Thieves Find Their Own Digs

As he raced his white Ford pickup south from Moab toward the red sandstone canyons here, Rudy Mauldin kicked himself for not thinking of it before.

That morning, he and his partner, fellow Bureau of Land Management special agent Bart Fitzgerald, had turned the case over and over with another investigator. What were they missing?

They knew that priceless artifacts had been looted from a remote Indian grave site. They knew that a burial blanket had been stripped off the remains of an infant and the skull tossed on a trash heap. They had a suspect but no link to the crime.

Then they remembered the backfill, the pile of dirt left by the digger.

They sped back to the crime scene at Horse Rock Ruin. As sunlight began to retreat from the remote canyon, they found their tiny but mighty evidence: a cigarette butt.

After a crime lab extracted DNA from the filter tip, Mauldin and Fitzgerald got their man--perhaps the most notorious archeological thief in American history.

The 1995 prosecution of Earl K. Shumway was a watershed for the little-known Archeological Resources Protection Act, a federal law enacted in 1979. His case would be the first in which DNA evidence led to a conviction for antiquities theft. And it resulted in the longest sentence ever for such a crime--five years.

More ARPA crimes are prosecuted in Utah than anywhere else in the nation. Native Americans are fed up with thieves rooting around in their ancestors’ graves, and authorities liken the acts to looting the National Archives.

“You look at what these people do and it just makes you sick,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Wayne Dance, who has won more felony convictions in ARPA cases than anyone. “I view this crime to be highly important to society, because of the irreplaceable nature of the loss.”

Tracking Thieves at Remote Crime Scenes

Diggers roam rugged areas of the Southwest in search of prehistoric baskets, pots and even bones to sell. Experts estimate that more than 80% of the Native American archeological sites, some dating back 17 centuries, have been looted.

The bulk of the crimes takes place in a 100-mile-long, north-south corridor stretching from Arches National Park and Moab in the north, south past the dusty Utah towns of Monticello and Blanding and through to Bluff, on the edge of the Navajo Reservation near the Arizona border.

It falls to U.S. Park Service and Forest Service employees and BLM agents to find the remote crime scenes, cull clues from sand and rock and then track the thieves into rural bars, across Internet auction sites and into swank art galleries, where an Anasazi pot might bring as much as $250,000.

On a recent tour of damaged archeological sites, Mauldin and BLM archeologist Kathy Huppe bumped down a dirt road in Manti-La Sal National Forest--prime looting landscape. Mauldin, a wiry former rodeo cowboy, has spent his career chasing diggers here.

Any lawman looking for looters inevitably crosses paths with Shumway, now 42, who once bragged to authorities that he had been robbing graves since he was 3 years old. His father worked the family’s hardscrabble uranium mines, and little Earl often would tag along, poking into caves and burial mounds on public lands. They took what they found and considered it theirs.

That sense of entitlement, investigators say, stems from the belief that there is a surfeit of artifacts here.

Modern archeologists often catalog sites but don’t immediately excavate them, which can lead the public to wrongly conclude that they are not historically important.

There also is the sheer volume of objects to be found here with little effort--pot sherds, arrowheads, cave walls crowded with pictograms and petroglyphs. In Utah’s San Juan County alone, there are an estimated 20,000 known archeological sites on BLM land. More than 90% have been looted. In the Four Corners area, “if you walk 20 feet and not find something, you are not looking,” Huppe said.

With the market for Southwest art and artifacts at an all-time high, the temptation here is to view Indian ruins less as scientific and historic treasure troves than as next month’s rent.

San Juan is Utah’s poorest county, its most remote and its least populous. With only 1.7 people per square mile, it’s not difficult to dig--even using heavy equipment--and remain unnoticed.

And they have been doing it for generations. In the 1920s, the University of Utah paid Blanding residents $2 for every Anasazi pot they could bring to the school’s museum. The ante has been upped since then. In a looting case from 1984, Shumway pleaded guilty to digging up more than $2 million worth of rare baskets.

But that haul was the exception, for the economic model skews mightily to the other end of the distribution chain. Diggers may get paid a few hundred dollars for a rare basket that will realize many thousands for a dealer in Munich or Tokyo. (While such artifacts are sought by collectors in the United States, they generally bring higher prices in Europe and Asia.)

The extent of the problem is matched by the scale of the area in which the looting takes place. The Archeological Resources Protection Act applies to looting on public or Indian land. For states in the interior West, public land can encompass up to 80% of the state.

“We are effective where we can be, but we are outnumbered and outspent” by looters, said Utah’s BLM agent-in-charge Keith Aller, who supervises three agents and 13 uniformed rangers responsible for crimes on 22 million acres of BLM land in Utah.

And the hunted often are better equipped than the hunters.

Shumway has hired helicopters to drop him into some remote sites, while other looters often employ high-tech climbing equipment and rappel over the sides of cliffs to access alcoves and caves. Site locations are for sale on the Internet, complete with Global Positioning System coordinates and sophisticated topographical maps.

The methods diggers employ to retrieve the fragile artifacts are not always subtle. In some cases, sites are devastated by bulldozers, backhoes and trenching machines that smash through material that may only be hundreds of years old to get to the more valuable, deeply buried, prehistoric layers. Professionals haul masonry saws into national parks and remove entire walls of rock art. One such case came to light last Thanksgiving: A boulder weighing several hundred pounds etched with prehistoric petroglyphs was hauled away from Utah state trust lands.

While looters are responsible for most of the damage to archeological sites, there also is a large amount of inadvertent loss inflicted by families on weekend outings and by well-meaning hobbyists.

“The three scariest words for an archeologist in Utah are ‘Boy Scout troop,’ ” Huppe said.

The youths’ crude excavations can destroy a 1,600-year-old pristine archeological site in an hour. Repairing the damage is expensive: The rule of thumb is that the cost for an archeologist to move a meter of dirt is $5,000.

Agents Left With ‘a Real Dang Puzzle’

The cost of investigating ARPA crimes, which often can take years to solve, also is astronomical.

“You get to one of these old caves, where people have been tramping around for thousands of years, and you’ve got a real dang puzzle on your hands,” Mauldin said in his slow, New Mexico drawl. “You find more evidence at your average murder scene.”

If the case begins with the retrieval of an artifact, Mauldin has to prove that it came from public land. If the case begins with a disturbed site, he has to determine when it was looted, who did it and attempt to find what was taken.

In the wild cliffs and canyons around here, criminal tracks are easy to erase. Some looters put plastic bags over their shoes or wrap them in carpet to eliminate incriminating footprints. But investigators also are masters at improvising. Because shoe prints and handprints seldom stay put in shifting sands, Mauldin carries hair spray to preserve those he does find.

Investigators search for identifying marks, even taking casts of shovel holes to look for notches that may come from the implement of a certain digger. In crime scenes that can stretch across miles of desert, even the most crafty criminal sometimes leaves a calling card.

“Earl [Shumway] was known for drinking Mountain Dew at his sites. We found the cans all over the place and could tie him to scenes because of that,” said Mauldin, who gets to know looters before he finds them by the trash they leave behind.

“In one case, we’re looking for a guy who eats pistachio nuts while he digs. We’ll take anything to make a case,” Mauldin said.

Artifacts Need to Be Studied in Context

To scientists studying artifacts, location is everything. The bowls and baskets and sandals that thieves seek hold little interest for archeologists once they have been moved. Studied in its historical context, a weapon or tool tells a scientist a tale of how it was used, when and why. Once moved, an ancient bowl is simply a vessel existing in a vacuum.

Southwest archeologists and anthropologists have been screaming into the wind for decades about looting. Their professional environment is akin to a scientist who comes to work to find someone has broken into his lab, overturned his experiments and stolen his notes.

“It could make you crazy if you thought about it,” Huppe said.

To say nothing of the anger Native Americans feel.

Shumway was beaten several years ago by Native American inmates while he was awaiting transport to prison.

“Ownership is not a Hopi concept, so we don’t understand the selling of artifacts,” said tribal prosecutor Dorma Nevayakiewa, who handles the ARPA cases reported on the Arizona reservation.

A ceremonial mask was the centerpiece of an unusual case in which an art dealer recruited two Hopi men to help him obtain a “friends” mask--believed to be a living thing and used in secret male ceremonies. For such an artifact to be taken out of a ceremonial kiva would be surprising, as such religious meeting rooms are sacred. But for a friends mask to turn up outside of Hopi land was unprecedented. The fact that Hopi men aided in the theft was devastating.

The taboo against tribal members taking part in looting their own heritage is great: One of the Hopi suspects in the mask case committed suicide within a week of his arrest.

But financial need often triumphs over taboo, and diggers overcome squeamishness to go where the big money lies--the graves. Native Americans buried their finest objects with the dead; those textiles that survive through several centuries are highly prized at art auctions. And infants typically were buried with their toys; such rare and tiny objects bring high prices on the open market.

The demand for skulls and bones is more difficult to gauge, but buying and selling does take place. “If you think there is no market for human remains, you would be sadly mistaken,” said John Farley, an Albuquerque-based special investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Mauldin knows the market is the final determinant, regulating archeological looting in a way that law enforcement cannot. Digging will continue as long as there is a buyer for the artifacts.

“It’s the greatest treasure hunt in the world, that’s how they see it,” Mauldin said, gazing out from an alcove high up a canyon wall. “Look around. It’s out here. And they’ll keep looking for it. And we’ll keep looking for them.”

Shumway, who did not show up after agreeing to an interview for this story, is still out there. After DNA connected him to the cigarette butt, Shumway pleaded guilty in the Horse Rock Ruin case to seven felony counts of stealing Anasazi artifacts and was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in federal prison. The sentence was reduced on appeal to 60 months. He is back living in the Moab area.

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Times researcher Belen Rodriguez contributed to this story.