Scientists Alarmed : Prehistoric Indian City Up for Grabs

One of the first things Tom Marsala noticed when he started cleaning away the trash beneath the spectacular red bluff that hovers over this area was a peculiar pattern of rocks just beneath the dirt.

As an amateur archeologist, Marsala was intrigued, and he began digging alongside some of the rocks to see what lay below.

What he found is most likely the remains of a prehistoric city that could be of inestimable value to historians who are trying to piece together the story of the Indians who ruled this area hundreds of years before the Navajos and the Hopis.

Marsala apparently had stumbled upon a prehistoric village built on top of an even older settlement.

Cause of Concern

Although it might seem that such a discovery would be greeted with great joy among professional archeologists, the few who know about it are deeply alarmed. The cause of their concern was expressed by Marsala himself as he cradled bits and pieces of pottery, probably about 1,000 years old, which he found at the site just off Interstate 40 about 20 miles west of Gallup, N.M.

“Some of the pots buried here are worth thousands of dollars,” Marsala said.

If he is right, and a number of experts said they have no reason to doubt his claims, Marsala and the three Navajo chiefs who own the 360-acre Yellowhorse Ranch could recover a small fortune from beneath the fine dust that has buried the ancient city. But according to archeologists, that reward will come at the expense of scientists who would exploit the site for very different reasons and in very different ways.

Within the Law

Since the site is on private land, there is no law prohibiting the commercial exploitation of what promises to be a priceless archeological discovery. Thus, whatever is recovered from the site can be sold freely on the open market, and there is no way to protect the scientific integrity of the exploration.

‘Can’t Do Anything’

“You can watch all you want to,” said Jeanne Swarthout, an archeologist with Arizona State University in Tempe, “but you can’t do anything about it.”

Her dilemma is not an isolated one.

Pot hunters have created a “worldwide problem,” said James Hill, chairman of the anthropology department at UCLA. “Some people look at it like picking flowers, and it’s very widespread, especially in areas known to have produced beautiful pots, like Mexico and Peru.”

Some pots may command prices of $40,000 to $50,000, Hill said, and Arizona and New Mexico are frequent targets.

“In southwestern New Mexico, they take in a bulldozer and take out a whole site in just a few days,” he said.

The Yellowhorse Ranch is near the Four Corners area, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet, an area that is rich in Indian history. A number of large settlements--small cities, really--have been found in that region, and the Yellowhorse discovery could add vital elements to a mystery that has bedeviled historians for years.

“These (large settlements) are the equivalent of capitals,” said Glen Rice, head of the office of cultural resource management for the department of anthropology at Arizona State University. “If you want to find out something about their leadership, the key lies in these large towns.”

The rising value of Indian artifacts has created a boom economy for “pot hunters,” Swarthout said, who have learned how to mine ancient villages quickly and efficiently for the riches they contain, but who are not constrained by the tedious requirements of scientific exploration.

“This is not an infinite resource,” she said. “Potting is booming, and we have no control over it. It’s scary.”

Expensive Project

Even if the Yellowhorse site were to be turned over to professionals, the cost of a scientific excavation would be prohibitive, she said, ranging somewhere from $1 million to $5 million. A recent excavation in Phoenix required 25 to 50 workers over an 11-month period and cost $1.3 million.

That kind of public financing, which does not include the cost of land acquisition, is sometimes available if the site lies in the path of a major development, such as a highway project, but it is hard to get for projects that must stand solely on their scientific merit, she said.

The pot hunters, or “vandals” as Swarthout sometimes calls them, can do it far more cheaply and they have honed their efforts into a science. They know that most complete pots can be found in burial sites, and they have devised steel prods to drive into the ground in search of burial caverns.

“It doesn’t matter if they pierce a skull,” she said. But they have learned how to excavate quickly with the least amount of damage to the artifacts they are searching for, she added.

“They know where to push down walls, and where to slow down,” she said.

Interest Is Economic

Marsala, who said he has worked on “private archeological digs on three continents,” insisted that he has no intention of destroying the site, but he made it clear that his primary interest is economic.

“Our goal is to uncover the whole thing and turn it into a showplace,” he said last week as he sat on the front porch of the home of Frank Yellowhorse, one of the chiefs who own the land. “You always have some destruction, but you can put the rock back together. We’ll do it one shovelful at a time.

“I haven’t broken anything yet,” he added.

Even professional archeologists admit that some destruction occurs in every excavation, and Marsala has economic reasons for keeping that destruction to a minimum.

The Yellowhorse site is visible from an interstate highway, and it already attracts a constant stream of tourists who pay $1 each to see the ruins. Some of them also spend a few dollars in the trading post at the site, which Marsala runs for one of the three Yellowhorse brothers, John, a local judge in nearby Sanders, Ariz.

Tourist Attraction

The site has been a tourist attraction for years because of what appear to be Indian ruins on the side of a giant, natural amphitheater that hangs over the ranch. But those ruins were in fact built by the legendary Harry Miller, who was known as “Indian Miller,” although he was not an Indian.

In the 1920s, Miller “killed the postmaster for messing with his wife,” Frank Yellowhorse said. “He got out of it, but the heat was on him. He built the rock house on the cliff, and he lived in it. He was a real treacherous guy.”

Yellowhorse also recognizes the historical value of the site and what it might tell about the Anasazi Indians, the farmers and traders whose pottery commands top dollar in today’s marketplace.

“There’s not a lot known about those people,” he said.

The site is in a gap between two high mesas, on what was once a major trade route. Mexican traders passed through there on their way to what is now Santa Fe, Yellowhorse said.

Became Trash Dump

Countless tourists also have passed this way, apparently believing that Miller’s structures were real Indian ruins, but a few years ago the trading post was closed and the area became a local trash dump.

About a month ago, Marsala, an artist who said that he does not like to work for anyone else, became a friend of the Yellowhorse brothers and took over the trading post.

He said that one day he discovered rocks laid out in patterns, as though they were the tops of walls barely visible in the dirt. He also noticed that the mortar between the rocks was different from the commercial mortar that Miller had used to build the fortress that became his home.

“So I started digging,” Marsala said.

He found that the walls went down far deeper than they would have if they had only been there for a few decades. And at one point, about eight feet below the surface, he made the most intriguing discovery of all.

Sudden Change

The type of rock work suddenly changed.

Marsala apparently had stumbled on a prehistoric village built on top of an even older settlement.

He walked several hundred yards away, to an area that had been cleared by road graders a few weeks earlier in the hope that people who were taking part in the Hands Across America hunger chain would pay $5 each to park their vehicles. Not many people showed up for Hands Across America, Marsala said, but the graders had scraped away the topsoil, revealing more rocks. Those rocks, he is convinced, are also parts of walls branching out from the ruins at the base of the cliff.

That could make the site one of the largest settlements ever discovered, and thus of great interest to scientists.

Rice said the Yellowhorse settlement probably dates back no further than AD 900, but that would put it in the middle of a period of change for the Anasazis.

Engineering Competence

One clue to the position the Yellowhorse site enjoyed in history could lie in the stratified nature of the ruins. In one area that Marsala has excavated, the lower walls are of far finer quality than the upper structure. The lower rocks appear to have been cut, or “dressed,” suggesting that they were put in place by Indians who had achieved a relatively high level of engineering competence.

Rice said that fact indicates that the older settlement may have been part of the Chacoan system, a series of communities linked to a central city in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, about 70 miles east of Yellowhorse. Archeologists have long been fascinated by the Chacoan communities, which are spread over a large area in western New Mexico, because they appear to have been linked by a system of roadways, although the Indians had no vehicles and no beasts of burden.

“The roads were linked with rock walls so they always knew where they were” when they walked from one settlement to the next, Rice said.

If the Yellowhorse site is part of the Chaco civilization, “it would be an exceptional find,” Rice said.

The Chacoans, a subgroup of the Anasazi Indians, had “the most complex society we have discovered in the Southwest,” UCLA’s Hill said.

Irrigation Canals

In addition to their roads, they built extensive irrigation canals lined with slabs of rock to reduce the loss of water in this arid region.

The Indians who built the Yellowhorse settlement also made the most of the water that was available. High on a hill behind the settlement they carved a small reservoir in the sandstone at the foot of a giant, red slab of rock. Then they chiseled shallow canals in the rock to funnel rainwater down to the reservoir from a large flat area farther up the slope.

And they advanced the art of potting, creating thousands of large vessels to hold their water and supplies, and hundreds of decorated bowls and pots to showcase their talents.

Walking with a reporter along a wash in the Navajo reservation just above the Yellowhorse site, Marsala stuck the toe of his shoe in the soft dirt and kicked forward. The move produced a small shard of pottery, probably hundreds of years old. Others were found all along the wash, testifying to the productivity of the Indians who lived there so long ago.

Built Communities

Archeologists have noted that the Indians spent long hours building the communities that became their cities, carving living space from an inhospitable desert.

But at some point, they gave it all up and moved on.

Why?

No one is sure.

“Maybe a drought,” Frank Yellowhorse said. “Maybe an epidemic.”

Did they build their city first in Chaco Canyon, and then expand with satellite communities that served differing purposes, as most archeologists believe?

Or did the outlying communities come first and Chaco evolved as a central meeting place, as others contend?

And was Yellowhorse a part of Chaco?

12 Chacoan Sites

If so, the Chacoan society may be even more extensive than archeologists have believed.

Although about 12 Chacoan sites have been found in New Mexico, most have been excavated by people who knew little about what they were doing, Swarthout said.

“Documentation is almost nil,” she added.

A scientific excavation of a site like Yellowhorse, she said, “would be a lifetime project.”

Some of the answers to questions people such as Swarthout are asking could lie buried beneath the sands of Yellowhorse.

If so, they were buried there for hundreds of years, waiting for Tom Marsala to come along to clean up the trash.