Thieves of Time : The Looting of Cultural Artifacts Angers Chumash Descendants

Retracing the route of her Chumash ancestors, Ernestine DeSoto-McGovran hiked to an enchanted forest grotto in Ventura County’s hostile wilderness. There, on the ceiling of a small sandstone cave, virtually hidden by alder and fir, she found an abstract image of a condor, the shamanistic symbol for magical vision and flight.

Painted deep red against a black background, the condor was probably drawn by a Chumash holy man before the time of Columbus. For DeSoto-McGovran, its presence was a stirring reminder of her long-gone religious past. Visiting the cave, she said, “was like being inside the Sistine Chapel.”

DeSoto-McGovran’s reverence was accompanied by a sense of relief. At other sites in the county, according to archeologists and government officials, similar Chumash rock art has been chiseled from the sandstone, smeared with graffiti or used as a target during paint-ball practice.

Desecration of their sacred objects understandably outrages the estimated 5,000 Chumash descendants living in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, but it hardly surprises them. They and many modern historians believe that Chumash culture has been ripped off and trashed since the Spanish began colonizing California more than 200 years ago.

A gentle stone-age civilization, the Chumash inhabited this area for at least 11,000 years before being devastated by a harsh mission system and European diseases, experts say. In 1782, when the San Buenaventura Mission opened its doors, the Chumash population was 20,000; in 1834, when the mission was secularized, only 3,000 were left. No full-blooded Chumash survive today.

Disregard for Chumash culture has continued well into this century: Looters have plundered Chumash artifacts, developers have paved over Chumash villages, and farmers have bulldozed burial grounds, unearthing bones and skulls that souvenir hunters reportedly have taken home.

“This is an insult to us,” said DeSoto-McGovran, a 55-year-old Ventura resident whose grandmother was a full-blooded Chumash. “Maybe people would understand how I feel if I tore through a Civil War cemetery and removed their relatives’ bones.”

Mad as hell about their stolen past, Native Americans such as the Chumash are finally getting some of it back. After years of political prodding by activists, Congress in 1990 passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires that American museums return to 350 federally recognized tribes sacred objects and skeletal remains. They have until the end of 1995.

“It’s about time the museums realized that what they have is sensitive to us and should be back in the ground,” said Richard Angulo of the California Indian Council.

MANY ARTIFACTS IN EUROPE

The looting of Native American antiquities--here and in the rest of the country--began in earnest after the Civil War, when Europeans began collecting Americana. For the next few decades, museums and wealthy private collectors in Europe and the United States devoured Native American artifacts. Even today, experts say, the best collections are in European museums.

The best Chumash collections are in Paris and Moscow, said Charles Johnson, associate director of the Ventura County Museum of History and Art. There is little doubt that those museums were supplied by the Rev. Stephen Bowers, the most notorious looter in county annals who “sold artifacts by the pound” in the late 1800s, Johnson said.

In 1906, Congress made it illegal for anyone without legitimate academic credentials to remove artifacts from public land, but looters operating in the vast wilderness are hard to catch, especially since budget cuts have crippled policing staffs.

The 1979 federal Archeological Resources Protection Act was supposed to crack down on looters--threatening $250,000 fines and jail time for convicted offenders. But according to authorities, the law’s complexity has often deterred federal officials from prosecuting. And juries have been reluctant to convict people accused of violating the act.

“Juries can’t relate to artifacts as they do to gold and silver,” said Jack Fitzgerald, National Park Service chief ranger at Channel Islands National Park. “Personal beliefs of a jury make it hard to prosecute an archeological case.”

And unless the culprit is caught at the scene, making a case isn’t always easy. “Once you disassociate an artifact from its location, it’s very difficult to prove exactly where it came from,” said National Park Service archeologist Don Morris.

Archeologists have been recording Ventura’s Chumash sites since 1909. Besides rock paintings, they have found other evidence of an artistic legacy--sandstone milling bowls, woven storage baskets coated with asphaltum, digging sticks, whistles and hairpins fashioned from deer and fish bone, abalone beads, and projectile points chipped from fused shale and obsidian.

Although archeologists project that hundreds of sites remain to be found, many hundreds already have been recorded. Many are in the Los Padres National Forest, on state and national parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains, and on the Channel Islands. By law, the recorded sites are secret--and even exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

But, like Indiana Jones wanna-bes, looters have tracked down many of these secret places. Of the county’s 1,300 recorded sites containing Chumash artifacts, archeologists estimate that as many as half have been looted.

“Almost all are certainly damaged,” said archeologist Clay Singer.

Only 30 years ago in the county, clusters of arrowheads still could be found lying in fields and alongside hiking trails. In the early 1960s, a Simi Valley family reportedly stumbled onto a cache of bows, arrows and spears in a China Flat cave and took them home for their private collection.

Surface finds are rare these days--the best artifacts are found underground. So today’s professional looters--called “thieves of time” by author Tony Hillerman--come armed with picks and shovels and a working knowledge of archeology. Excavating known sites or making discoveries on their own, they not only rob the Chumash of their past, but they also destroy the archeological record.

While scientists carefully sift through layers of history, looters churn up the earth, blending centuries into scrambled sludge. At an undisturbed site, carbon deposits can be dated to pinpoint the time frame in which the artifacts were used; animal bones and plant remains help explain diet; pollen grains provide information about climate.

“The greatest importance of artifacts is their context and how they relate to other artifacts and the landscape,” said state archeologist Mike Sampson. “How artifacts fit in can tell a more complete story of the culture of the people who lived there.”

According to experts, professional looters sell the pillaged artifacts to private collectors through a wide-spread black market, while amateurs probably keep the stolen artifacts for their mantle.

“People will raid the town dump for old glass bottles, so it’s not surprising they’re doing illegal excavation looking for artifacts,” Morris said. “There’s a lot of money to be made.”

SITES UNDER SURVEILLANCE

A recent issue of Antique Trader magazine lists Native American pottery for sale by private collectors at prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. Woven baskets sell for as much as $1,400. Even arrowhead collections can go for $500. Auctioned artifacts are usually higher quality and bring higher prices: a prehistoric pot from the Southwest sold recently at a New York auction for $90,000.

Foiling looters has become a high priority on public lands.

To check sites on the Channel Islands, the park service is doing aerial surveillance. Other agencies are considering TV cameras and electronic equipment like motion detectors.

In the Los Padres National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service recently began a site-monitoring program called Partners in Preservation. Volunteers--who have to work a minimum of 150 hours a year--receive 10 hours of classroom training, 10 to 20 hours of fieldwork and a confidential map showing the location of the secret sites.

Only two sites are being monitored in the county. Within a quarter of a mile of each other, they are being watched by Betty and Herman Zittel, retired forest service employees living in Carpinteria. Once a month, the Zittels put on their blue Partners in Preservation T-shirts and spend a few hours in the Los Padres, checking the status of pictographs. They hope to get enough volunteers so the sites can be visited weekly.

“If a site has been vandalized with paint, it’s important to catch it quickly so the stuff can be wiped off before setting,” said Herman Zittel, a former forester.

If all else fails, keepers of the rock art can always follow the example of Santa Barbara’s Painted Cave and install iron bars across the entrance.

“Rock paintings are very sacred to us,” says Ernestine DeSoto-McGovran, who is fighting now to keep a developer from building on a Chumash village site in Santa Barbara. “In my people’s travels through here, these paintings are our journals, these stones our tablets conveying what was in our hearts.

“Seeing it is to imagine what it was like to be Chumash.”