ANTIQUITIES ACT: TASK OF RECOVERING STOLEN ARTIFACTS, AN INCREASINGLY
DANGEROUS DUTY

In April 2004, an interagency group of law-enforcement officers
descended on a drab-looking house in the tiny village of San Rafael,
southwest of Grants, with search warrants in hand.

They were looking for evidence that the homeowner, Augustine Chavez,
was involved in trafficking a pair of ancient Indian leggings woven
from human hair. The leggings could have fetched $250,000 on the
black market, according to agents.

Officers knocked on the door and repeatedly said they had a warrant
to search the house. Chavez ran out the back door, right into other
agents. "Are you here for the meth?" he asked surprised officers,
according to a federal-court affidavit.

Inside, the agents found about 16 pounds of marijuana, 700 grams of
methamphetamines, a loaded SKS semiautomatic rifle and other guns,
and a collection of valuable, ancient Navajo pots.

Chavez, as it turned out, was dealing both drugs and Indian artifacts.

At the time of the raid, the leggings were held safely in a federal
evidence room. A source, cooperating with the Bureau of Land
Management, had purchased them from Chavez using marked bills. Agents
found the marked bills in Chavez's wallet.

The leggings are among an untold number of artifacts looted every
year from ancient and historic sites around New Mexico and the Four
Corners area. A specialized group of law-enforcement agents and
rangers, often working after regular hours, has recovered thousands
of these items. Frequently, the group finds drugs along with looted
pots, masks and arrowheads.

Paul Williams, lead archaeologist for the BLM's Taos field office,
wasn't surprised officers found drugs when they went looking for the
leggings. "We've always known there's a connection between drugs and
artifacts. Easy money," he said. "It's kind of scary."

Forward-Thinking Laws

One hundred years ago this year, Congress adopted the Antiquities
Act, making it a crime to steal Indian artifacts or deface ancient
and historical sites on federal lands. Congress further clarified and
strengthened federal authority in 1979 with the passage of the
Archaeological Resources Protection Act, or ARPA, which prohibits the
sale, purchase or trafficking of artifacts more than 100 years old
such as masks, pots, clothing and human remains taken from public
lands. The act made looting, transporting or selling any artifact
worth more than $500 a felony, punishable by fines up to $20,000 and
up to one year of imprisonment. For a second offense, felons could be
fined up to $100,000 and spend as many as five years in prison.

Cataloging Ancient Treasures

The West is full of archaeological treasures. The long, complex
history of humans is told by what was left behind. New Mexico alone
has hundreds of ancient sites once inhabited by Pueblo, Anasazi and
other ancestral tribal people. Middens, or refuse heaps, contain
uncounted numbers of potsherds. From Taos to the Mexican border,
people still stumble across Spanish spurs, the remnants of early
hardscrabble ranch lives and the bones of frontier soldiers.
Archaeologists are struggling to catalog these artifacts before they
are lost, stolen, sold, weathered away or paved over.

But while archaeologists are trying to uncover the past, a cadre of
diggers are out to profit from it, often selling off artifacts for a
few grams of drugs. "The amount of looting going on in the Four
Corners area is incredible," said one BLM antiquities investigator
who is still undercover.

In 1989, Congress created a special interagency Four Corners Task
Force based in Santa Fe to track stolen antiquities and arrest the
scofflaws. Gary Olson, a BLM agent, coordinated the group.

Before the task force was disbanded for lack of funding in 1992, the
dozen or so agents and archaeologists from the National Park Service,
U.S. Forest Service and the BLM recovered about 10,000 artifacts and
worked to return the objects to tribes or arranged for them to be
safely housed at museums.

"It was all the way from pottery shards to museum-quality whole pots
worth thousands of dollars," said Olson, who is now assistant special
agent in charge of the BLM's Phoenix office handling drug-interdiction cases.

After the task force was disbanded, the agents, who had developed
skills for tracking stolen artifacts, kept at it. "Some of us have
worked together for 25 years. A few of us who have an interest in
ARPA, with permission from our agencies, get together and pool our
resources to pursue cases now," Olson said.

The group shares funds, specialized surveillance equipment,
undercover agents and information. In the last two decades, this
small band of less then a dozen investigators has pursued more than 200 cases.

It is tedious, time-consuming work. It can take two or three years to
gather enough evidence to seek a warrant. Often agents are pursuing
cases on top of their regular jobs, giving up weekends and time with
their families.

"A 16-hour day is not uncommon when you are pursuing those kinds of
cases," Olson said.

People who dig and loot artifacts are a close-knit society. Sometimes
two and three generations of the same family have looted sites,
according to Olson, and breaking into that circle is difficult and
dangerous. "Either going out digging with those people or getting in
with people at shows is extremely difficult and requires a lot of
commitment," he said.

Tracking Stolen Artifacts

A case starts when a tip catches an agent's attention. Sometimes it's
an overheard conversation about someone with a collection of
artifacts. Sometimes agents find an informant.

"No tip, no innuendo is too small," said an undercover agent, who is
currently investigating nine cases.

If the information seems reliable, it's shared with other
investigators. "Because there's so few of us, we'll call each other
up and say, 'Hey, we've got a pretty good case here,' " Olson said.

One of Olson's favorite cases involved monitoring a rock-shelter site
near Farmington that was the target of looters. After a 2 1/2 year
effort, Olson and his team recovered 300 artifacts including a rare
Nightway Chant ceremonial mask. Their work resulted in indictments of
seven people on 14 felonies.

The mask was returned to the Navajo Nation in a special ceremony that
Olson was invited to attend. "It was quite an honor. It was a very
moving experience," he said.

The San Rafael leggings case was solved in three months -- unusually
fast. Cibola County Sheriff's deputies alerted BLM after a Grants
resident reported the leggings stolen from his home.

Agents first had to figure out the provenance, or origin, of the
leggings, the undercover agent said, because, unless law enforcement
can prove artifacts are from public land, they can't pursue the case.
And experienced looters sometimes pay private landowners to sign a
paper falsely claiming an artifact came from private land. "Once
artifacts are on someone's mantle or in someone's car or in a show,
tracing that artifact back to where it came from is extremely
difficult," Olson said.

The man who reported the leggings stolen from his Grants home claimed
he found them on private land three decades earlier. But when he took
officers out to the site, they discovered it was in the Cibola
National Forest, which meant the leggings were subject to ARPA. A
Forest Service ranger was called in to join the investigation.

Drugs And Artifacts

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement have
all pitched in to help with looting cases. Cibola National Forest,
BLM agents and Cibola County Sheriff's deputies worked together to
break the leggings case.

Sometimes they go after the looters by offering to buy what they
believe are stolen artifacts. Sometimes they pursue the buyers --
including art galleries, overseas traders and trading posts. They
focus on big cases, those involving a repeat looter or large-scale
artifact trafficking.

"We can't afford to go after people who are occasional collectors. We
go after the more serious looters," Olson said.

The drug connection is never far away. "Many of the people we go
after have extensive criminal histories, violent crimes and selling
or using drugs. Many times, how these people know each other is
through drugs," Olson said.

Methamphetamine-users seem to love digging for artifacts, agents say.
"Methamphetamine is probably the most common drug used among the
looters or the diggers," Olson said. "Many times in rural areas, if
there's not much to do, these guys get high on meth and go digging.
If they find anything, they trade it for more drugs."

Chavez was arrested on charges of being a felon in possession of
firearms and drug possession. Officials decided not to charge him
with the theft of the leggings. He pleaded guilty in federal District
Court to drug possession with intent to distribute and was sentenced
in February to 11 years in prison and four years probation, according
to court records.

Though the leggings now sit in a U.S. Forest Service evidence room,
"the goal is to repatriate them to their rightful owner, whichever
pueblo they belong to. Archaeologists are working on that process
right now," said Terry McGaha, a U.S. Forest Service special agent
who worked on the case.

McGaha said archaeologists told him there is only one other pair of
similar leggings in the world.

"The leggings are a national treasure," said the undercover BLM agent
who worked on the case. "We had to get them back."

We believe in it.

Thousands of drug agents are assigned to fight the drug war on public
land, Olson said. But few have the skills or inclination to spend the
time in tracking artifacts.

"There's a brief moment of euphoria when we get a warrant," Olson
said. Those moments are "few and far between given the amount of work
and stress involved," he noted. "But we think it makes a difference,
and we believe in it."