Bighorn Canyon sites at mercy of unlawful artifact hunters

Sometime in the past 200 to 400 years, an artist from an exclusive Crow religious society painted two sacred figures on the walls of a protected rock shelter on the edge of the Pryor Mountains.

He had meticulously drawn a man and a woman adorned with sacred hats worn by Crow participants in Tobacco Society rituals. The artist probably created his intense red paint by combining blood and urine with ocher, a reddish clay that crops up occasionally in the ancient mountain range. Pieces of ocher that the artist would have crushed to a fine powder for mixing his paint were discarded on the floor of the shelter.

"The Tobacco Society is very, very old,'' said Howard Boggess, a Crow and a historian, as he sat on a rock in front of the 2-foot-high paintings. "It's really a strong society. You have to work for years to get into it.''

Only those who are ritually pure, who drink no alcohol and don't partake of hallucinatory drugs, can participate, he said. It's a male society, according to Boggess, but women play an important role in ceremonies.

Boggess and Mike Penfold, president of the Western Heritage Alliance, have spent years wandering southeastern Montana and northern Wyoming, finding, documenting and pushing to preserve archaeological sites.

The two Billings men visited the Tobacco Society shelter last summer, finding it in near pristine condition. Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Glade Hadden of Billings hadn't seen the figures, so they arranged an expedition for the next week. The shelter appeared untouched, just as Boggess and Penfold had left it. After leaving an offering of tobacco and plastic beads, the group made the arduous climb down the rocky slope.

A week later, Penfold and Boggess returned with another small group. This time, it was clear that someone had been treasure hunting at the sacred site. The figures had not been damaged, but looters had dug deep into the shelter's powdery soil, looking for artifacts.

They made off with the plastic beads deposited a week earlier, but that's probably all, Hadden said. It's a ceremonial site, not an occupation site, he said, and little would have been left behind by the Crow.

"There's nothing even to loot, and they took it anyway,'' Hadden said in disgust.

It's another blow to scientists trying to understand a landscape that has supported human life for at least 10,000 years. Sites all over public lands in Montana and Wyoming are being systematically pillaged of information vital to piecing together the ancient past, he said.

There are probably some professionals out there digging for profit, hoping to find something they can peddle online or to shady private collectors, Hadden said. But he said he believes most looters are amateurs hoping to expand their personal collections.

"They really love the hell out of it,'' he said. "But they are destroying what they love. They are destroying it so fast, we can't keep up with it.''

It's an obsession with some people, agrees Chris Finley, archaeologist for the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. And artifact looting seems to be an obsession that some are unable to control.

"It's become a very serious problem,'' Finley said. "We just see more and more of it all the time. We're not sure what it is they're finding, but whatever it is, it keeps them coming back.''

This spring, he stood on a promontory in the national recreation area and spotted a cairn, a pile of carefully placed stones, that had been looted only two to three months earlier. Rocks from the dismantled cairn formed a circle around its center. A rodent skull and a few small animal bones lay among the ruins, but that was all.

"If there was anything in there, I'll never know now,'' he said, crouching to re-examine the ruined site.

Artifact hunting or vandalizing archaeological sites on public lands is almost always illegal. Professionals with proper credentials and a carefully detailed project in mind may be able to get a permit for BLM lands, but amateurs without credentials need not apply.

Basically, it is illegal to excavate, deface or remove objects from public lands or Indian reservations - including broad stretches of Montana managed by the BLM, the Forest Service and the National Park Service.

Writing "I love Mary'' or "Joe was here'' on an archaeological site can prompt a federal felony charge. Stealing artifacts from a site can result in a separate felony charge for each artifact taken. Looters can also be fined and required to pay the cost of restoring damaged artwork or a salvage archaeological survey of the area they have wrecked. Hadden said costs for salvage archaeology can quickly reach $100,000 or more. Archaeology done right isn't cheap.

The problem is catching the violators, Finley said. Looters have boldly operated on the edge of the Bighorn Canyon tour road, and no one has ever been caught red-handed.

Sound carries for miles in the national recreation area, and maybe the thieves just jump into the brush when they hear a car coming, he said. Maybe those who see them don't realize that people digging in the ground so openly might be doing something wrong.

There are more eyes out in the Pryor Mountains and on the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area these days. Law enforcement officers are always on the lookout, and all federal employees who work on public lands have been on the alert for looters, too. So are volunteers like Boggess and Penfold. Hadden has also put together a group of volunteer stewards who check sites regularly. Members of the public who see something suspicious on public lands are asked to report it to law enforcement.

Beyond that, "all we really can do is educate them - try to develop a conscience in them,'' Finley said.

"Besides I was under the impression that only cave dwellers left any substantial evidence of their past existience the rest has been swallowed up by strip malls and fast food joints."

The area is not densely populated. The nearest "city" is Billings, about 2 hours away. Billings has 40,000 population, making it the biggest city in Montana.

The adjacent section of Wyoming is closer to Billings, than other "principle" cities in Wyoming. The area in question has no strip malls to speak of. No enough population.

The town my grandmother and father were born in has about 300 people today, same as in 1901. Cowley, is on one road to Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area.

The entire area is rich in all kinds of antiquity. Fossils, Indian history, white man history. Custer Battlefield a little over an hour away.

I got brought up with Rocky Mountain conservatism, that taught wildlife conservation, through regulated hunting & fishing.

Use nature's bounty with care and reverence. Clean up after yourself. I am neither cowboy or Indian. But my grandfather was a cowboy, died wearing an Indian bracelet, for he had known and lived with them all his life.

possible topic (I hope I haven't already seen one about and forgot it)?

I'm going to bed. G'night all.

[blam; FairOpinion; StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach]

http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050718_native_lore.html

Native Lore Adds Clues to Ancient U.S. Catastrophes

By Michael Schirber

LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 18 July 2005

10:20 am ET

The Pacific Northwest is an historically active area for earthquakes and tsunamis. But some geological records can be difficult to sift through.

Now further clues of the region's catastrophic events have emerged from native lore.

The Cascadia subduction zone -- a fault line stretching along the coast from Vancouver to northern California -- likely erupted in seven or more major earthquakes in the last 3,500 years, geologists have learned in recent years.

Some of these events apparently were recorded in the Native American lore from the region. Through the use of mythological figures that represent wind, thunder, and water, a number of native stories describe major earth trembling and flooding along the coastline.

"There's a frightening amount of it," says Ruth Ludwin from the University of Washington. "It appears that these stories have to do with earthquake-, tsunami- and landslide-like events.”

One recurring theme in this oral tradition is the epic battle between Thunderbird and Whale. Ludwin and her colleagues find a metaphor for ground shaking and ocean surges in stories of Thunderbird being dragged down to the ocean floor, with its talons dug into Whale's back.

Other stories depict a shape-shifting spirit -- called a'yahos by the Salish people -- that often appears as a giant serpent with two heads or blazing eyes and horns. A'yahos is associated with shaking and rushes of muddy water.

“As you go around the region, there are very many of these stories and they are central to the native cultures, which suggests that these past earthquakes had profound effects on the local inhabitants,” Ludwin said.

In two papers for the journal Seismological Research Letters, Ludwin and her collaborators have collected such stories in order to relate them to specific occurrences in the geologic past.

For instance, between 1860 and 1964, there were nine separate tales that appear to all describe a large tsunami from January 1700. Three of these stories -- passed down to grandchildren or great-grandchildren -- were eyewitness accounts of the flooding.

"There were a lot of native people living here,” Ludwin said. “Hearing the local story based on eyewitness accounts helps us to realize that the event occurred right here and that people saw it and remembered it for many generations."

Across the Pacific, this same tsunami resulted in flooding in Japan. Recent evidence points to a magnitude 9 earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone as the cause of these giant waves.

Other native tales may be related to a major earthquake on the Seattle fault that erupted around 900 A.D. and presumably unleashed a tsunami in Puget Sound. The researchers found five stories about a'yahos that are associated with spots along this fault line, and another 13 stories that originate from Puget Sound and the surrounding region.

One story mentions a spirit boulder, which the researchers matched to an actual boulder located just south of the Fauntleroy ferry terminal in West Seattle. Subsequent analysis determined that this boulder was dislodged by a prehistoric landslide that may have been a mile in length.

Interpreting all the stories has not been easy, since any given earthquake has different effects in different places. But Ludwin said that knowing some of the symbolism has helped bridge the human history with the geologic history.

"Over time, so much has been lost but the stories still have a tremendous richness of detail. Things happened that left a very deep cultural impression," Ludwin said.

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