Roundup of Utah Collectors Stirs a Debate on Enforcement

摘要

Last month, after 16 residents from this town in southern Utah were arrested and accused of stealing prehistoric Indian artifacts from public and tribal lands, nobody was more surprised than Teri Paul, director of the state's Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum, which features archaeological exhibits on the area's Native American cultures. "I guess I just got it into my head that locals weren't doing this anymore." The town was the center of a similar raid back in the mid-1980s. Old traditions die hard, though. Blanding, like numerous other communities in the Four Corners region, has a long-standing tradition of digging up Native American ruins for recreation and profit. The habit took hold during American archaeology's embryonic period between the 1800s and 1920s-ironically, a time when the Smithsonian Institution and others sponsored expeditions to the Southwest and paid locals to find artifacts. Federal laws now make it a crime to take such trophies from public lands and Indianrnreservations, but the practice of "pothunting" continues, fueled by a lucrative black market in antiquities.