Fighting the Looting of History : Electronic Sensors Cut Down Theft at Archeological Sites

Remote sensors detect activity at an isolated, prehistoric Indian site in Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Kentucky.

Alerted, two park rangers race their four-wheel-drive trucks along dirt roads to the sandstone rock shelter. There they watch four men looting an Indian campground. Their eyewitness accounts and the photographs they take provide evidence rarely obtained in looting incidents.

Without electronic surveillance, these four men would not have been arrested a year ago.

“Electronics is a big part of the program to stop looting, because we don’t have enough people to monitor all the sites,” said Special Agent Dave Montalbano of the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana.

Electronic surveillance is an important element in a national anti-looting plan, developed at a recent conference of archeologists, law enforcement officials and federal land managers.

“If the current rate of looting continues, we will lose most of our existing archeological sites within a few decades,” said Jeremy Sabloff, president of the Society for American Archaeology, which sponsored the conference at a research center just south of Ranchos de Taos.

Archeological sites are quickly becoming “endangered species” of history, as the market for artifacts, especially Native American ones, becomes a multimillion-dollar business. No region, and no culture, is safe.

In Alaska, totem poles are cut into sections and shipped overseas. On Mississippi River bottomlands, prehistoric Indian mounds are bulldozed and mined for artifacts. In Virginia, a Civil War battlefield is stalked at night by relic hunters using sophisticated metal detectors; the ground is pocked with more than 100 holes.

All this has happened in the decade since Congress passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act to toughen federal laws prohibiting removal of artifacts from federal lands. Penalties for second-offenders were increased last year to a maximum of $200,000 in fines and 10 years in prison.

But the 10-year-old law is not working.

“It was not until November, 1987, eight full years after the act became law, that the first felony conviction by a jury took place,” said Martin MacAllister, a former Forest Service archeologist who now travels the country training officials in the law.

Last year, less than 2% of the more than 600 cases of archeological vandalism on National Park Service lands resulted in convictions under the 1979 law because of a lack of conclusive evidence. Looting has escalated in the 1980s.

“I can count on my hand the Mimbres sites that aren’t looted in southern Utah,” Rigby Wright, former San Juan County sheriff, said of that prehistoric culture of the Southwest, which created some of the finest Indian pottery designs north of Mexico. “At least 50% to 80% of the burial mounds have been dug. You used to go out around Blanding and see holes here and there. Now, there is so much excavation it looks like the battle of the bulls.”

“Looters know exactly what they are looking for, and they know exactly where to look,” said archeologist Jim Judge of Southern Methodist University’s Ft. Burgwin Research Center here.

Museum-quality pots of the Anasazi people, who for 1,300 years built cliff dwellings and pueblos along New Mexico’s canyons and arroyos, can bring $10,000 to $30,000 each.

“We want to catch looters in the act and follow them home,” Judge said. “Then we can get back what they have taken.”

Electronic devices are helping to do this. Infrared sensors can detect heat radiated from a human body or an automobile engine. Seismic sensors, hidden underground, can detect any digging. When looters sink their shovels into a sensor-protected burial site, transmitters alert law enforcement officials.

Magnetic sensors, or magnetometers, which operate like metal detectors in airports, can uncover metal in looters’ shovels, sifting screens, belt buckles and car keys.

As the only full-time law enforcement agent at the 620,000-acre Kisatchie National Forest, Montalbano uses both seismic and magnetic sensors. “If we get both alarming,” he explained, “we know we have relic hunters, and not just a deer pawing the earth, a burrowing animal or an innocent hiker.”

Stepped-up enforcement efforts on federal lands will involve increasingly sophisticated technology. Mountain ranges, for example, block radio waves transmitted by most of the sensors. Satellites will soon be tested in a pilot program in the Southwest to pick up signals from sensors and relay data to a central location.