Colorado Welcome Sign
It seems that authorities have indicted another suspect in the increasingly complicated series of investigations into the trade in illegal antiquities in the southwest. Robert B. Knowlton of Grand Junction, Colorado has been charged with selling three artifacts illegally collected from public land to the undercover operative known as “the Source,” who apparently convinced him to mail the items to Utah from Colorado, which added a charge of interstate transportation of stolen property to the charges stemming from selling the items in the first place.
Four Corners Welcome Sign
There doesn’t seem to be much information out yet about the circumstances behind this indictment, but there are a few interesting things about it. For one, this is a new guy. He wasn’t named in any of the prior charge. His connection to the earlier cases seems pretty obvious, as the Source was the informant in those as well, but charges in those cases were heavily focused on people in and around Blanding, Utah with a few suspects from Durango, Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico involved as well. In addition, this indictment was issued by a federal grand jury in Denver rather than the one in Salt Lake that issued the prior ones. Some vague references in earlier articles on the investigation have suggested that authorities in each of the Four Corners states have been investigating separately, with the Source being the main link among the various cases, and Utah was just the first state to move to filing charges. Subsequent revelations about searches of the homes of some artifact dealers in Santa Fe showed that New Mexico authorities have been active as well (although I don’t think they’ve filed any formal charges so far), and this indictment seems to show Colorado getting in on it too. The lack of any Arizona connection so far is interesting, and it suggests that there may just be at least one more shoe left to drop here.
Westwater Cliff Dwelling, Utah
Also interesting is the nature of the artifacts Knowlton is accused of selling. While one is a “cloud blower” pipe allegedly from the Big Westwater Site near Blanding, and thus part of the same late prehistoric Anasazi cultural tradition as most of the artifacts associated with the Blanding cases, the other two are Paleoindian lithics from a much earlier period: a Midland projectile point and a Hell Gap knife. I don’t know very much about Paleoindian archaeology, so hearing about this indictment led me to look into this a bit.
Stone Tools at Chaco Visitor Center Museum
It turns out that Midland points are very similar to the better-known Folsom points, dating to around 9000 BC, except that they aren’t fluted, and, indeed, in an interesting but rather short article from a while back George Agogino of Eastern New Mexico University (a major center for Paleoindian archaeology, due partly to its association with Blackwater Draw) questions if the “Midland complex” defined around this type of point is really anything more than a variant of the Folsom complex. Henry Irwin and H. M. Wormington noted in a very useful article from around the same time on Paleoindian artifact assemblages that the sets of tools associated with the Midland and Folsom complexes are very similar.
Arrowheads at Chaco Visitor Center Museum
As for the Hell Gap knife, Irwin and Wormington discuss it as well, noting that it is one of the few knife types to be associated with a specific cultural complex in the way that projectile points are. This is, unsurprisingly, the Hell Gap complex, defined by the use of Hell Gap projectile points, which Agogino had named in an earlier article. Although Irwin and Wormington don’t give any specific dates for the complexes they discuss beyond putting the Clovis complex around 9200 BC and the others between 9000 and 6000, Agogino gives a radiocarbon date of 8890 BC for the level in which he found the Hell Gap points, which he considers roughly contemporary with dates for Folsom levels at other sites. (I don’t know how widely accepted these dates are nowadays, but I’m going to be looking into contemporary understandings of the Paleoindian period.)
Four Corners Monument
One passage from Agogino’s Midland article stood out when I was reading it:
The Folsom point type is distinct, unique, and attractive, making it easy to recognize. Today, Folsom points are among the most sought after artifacts in private collections, and their relative scarcity has prompted speculators to sell prime specimens for considerable sums.
This case seems to show the truth of this statement even forty years later, although the specific artifacts Knowlton is accused of selling don’t fit the narrow definition of “Folsom points” against which Agogino is arguing. Knowlton apparently told the Source that he bought the knife from a woman who found it near the airport in Moab, Utah and that he bought the point from a park ranger who found it near Telluride, Colorado after a fire. One thing to note about these locations is that they’re a bit far afield geographically as well as temporally from the previous cases. Although Moab isn’t too far from Canyonlands National Park, where some of the Blanding people were accused of digging, Telluride is a whole different geographical and cultural area. In addition, although Knowlton lives in Grand Junction, the sale apparently took place in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is way on the other end of the state from any of the rest of this.
Map of Four Corners Monument Area
The Santa Fe branch of the investigation, although still rather murky, seems to have extended it both considerably to the southeast of Blanding and into the trade in items illicitly acquired from the modern Pueblos. This Colorado indictment, on the other hand, is taking things in a very different direction: north, east, and very far backward in time.
T-Shirt Shed at Four Corners Monument
Wow, that’s getting pretty close to home here…
There are published subscription catalog/journals that feature “collections” and have various artifacts offered for sale. I’ll bet you can find items, maybe even ancestral Puebloan artifacts, for sale on Amazon.Com or Ebay right now.
Most of these collections and artifacts are from the Greater Mississippi drainage and East but I have seen Puebloan artifacts offered for sale.
I will try to find out the name(s) of publications I have seen and pass this on. Point being I have for example definitely seen Clovis points offered for sale in print in a relatively public catalog/journal complete with photos ( I don’t think you’d find these “catalogs” in the local library but there is probably no reason why the library couldn’t pay for a subscription)
Is the key element in these cases the provenience from public lands?
Selling artifacts is best I can tell a rather “open and notorious” practice. It is an every day event here in North Carolina. And this is one of the minor disagreements I have with the very brave statements by Winston Hurst in the Archeology article you linked to a few weeks back; I’m not sure any artifacts no matter the “provenience” should be private property. Remember @ 150 years ago many in this country thought it was OK to own another person………
( though hopefully resolving this dispute won’t require a Civil War )
And where in Canyonlands did some of the Blanding artifacts originate? Must have been Needles. I have seen open cists in Salt Creek. The macaw feather cape which may be one of the most fascinating of all Ancestral Puebloan artifacts was found in a cave in Lavender Canyon which is in the Needles district of the National Park and is one of the great mysteries ( what the heck was it doing in a cave in Lavender Canyon? ) adding to the aura of this amazing item.
Yeah, artifacts are sold quite openly, and (theoretically) legally. Here, for example, is the site where Bob Knowlton sells his stuff (which I found via Paul Barford). He’s got stuff advertised all over there, and most of it’s probably legal despite the fact that he’s just been indicted. Private property is indeed the core of the issue here; artifacts from private property can be dug or sold with basically no restrictions. This is obviously a huge loophole for pothunters to fence illegally excavated artifacts, since they can always claim that any given artifact was taken legally from private land, and there’s no way to prove that it wasn’t short of catching them in the act of digging on public land (which, given the vastness of the west, is basically impossible), or, as we’re seeing with the Blanding cases, conducting a sting with an undercover operative. I discussed the issue of private property a bit in a recent post.
I’m increasingly leaning toward your view on private ownership of artifacts, but good luck doing anything about it at this point. It’s not that it’s theoretically impossible to declare artifacts public property, and this is apparently how things work in Mexico, but attachment to the rights of property owners runs very deep in this country, especially in the west, and while there have been some murmurs lately in some circles about making an effort to ban private ownership of antiquities I don’t see it happening short of something like another civil war. And note that the pothunters and the zealous western landowners are all heavily armed. Hurst is in a particularly tricky situation when it comes to this sort of thing, since he lives in Blanding himself, and it’s no surprise that he’s careful and moderate in expressing his opinions.
One thing I think Hurst is right about, though, is that making this all about who can own artifacts is the wrong way to go about it. It just makes it sound like the liberals and the archaeologists want to take stuff away from private citizens and give it to the government because they hate freedom and love tyranny (etc. etc., I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of this sort of talk). The point, though, is that it isn’t about owning things at all. It’s about context, and information, and what things can teach us through their associations with other things and places and so forth. The archaeological record. Hurst argues that the way to address these problems is through education and teaching people to see things that way, although he acknowledges that it’ll have to be a very long-term project and not one that will necessarily succeed. I share his pessimism.
Sometimes I think the best way to deal with this is to make it illegal for anyone to possess artifacts. Not private citizens, not museums, not the government. Leave it all where it is, and study it only in ways that leave it undisturbed. The archaeologists won’t like that, of course, and neither will the pothunters, but it might get the latter to see that it’s not about who can own things. It might get the former to reflect a bit more on the background and origins of their discipline, too.
Not that that’ll happen either, of course, but I think it’s a useful perspective from which to consider these issues.
Oh, and as for Canyonlands, I’m not sure. I do recall reading somewhere in the coverage of the cases that some of the stuff came from within the park, but looking back through the articles now I don’t see anything specific about it.