JScottWood
Greenie
OK, I’ve been reading the posts coming into the “played for fools” thread since last I was here and I have come to several conclusions. The first is that there are a lot of responsible people out there who want to be able to pursue their interest/obsession but at the same time want to do so responsibly within the law and without damage to the land. I also got the feeling that many of these same people would like to have a more cordial working relationship with the people charged with managing public lands and would like to know the best way to present their cases when it comes time to apply for treasure trove permits. Those are good things.
I also noted that there is a little confusion about exactly what the process of historic preservation entails and why we (the agencies) do some of the things we do. While not necessarily a bad thing, it’s something we can talk about. In fact, let’s start there.
I know that many of you feel discriminated against by the land management agencies. I won’t necessarily defend my brethren in this, but I will offer a little explanation. Mostly, the feeling amongst agency officials is not discrimination per se but frustration. I have to tell you that the number of times that I have dealt with people as lucid and reasonable as most of y’all over the last 30 years can be counted on one hand. By and large the people we get to deal with are rank amateurs who read one article in a treasure magazine, drive past the Superstitions, look up and see shapes in the rocks and convince themselves that they, out of the thousands of people who have searched the area for a century, have solved the mystery. We also get the outright delusional obsessives who won’t believe even their own eyes. Over the years we have had treasure hunters dynamite cliffs into rubble, dig holes all over the place (often into solid rock), build little rockhouse shanties in the wilderness, carve and paint fake petroglyphs and pictographs and deface real ones, shoot at people (including me – and that was before I had even talked to any of them…), and destroy irreplaceable archaeological sites. Not that many years ago we arrested and deported an “international traveler” who was working for an infamous Dutchman hunter. He was working in a rockshelter in the Superstitions that contained several meters of cultural fill – the remains of occupations ranging from the Middle Archaic (ca 5,000 years ago) to the Apache and Yavapai. In the space of a few weeks he had shoveled nearly all of this material over the cliff, destroying the site; why? Because some idiot had written “1847” in charcoal on a rock ledge inside the shelter. Was there a tunnel or adit or a cache of bullion or plate hidden under that 5,000 year old midden? Of course not.
We also have to deal with the truly delusional, people like the guy who swore that Bluff Springs Mountain was hollow and that it contained a population of Aztecs who were still there protecting “Montezuma’s” treasure and sacrificing runaway teenagers on a pyramid they had built underground, or the infamous Chuck Kenworthy, with his contradictory dictionary of signs, saguaro topiary, and giant “carved” pigs and poodles. And then there are the Jesuit/Peralta people with their stone “maps” made with anachronistic epigraphy, magic symbols, 1940’s Disneyesque cartoon illustrations on a type of sandstone that can’t be found anywhere closer than 100 miles north of the Superstitions. To a reasonable person, most of this stuff is laughable, but we can’t just tell these people to go away without at least hearing them out (although some managers have finally gotten to that point). And it seems that the loonier they are the more prone they are to threaten us with lawsuits (never happens) and going to the press (happens a lot, and guess who gets to look like the bad guy?). So, I would say that, for the most part, it isn’t so much discrimination as frustration. Most of the treasure hunters we deal with are not the kind of people y’all would probably want in the Treasure Net Hall of Fame….. and dealing with them takes time away from real resource management, which is harder and harder to do nowadays as agency personnel are drained away and funding for the stewardship of America’s public lands is siphoned off to pay for solving other peoples’ problems in other countries.
As a corollary, we don’t often have contact with responsible treasure hunters. The closest that most agency people get (especially those without legendary lost mines and such in their jurisdiction) is through law enforcement – busting people who use metal detectors to turn publicly owned historic sites into prairie dog towns and bombing ranges in order to steal artifacts for their own amusement or monetary gain (we’ll come back to this). So, while I am not making excuses for those of my brethren who slight and dismiss y’all and treat you like criminals without making any effort to reach out and work with you, maybe this will help you to understand why they feel the way they do.
Why, then, do you ask, am I here? Obviously, I have the same frustrations as my colleagues – more so than most, actually, because no other Forest in the country has anything like the treasure draw created by the Lost Dutchman. A couple of reasons.
First of all, as several of you have noted, evaluating the merit of treasure claims is part of my job (though I must tell you that my District Rangers – the people who actually manage the Forest and issue the permits – don’t always see it that way). That job is easier the more that I can understand where y’all are coming from and vice versa.
Second, I happen to have a fairly old-fashioned idea about access to the National Forests. I still feel that any American taxpayer has the right of access to public land. Many agency archaeologists nowadays, out of fear of pothunters, don’t like people to have access to archaeological and historic sites on public land. I look at it the other way and encourage people to get out there and enjoy that same thrill of discovery that an archaeologist has when finding a site for the first time. Now, that doesn’t mean that I like the idea of people making new roads and trails everywhere or violating the wilderness laws or spewing their trash and brass all over the countryside or taking artifacts away or digging in sites; the point is for everyone to have the opportunity to feel the same thrill that you did and that can’t happen if you wreck the place and take away all the neat stuff. I have been burned by this attitude, of course, since there’s always that 5-10% of visitors that really don’t care about anyone but themselves, and sites have been damaged as a result, mostly by having all their artifacts walk off and end up in peoples’ trash cans after they get tired of moving and dusting them. In the long run, though, I like to think that open access helps to foster a feeling of ownership and responsibility.
This brings up something that Beth (?) - mrs. oroblanco – brought up and that Mike (gollum) asked me about as well, namely the idea that finding something “brings in the archaeologists” and all of a sudden places become “off-limits” and the archaeologists take everything for themselves or shove it into some museum basement, never to see the light of day again. This is actually an issue of some importance in the archaeological community as well. Basically, archaeology in this country (at least as regards Federal land) works under several laws designed to protect sites and their contents as the property of the Federal government as agent for the people of the US. Because of this, it is illegal to take stuff from a site as that damages its integrity and makes it all that much more difficult to study and interpret – not to mention tainting the feeling of discovery. On the other hand, when we excavate sites as mitigation for their imminent destruction by a construction project, the lack of money available nowadays usually means that we only dig a sample of any given site; the rest, which remains under the same protection of the law that prevents people from taking stuff from it, is then destroyed by the project. Afterwards, aside from what might be published in the excavation report, the artifacts are then, again, by law, held in a repository and, realistically, are almost never seen again. This has become an enormous problem in archaeology, since we are actually running out of places to put the stuff. The one thing that doesn’t happen is for the material to end up in private collections; with the sole exception of human remains, if it came off of or out of Federal property, it remains Federal property. The other thing that doesn’t happen, at least on Federal land, is that unless a site is doomed to destruction by some project, it doesn’t get dug. There is far too much demand for mitigation and far too little money for research for the luxury of digging up sites just because we want to. With the exception of an occasional University field school, that just doesn’t happen all that often on public land any more.
While there are many avenues for public participation in this process, it is easy to understand why many people feel left out. It’s also obvious that the system will be changing over the course of the next 10-20 years. How it will change will depend on who is involved in making the decisions. If y’all want it to change in your favor, you’ll need to get involved. In the meantime, don’t be afraid to talk to agency archaeologists or report your findings. Sure, many times you’ll get told not to go back out there or not to dig anything else up, but the more interaction you have with these people, the more opportunity you’ll have to change their attitudes and make your concerns known. One thing I will tell you will probably never change, though, and that is the ownership of artifacts from Federal lands. There are proposals being evaluated for short and long term loans of various kinds of material to private individuals under certain circumstances as a way to reduce pressure on the repositories, but I doubt that it will ever get to the point that finding it on Federal property automatically makes it yours.
The third thing is something else that Beth brought up (those darn oroblancos!) – the idea that having someone like me “with an interest in the subject can help to bridge the divide between us.” While I hope that can happen, I feel that I need to clarify my “interest in the subject.”
I am not a treasure hunter, at least not in the sense that most of you are. I gave up looking for the Lost Dutchman 35 years ago when I figured out that the whole town of Goldfield had beat me to it. I have over the years accumulated a little knowledge and studied the folklore patterns of treasure stories, largely because I have had to. I am an archaeologist. My obsession with the past lies in learning about how people lived and developed here in Arizona and in several other parts of the world in which I have an interest. The tools we use are similar, however, starting from historic research and an understanding of the landscape and finally reaching down to the point of using metal detectors to identify, map, and study historic Army/Apache battle sites or mining camps. From that perspective, we are not so different, and on that basis, hopefully, we can begin to understand one another.
And y’all thought Roy was long winded!
Next post: advice on obtaining a treasure trove permit from the US Forest Service.
I also noted that there is a little confusion about exactly what the process of historic preservation entails and why we (the agencies) do some of the things we do. While not necessarily a bad thing, it’s something we can talk about. In fact, let’s start there.
I know that many of you feel discriminated against by the land management agencies. I won’t necessarily defend my brethren in this, but I will offer a little explanation. Mostly, the feeling amongst agency officials is not discrimination per se but frustration. I have to tell you that the number of times that I have dealt with people as lucid and reasonable as most of y’all over the last 30 years can be counted on one hand. By and large the people we get to deal with are rank amateurs who read one article in a treasure magazine, drive past the Superstitions, look up and see shapes in the rocks and convince themselves that they, out of the thousands of people who have searched the area for a century, have solved the mystery. We also get the outright delusional obsessives who won’t believe even their own eyes. Over the years we have had treasure hunters dynamite cliffs into rubble, dig holes all over the place (often into solid rock), build little rockhouse shanties in the wilderness, carve and paint fake petroglyphs and pictographs and deface real ones, shoot at people (including me – and that was before I had even talked to any of them…), and destroy irreplaceable archaeological sites. Not that many years ago we arrested and deported an “international traveler” who was working for an infamous Dutchman hunter. He was working in a rockshelter in the Superstitions that contained several meters of cultural fill – the remains of occupations ranging from the Middle Archaic (ca 5,000 years ago) to the Apache and Yavapai. In the space of a few weeks he had shoveled nearly all of this material over the cliff, destroying the site; why? Because some idiot had written “1847” in charcoal on a rock ledge inside the shelter. Was there a tunnel or adit or a cache of bullion or plate hidden under that 5,000 year old midden? Of course not.
We also have to deal with the truly delusional, people like the guy who swore that Bluff Springs Mountain was hollow and that it contained a population of Aztecs who were still there protecting “Montezuma’s” treasure and sacrificing runaway teenagers on a pyramid they had built underground, or the infamous Chuck Kenworthy, with his contradictory dictionary of signs, saguaro topiary, and giant “carved” pigs and poodles. And then there are the Jesuit/Peralta people with their stone “maps” made with anachronistic epigraphy, magic symbols, 1940’s Disneyesque cartoon illustrations on a type of sandstone that can’t be found anywhere closer than 100 miles north of the Superstitions. To a reasonable person, most of this stuff is laughable, but we can’t just tell these people to go away without at least hearing them out (although some managers have finally gotten to that point). And it seems that the loonier they are the more prone they are to threaten us with lawsuits (never happens) and going to the press (happens a lot, and guess who gets to look like the bad guy?). So, I would say that, for the most part, it isn’t so much discrimination as frustration. Most of the treasure hunters we deal with are not the kind of people y’all would probably want in the Treasure Net Hall of Fame….. and dealing with them takes time away from real resource management, which is harder and harder to do nowadays as agency personnel are drained away and funding for the stewardship of America’s public lands is siphoned off to pay for solving other peoples’ problems in other countries.
As a corollary, we don’t often have contact with responsible treasure hunters. The closest that most agency people get (especially those without legendary lost mines and such in their jurisdiction) is through law enforcement – busting people who use metal detectors to turn publicly owned historic sites into prairie dog towns and bombing ranges in order to steal artifacts for their own amusement or monetary gain (we’ll come back to this). So, while I am not making excuses for those of my brethren who slight and dismiss y’all and treat you like criminals without making any effort to reach out and work with you, maybe this will help you to understand why they feel the way they do.
Why, then, do you ask, am I here? Obviously, I have the same frustrations as my colleagues – more so than most, actually, because no other Forest in the country has anything like the treasure draw created by the Lost Dutchman. A couple of reasons.
First of all, as several of you have noted, evaluating the merit of treasure claims is part of my job (though I must tell you that my District Rangers – the people who actually manage the Forest and issue the permits – don’t always see it that way). That job is easier the more that I can understand where y’all are coming from and vice versa.
Second, I happen to have a fairly old-fashioned idea about access to the National Forests. I still feel that any American taxpayer has the right of access to public land. Many agency archaeologists nowadays, out of fear of pothunters, don’t like people to have access to archaeological and historic sites on public land. I look at it the other way and encourage people to get out there and enjoy that same thrill of discovery that an archaeologist has when finding a site for the first time. Now, that doesn’t mean that I like the idea of people making new roads and trails everywhere or violating the wilderness laws or spewing their trash and brass all over the countryside or taking artifacts away or digging in sites; the point is for everyone to have the opportunity to feel the same thrill that you did and that can’t happen if you wreck the place and take away all the neat stuff. I have been burned by this attitude, of course, since there’s always that 5-10% of visitors that really don’t care about anyone but themselves, and sites have been damaged as a result, mostly by having all their artifacts walk off and end up in peoples’ trash cans after they get tired of moving and dusting them. In the long run, though, I like to think that open access helps to foster a feeling of ownership and responsibility.
This brings up something that Beth (?) - mrs. oroblanco – brought up and that Mike (gollum) asked me about as well, namely the idea that finding something “brings in the archaeologists” and all of a sudden places become “off-limits” and the archaeologists take everything for themselves or shove it into some museum basement, never to see the light of day again. This is actually an issue of some importance in the archaeological community as well. Basically, archaeology in this country (at least as regards Federal land) works under several laws designed to protect sites and their contents as the property of the Federal government as agent for the people of the US. Because of this, it is illegal to take stuff from a site as that damages its integrity and makes it all that much more difficult to study and interpret – not to mention tainting the feeling of discovery. On the other hand, when we excavate sites as mitigation for their imminent destruction by a construction project, the lack of money available nowadays usually means that we only dig a sample of any given site; the rest, which remains under the same protection of the law that prevents people from taking stuff from it, is then destroyed by the project. Afterwards, aside from what might be published in the excavation report, the artifacts are then, again, by law, held in a repository and, realistically, are almost never seen again. This has become an enormous problem in archaeology, since we are actually running out of places to put the stuff. The one thing that doesn’t happen is for the material to end up in private collections; with the sole exception of human remains, if it came off of or out of Federal property, it remains Federal property. The other thing that doesn’t happen, at least on Federal land, is that unless a site is doomed to destruction by some project, it doesn’t get dug. There is far too much demand for mitigation and far too little money for research for the luxury of digging up sites just because we want to. With the exception of an occasional University field school, that just doesn’t happen all that often on public land any more.
While there are many avenues for public participation in this process, it is easy to understand why many people feel left out. It’s also obvious that the system will be changing over the course of the next 10-20 years. How it will change will depend on who is involved in making the decisions. If y’all want it to change in your favor, you’ll need to get involved. In the meantime, don’t be afraid to talk to agency archaeologists or report your findings. Sure, many times you’ll get told not to go back out there or not to dig anything else up, but the more interaction you have with these people, the more opportunity you’ll have to change their attitudes and make your concerns known. One thing I will tell you will probably never change, though, and that is the ownership of artifacts from Federal lands. There are proposals being evaluated for short and long term loans of various kinds of material to private individuals under certain circumstances as a way to reduce pressure on the repositories, but I doubt that it will ever get to the point that finding it on Federal property automatically makes it yours.
The third thing is something else that Beth brought up (those darn oroblancos!) – the idea that having someone like me “with an interest in the subject can help to bridge the divide between us.” While I hope that can happen, I feel that I need to clarify my “interest in the subject.”
I am not a treasure hunter, at least not in the sense that most of you are. I gave up looking for the Lost Dutchman 35 years ago when I figured out that the whole town of Goldfield had beat me to it. I have over the years accumulated a little knowledge and studied the folklore patterns of treasure stories, largely because I have had to. I am an archaeologist. My obsession with the past lies in learning about how people lived and developed here in Arizona and in several other parts of the world in which I have an interest. The tools we use are similar, however, starting from historic research and an understanding of the landscape and finally reaching down to the point of using metal detectors to identify, map, and study historic Army/Apache battle sites or mining camps. From that perspective, we are not so different, and on that basis, hopefully, we can begin to understand one another.
And y’all thought Roy was long winded!
Next post: advice on obtaining a treasure trove permit from the US Forest Service.
