM archaeologist Kathy Huppe said.

A marketplace commodity

With the market for Southwest art and artifacts at an all-time high, the
temptation is to view Indian ruins less as scientific and historic treasure
troves than as next month's rent.

And the hunted often are better equipped than the hunters.

Shumway has hired helicopters to drop him into remote sites, while other
looters often use high-tech climbing equipment and rappel down cliffs.

Methods of retrieving fragile artifacts are not always subtle. In some
cases, bulldozers, backhoes and trenching machines smash through material
that may be hundreds of years old to get to the more valuable, deeply
buried, prehistoric layers. Repairing the damage is expensive: The rule of
thumb is that the cost for an archaeologist to move a meter of dirt is
$5,000.

High cost, few clues

The cost of investigating ARPA crimes, which often can take years to solve,
also is astronomical.

"You get to one of these old caves, where people have been tramping around
for thousands of years, and you've got a real dang puzzle on your hands,"
Mauldin said. "You find more evidence at your average murder scene."

Investigators search for identifying marks, even taking casts of shovel
holes to look for notches that may come from a certain digger's tools. In
crime scenes that can stretch across miles of desert, even the most crafty
criminal sometimes leaves a calling card.

"Earl (Shumway) was known for drinking Mountain Dew at his sites. We found
the cans all over the place and could tie him to scenes because of that,"
Mauldin explained.

Mauldin knows the market regulates archaeological looting in a way that law
enforcement cannot.

"It's the greatest treasure hunt in the world, that's how they see it," he
said. "Look around. It's out here. And they'll keep looking for it. And
we'll keep looking for them."

Shumway, who did not show up after agreeing to an interview for this story,
is still out there. He pleaded guilty in the Horse Rock Ruin case to seven
felony counts of stealing Anasazi artifacts and was sentenced to 6-1/2 years
in federal prison. The sentence was reduced on appeal to 60 months. He is
back living in the Moab area.

Copyright � 2001 The Seattle Times Company

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