Pubdate: Sun, 22 Jan 2006
Source: New Mexican, The (Santa Fe, NM)
Copyright: 2006 The Santa Fe New Mexican
Contact: http://www.freenewmexican.com/emailforms/letters.php
Website: http://www.freenewmexican.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/695
Author: Staci Matlock, The New Mexican
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

ANTIQUITIES ACT: TASK OF RECOVERING STOLEN ARTIFACTS, AN INCREASINGLY 
DANGEROUS DUTY

In April 2004, an interagency group of law-enforcement officers 
descended on a drab-looking house in the tiny village of San Rafael, 
southwest of Grants, with search warrants in hand.

They were looking for evidence that the homeowner, Augustine Chavez, 
was involved in trafficking a pair of ancient Indian leggings woven 
from human hair. The leggings could have fetched $250,000 on the 
black market, according to agents.

Officers knocked on the door and repeatedly said they had a warrant 
to search the house. Chavez ran out the back door, right into other 
agents. "Are you here for the meth?" he asked surprised officers, 
according to a federal-court affidavit.

Inside, the agents found about 16 pounds of marijuana, 700 grams of 
methamphetamines, a loaded SKS semiautomatic rifle and other guns, 
and a collection of valuable, ancient Navajo pots.

Chavez, as it turned out, was dealing both drugs and Indian artifacts.

At the time of the raid, the leggings were held safely in a federal 
evidence room. A source, cooperating with the Bureau of Land 
Management, had purchased them from Chavez using marked bills. Agents 
found the marked bills in Chavez's wallet.

The leggings are among an untold number of artifacts looted every 
year from ancient and historic sites around New Mexico and the Four 
Corners area. A specialized group of law-enforcement agents and 
rangers, often working after regular hours, has recovered thousands 
of these items. Frequently, the group finds drugs along with looted 
pots, masks and arrowheads.

Paul Williams, lead archaeologist for the BLM's Taos field office, 
wasn't surprised officers found drugs when they went looking for the 
leggings. "We've always known there's a connection between drugs and 
artifacts. Easy money," he said. "It's kind of scary."

Forward-Thinking Laws

One hundred years ago this year, Congress adopted the Antiquities 
Act, making it a crime to steal Indian artifacts or deface ancient 
and historical sites on federal lands. Congress further clarified and 
strengthened federal authority in 1979 with the passage of the 
Archaeological Resources Protection Act, or ARPA, which prohibits the 
sale, purchase or trafficking of artifacts more than 100 years old 
such as masks, pots, clothing and human remains taken from public 
lands. The act made looting, transporting or selling any artifact 
worth more than $500 a felony, punishable by fines up to $20,000 and 
up to one year of imprisonment. For a second offense, felons could be 
fined up to $100,000 and spend as many as five years in prison.

Cataloging Ancient Treasures

The West is full of archaeological treasures. The long, complex 
history of humans is told by what was left behind. New Mexico alone 
has hundreds of ancient sites once inhabited by Pueblo, Anasazi and 
other ancestral tribal people. Middens, or refuse heaps, contain 
uncounted numbers of potsherds. From Taos to the Mexican border, 
people still stumble across Spanish spurs, the remnants of early 
hardscrabble ranch lives and the bones of frontier soldiers. 
Archaeologists are struggling to catalog these artifacts before they 
are lost, stolen, sold, weathered away or paved over.

But while archaeologists are trying to uncover the past, a cadre of 
diggers are out to profit from it, often selling off artifacts for a 
few grams of drugs. "The amount of looting going on in the Four 
Corners area is incredible," said one BLM antiquities investigator 
who is still undercover.

In 1989, Congress created a special interagency Four Corners Task 
Force based in Santa Fe to track stolen antiquities and arrest the 
scofflaws. Gary Olson, a BLM agent, coordinated the group.

Before the task force was disbanded for lack of funding in 1992, the 
dozen or so agents and archaeologists from the National Park Service, 
U.S. Forest Service and the BLM recovered about 10,000 artifacts and 
worked to return the objects to tribes or arranged for them to be 
safely housed at museums.

"It was all the way from pottery shards to museum-quality whole pots 
worth thousands of dollars," said Olson, who is now assistant special 
agent in charge of the BLM's Phoenix office handling drug-interdiction cases.

After the task force was disbanded, the agents, who had developed 
skills for tracking stolen artifacts, kept at it. "Some of us have 
worked together for 25 years. A few of us who have an interest in 
ARPA, with permission from our agencies, get together and pool our 
resources to pursue cases now," Olson said.

The group shares funds, specialized surveillance equipment, 
undercover agents and information. In the last two decades, this 
small band of less then a dozen investigators has pursued more than 200 cases.

It is tedious, time-consuming work. It can take two or three years to 
gather enough evidence to seek a warrant. Often agents are pursuing 
cases on top of their regular jobs, giving up weekends and time with 
their families.

"A 16-hour day is not uncommon when you are pursuing those kinds of 
cases," Olson said.

People who dig and loot artifacts are a close-knit society. Sometimes 
two and three generations of the same family have looted sites, 
according to Olson, and breaking into that circle is difficult and 
dangerous. "Either going out digging with those people or getting in 
with people at shows is extremely difficult and requires a lot of 
commitment," he said.

Tracking Stolen Artifacts

A case starts when a tip catches an agent's attention. Sometimes it's 
an overheard conversation about someone with a collection of 
artifacts. Sometimes agents find an informant.

"No tip, no innuendo is too small," said an undercover agent, who is 
currently investigating nine cases.

If the information seems reliable, it's shared with other 
investigators. "Because there's so few of us, we'll call each other 
up and say, 'Hey, we've got a pretty good case here,' " Olson said.

One of Olson's favorite cases involved monitoring a rock-shelter site 
near Farmington that was the target of looters. After a 2 1/2 year 
effort, Olson and his team recovered 300 artifacts including a rare 
Nightway Chant ceremonial mask. Their work resulted in indictments of 
seven people on 14 felonies.

The mask was returned to the Navajo Nation in a special ceremony that 
Olson was invited to attend. "It was quite an honor. It was a very 
moving experience," he said.

The San Rafael leggings case was solved in three months -- unusually 
fast. Cibola County Sheriff's deputies alerted BLM after a Grants 
resident reported the leggings stolen from his home.

Agents first had to figure out the provenance, or origin, of the 
leggings, the undercover agent said, because, unless law enforcement 
can prove artifacts are from public land, they can't pursue the case. 
And experienced looters sometimes pay private landowners to sign a 
paper falsely claiming an artifact came from private land. "Once 
artifacts are on someone's mantle or in someone's car or in a show, 
tracing that artifact back to where it came from is extremely 
difficult," Olson said.

The man who reported the leggings stolen from his Grants home claimed 
he found them on private land three decades earlier. But when he took 
officers out to the site, they discovered it was in the Cibola 
National Forest, which meant the leggings were subject to ARPA. A 
Forest Service ranger was called in to join the investigation.

Drugs And Artifacts

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement have 
all pitched in to help with looting cases. Cibola National Forest, 
BLM agents and Cibola County Sheriff's deputies worked together to 
break the leggings case.

Sometimes they go after the looters by offering to buy what they 
believe are stolen artifacts. Sometimes they pursue the buyers -- 
including art galleries, overseas traders and trading posts. They 
focus on big cases, those involving a repeat looter or large-scale 
artifact trafficking.

"We can't afford to go after people who are occasional collectors. We 
go after the more serious looters," Olson said.

The drug connection is never far away. "Many of the people we go 
after have extensive criminal histories, violent crimes and selling 
or using drugs. Many times, how these people know each other is 
through drugs," Olson said.

Methamphetamine-users seem to love digging for artifacts, agents say. 
"Methamphetamine is probably the most common drug used among the 
looters or the diggers," Olson said. "Many times in rural areas, if 
there's not much to do, these guys get high on meth and go digging. 
If they find anything, they trade it for more drugs."

Chavez was arrested on charges of being a felon in possession of 
firearms and drug possession. Officials decided not to charge him 
with the theft of the leggings. He pleaded guilty in federal District 
Court to drug possession with intent to distribute and was sentenced 
in February to 11 years in prison and four years probation, according 
to court records.

Though the leggings now sit in a U.S. Forest Service evidence room, 
"the goal is to repatriate them to their rightful owner, whichever 
pueblo they belong to. Archaeologists are working on that process 
right now," said Terry McGaha, a U.S. Forest Service special agent 
who worked on the case.

McGaha said archaeologists told him there is only one other pair of 
similar leggings in the world.

"The leggings are a national treasure," said the undercover BLM agent 
who worked on the case. "We had to get them back."

We believe in it.

Thousands of drug agents are assigned to fight the drug war on public 
land, Olson said. But few have the skills or inclination to spend the 
time in tracking artifacts.

"There's a brief moment of euphoria when we get a warrant," Olson 
said. Those moments are "few and far between given the amount of work 
and stress involved," he noted. "But we think it makes a difference, 
and we believe in it."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman