Site-looting has not changed, though the technology of annihilating ancient burials and dwelling places has become chillingly efficient.  Archaeology has changed - perhaps in part because of the persistent witness and challenge of Native Americans, and writers like Craig Childs. Many contemporary field archaeologists go into their work with respect for the ancestors of Native Americans, native people still living on these lands.  They return objects to the place they found them.  They teach their students to do the same.  And still - I hear the words of a Hopi friend, "If they want to know where we come from and who we are, why don't they just ask us?  Why do they have to dig everything up?"

I once worked with the Havasupai (the only native people living in the Grand Canyon) to stop a breccia pipe uranium mine from being drilled into a meadow the Havasupai know as the Belly of the Mother, a meadow in high desert forest 13 miles south of the Grand Canyon.  We won a temporary victory, not because of our four years of legal and educational grindingly hard work, but because the price of uranium dropped.  One of the elders took us to the meadow after the decision to postpone mining was reached.  We stood on the scraped red dirt in the shadow of a drilling rig.  Piles of up-rooted sage and juniper lay around us.  The elder pointed to a series of gouges in the earth.  "That's where our ancestors' bones once lay. Those salvage archaeologists dug 'em up and shipped them to some museum in Phoenix."    

Craig Childs writes of the consequences of the commodification of research and looting.  The stories are often horrifying:  a site-looter who found the mummified bodies of two children, ripped off the heads to keep and buried the bodies in his backyard.  Childs takes us into the backs of caves scattered with bones.  He describes burial sites stripped of everything but a few beads. He writes of bones packed into dark basements and sacred objects treated with deadly preservatives. He writes of other violence, of site-looters ready to kill Federal agents, of entire families ripped apart by suicide and death.

We walk as he has walked - for Childs is not an armchair researcher.  He has nearly died for knowledge, slogging over scorching desert, teetering on ledges above two hundred foot drops. And he takes us into a relentless exploration of his interior, into his conflicted heart, into the exhausting and necessary examinations of his own longing to find, to keep and to own.  In writing this personal archaeology, he writes of grace.  I'll leave it to you to stumble over dangerous terrain with Craig into the last chapter of the book, a chapter in which we are taught not only his way to be with beauty, but a way you might make your own.

We cannot truly own anything - or anyone.  Our efforts to possess only slow the natural progression of anything back into the earth, forward into time.  The Zuni people understand this immutable truth:  Their Ahayu:da are twin gods (referred to by many non-Zunis as "War Gods") who are protectors of the Zuni people.  They are represented in sculpted wooden cylinders that are used in sacred ceremonies.  When new Ahayu:da are installed in their shrines, the old deities are "respectfully placed on an adjacent pile of "retired" War Gods. These retired Ahayu:da retain an important roll in Zuni ritual.  All Ahayu:da are to remain at their shrines exposed to the natural elements until they disintegrate and return to the earth." (1)

Perhaps you have found a treasure and kept it.  Perhaps you have discovered it years later lost in the back of a cluttered drawer.  Perhaps you have encountered a great love and watched it fade.  Perhaps you have clutched at what had been and found it to be dust in your heart.  Perhaps you have been a finder and tried to be a keeper.  In many ways, finding and keeping are the essence of addiction.  Those of us who cannot stop using are always trying to get back to the gorgeous perfection of the first fix, drink, bet, acquisition, kiss.  Finders, Keepers could be an exploration of each of us.  And when the book is done, Childs releases us - much as a fine therapy or healing lets us go.

I thought back to something I read from Charles Bowden, a dry and brilliant desert writer. While wandering in intense sunlight, surrounded by the remains of the dead, he said that a set of rules came to him, rules that define what we must contend with as we explore this land. They are:

'1.  You are in the right place.

"2.  You do not belong here.

"3.  Deal with this fact.

"4.  Time's up."               ---Finders, Keepers

Our time in these bodies, on this earth is loaned to us.  And, for now, we are in the right place.  I am grateful to Craig Childs for reminding me of those hard and radiant truths.

1.  T.J. Ferguson, Roger Anyon and Edmund J. Ladd.  Repatriation at the Pueblo of Zuni: diverse solutions to complex problems, in Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains?, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 2000.