Man Is Fined $2.5 Million for Looting Key Archeological Site

A man who federal officials say spoiled a major archeological find when he looted ancient American Indian remains from a Nevada cave in the 1980s has been fined $2.5 million in civil penalties.

Jack Lee Harelson destroyed what could have been one of the most important archeological cave sites in the Great Basin, Bureau of Land Management officials said.

Before Elephant Mountain Cave was looted over several years in the early 1980s, it contained a 10,000-year record of human life in northern Nevada, including artifacts from the Paiute tribe. The site is in the Black Rock Desert, 140 miles north of Reno.

“The desecration and loss of this site to all Americans is staggering,” said Bob Abbey, Nevada state director of the BLM. “While we are pleased the judge ruled completely in BLM’s favor, money can’t bring back what was lost.”

Harelson, of Grants Pass, Ore., maintained his innocence and laughed when asked whether he would pay the fine.

“I’m on Social Security and crippled, yeah, right,” he said. “The federal government knew that I had nothing going in. They needed to slap someone.... You deal with the government and there are lies, and that’s what you have to deal with.”

Harelson acknowledged digging a “test hole” and removing some artifacts, but argued he did so only to interest Nevada archeologists in the site.

Harelson and his wife discovered two large baskets, one with the body of a boy and the other with the body of a girl, court records show.

They removed the bodies, baskets and other artifacts, and buried the bodies in their backyard.

More than 2,000 artifacts were later recovered, including 10,000-year-old sandals that possibly were the oldest footwear found on Earth, said Pat Barker, a state archeologist for BLM.

William Hammett, an Interior Department administrative law judge, handed down the civil penalty, the fourth largest ever assessed for archeological theft.