Plunder for Profit : Looters Rob Old Graves and History

Crows caw in the distance and a cold drizzle falls from a churning gray sky in this remote corner of northwestern Kentucky where hundreds of freshly dug holes--open wounds upon the land--mar a sloping farm field.

The crude excavations are littered with black fragments of ancient pottery, a few discarded beer cans, abandoned shovels and the broken, mud-stained bones of perhaps 1,200 Indians.

From a nearby rise, a knot of local people watches silently as three American Indians walk among the opened graves and mounds of dirt. They carry a mussel shell filled with burning tobacco as they pray for the disturbed spirits of their ancestors.

“There have been incidents before, but something this massive is outrageous,” said one of the three, John Thomas, a Shawnee activist who conducts the solemn, makeshift ceremony every four days.

Far-Ranging Scavengers

The site, on the banks of the Ohio River near its confluence with the Wabash River, is a ghostly symbol on a grand scale of something that is happening with increasing frequency in America--the looting and destruction of archeological sites and desecration of historic graves by commercial artifact hunters. Profit-driven relic scavengers are harvesting the nation’s history--digging up the graves of Indians, pioneer settlers and Civil War soldiers on both private and public lands.

Looters using metal detectors have been caught digging in the Richmond and Fredericksburg Civil War battlefields, and in some areas of the Southwest, looters have used heavy earth-moving machinery to uncover Indian artifacts.

Here at Uniontown, 10 men, four of them from neighboring Illinois and Indiana, allegedly paid a local farmer $10,000 for the right to dig on 40 acres in the months between the harvest and spring planting.

With water from rented tanks to soften the hard, dry soil, they allegedly used shovels to digging up the ancient graves in mid-October and continued until mid-December, when residents of the area complained and Kentucky State Police moved in to make arrests. The 10 are charged with desecration of a venerated object. They have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

“This site had greater potential than any I know of to tell us what happened to the native peoples of the Ohio Valley,” said Cheryl Ann Munson, senior archeologist at Indiana University’s Glenn Black Laboratory of Archeology.

“The value of (this) site was what it could tell us about the native cultures of the region and why they disappeared . . . . Looters have compromised much of what we can compare,” said Munson, who was to begin studying the Uniontown site next month with a grant from the Kentucky Heritage Council.

“This was really a commercial mining operation of the burial ground for artifacts . . . (and it) is a clear example of what’s happening all over the nation,” added Francis P. McManamon, chief of the U.S. Interior Department’s archeological assistance agency.

“This ranks as one of the five worst cases nationwide that I know of,” said David J. Wolf, a forensic anthropologist with the Kentucky State Medical Examiner’s Office.

“An archeological site is similar to an endangered species in wildlife,” said Mark Leone, an official of the Society for American Archeology. “There are only so many of them. They don’t reproduce, and once they’re gone, they’re gone . . . . The Kentucky example is disturbing because it is making a profit off the remains of the cultural past and exploiting another people’s heritage.”

‘It’s Not Right’

“It’s grave robbing,” said Kentucky state Sen. John T. Hall. “They’re looking at it for monetary value and that’s not right. Digging up anybody’s bones is wrong. It’s just not a proper way to make a living.”

If it is not proper, it is lucrative. Norman Reid, who owns the Indian Hill Museum in nearby Bone Gap, Ill., said that items from similar graves have been sold for thousands of dollars. One collector paid $17,000 for a stone ax. Slate pendants can fetch between $300 and $1,000. Pipes have been sold for $5,000 each. A copper death mask could be worth $100,000 or more. “That’s like finding a Rembrandt.”

“If you want to stoop that low, it’s a very profitable business,” Reid said.

“There’s a wide-open market for Indian artifacts,” Munson said. “It’s a black market only for lack of ethics involved.”

“We need to cut off access to the markets,” said Suzan Shown Harjo, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. In addition to arresting looters, Harjo said that penalties should be imposed on “all those intermediaries, brokers and final recipients, whether it’s the Smithsonian itself or the favorite local museum or a pawn shop . . . . It has to get to the point where the risk is not worth the price.”

Enforcement Criticized

“Federal agencies . . . have not been effective in identifying and prosecuting the buyers of looted artifacts,” the congressional General Accounting Office said in a December report on the problem.

Long recognized as a problem in the West and Southwest, the looting of historic sites is now seen as a serious threat in the East and Midwest.

Currently, it is “probably more serious in the eastern third of the country than it is in the Southwest,” Mark Michel, president of the Santa Fe-based Archeological Conservancy, said. “Many of the sites there are on private land and are not protected by (federal) law and there is less of an awareness in that section of the country about Indian cultures.”

Like many places along the banks of the Ohio, Uniontown sits atop archeological treasures. The town is built above layer upon layer of ancient settlements that may date back hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.

This particular site was considered important because it is believed to be “very late prehistoric,” Munson said. It might have yielded information about “European contact with Indian people . . . it could tell us about the native cultures of the region and why they disappeared.”

Gardens Yield Relics

It is not uncommon for Uniontown residents digging in their gardens to unearth relics--pots, arrowheads, axes. For decades, some have spent springs and autumns gleaning artifacts turned up in freshly plowed fields. And the sparsely settled countryside around Uniontown is dotted with potholes, apparently the sites of treasure-hunting digs.

Yet in this community of 1,250 people, where livelihoods come from the ground--from mining coal, pumping oil and farming--and where artifact hunting is as much a part of life as raccoon hunting, this massive dig has sensitized and angered people. That is something that law enforcement officials and archeologists alike say distinguishes Uniontown from other places where sites have been looted.

For example, the General Accounting Office found that “much of the public in (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah) condones the looting of archeological sites on federal lands both as a means of supplementing personal income and as a personal hobby.”

Until the current incident, it was not seen as a serious problem in northwestern Kentucky. But attitudes have changed.

“The Indians are human, just like the white man is,” said Uniontown Mayor Raymond L. Turner. “It’s as if a bunch went down to St. Agnes Cemetery and dug up their grandfathers . . . . I guess nobody never thought of it as desecration of graves, they just thought of it as hunting for artifacts.”

“I’m just like everybody else,” said Ronnie Butler, a native of the area who is Uniontown’s Avon lady. “I wouldn’t want it to happen to my ancestors.”

“It’s outrageous that someone would desecrate a grave for profit,” said Bonnie Douglas, a homemaker.

“It’s wrong, just wrong,” said M. Greenwell, a Uniontown native and factory worker. “I don’t care how you look at it, you just cannot desecrate a person’s grave. I don’t care if they are black, white or Indian.”

Overflow Audiences

Local reaction has been so strong that when the City Council discusses the digging and plans for reburial, audiences are too big for City Hall and the meetings have to be held in the larger Knights of Columbus Hall. People in Uniontown, and in other Kentucky cities as far east as Louisville, have begun holding bake sales and chili dinners to raise money for the reburial ceremony that American Indian leaders are planning for Memorial Day.

“We’ll call it Ancestors Day,” said John Thomas, an activist who, along with other American Indian leaders, believes the Uniontown dig will help efforts to publicize the problem and prevent further desecration of graves. They plan to bus in hundreds of Indians from throughout the United States for several days of ceremonies before the actual reburial, an event calculated to draw national media attention to Uniontown.

In addition to arousing the local community, the Uniontown dig has prompted Kentucky legislators to begin talking about strengthening state law, and has renewed interest among Indiana legislators. Congressmen from the region are also examining ways to strengthen federal law.

New laws will come too late, however, for this prehistoric burial ground.

“It’s likely that none of the artifacts that would help us figure out the relationship of this culture to other cultures in the area will ever be recovered,” archeologist Munson said. “ . . . there would have been a lot to learn.”

Larry Green reported from Uniontown and Wendy Leopold from Chicago.