Finders Keepers Book Review - New York Times

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This section contains book reviews for our focus book, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs from --

(1) The Salt Lake Tribune
(2) The Los Angeles Times
(3) The New York Times

However, as explained in the “Original Proposal” section above, we are using Finders Keepers as a guide for examining one aspect of a preliminary assessment of what would be involved in our pending challenge to The Mormon Church over its condoning of the Wanton Destruction of Great Salt Lake.

Additional information concerning that imbroglio is available elsewhere on this website --

The Mormon Church’s President and Twelve Apostles who govern its affairs, were each requested by certified-mail return-receipt on 10/31/2016 to issue a press release stating that (1) the Mormon Church will sponsor a “legislative initiative” pursuant to Utah Constitution Art. VI Sec. 1 and Utah Code Title 20A Chapter 7 to require an immediate cessation to the Bear River Pipeline Project AND the dedication of all Utah State Sales Tax Funds that would have been allocated to the Bear River Pipeline Project to be spent, instead, on purchasing (or taking by eminent domain) farmland to have been served by the Bear River Pipeline based on the value of the farmland if the full costs of the Bear River Pipeline were reflected 100% in water prices –- AND (2) if the Mormon Church’s “legislative initiative” should fail, the Mormon Church will lobby the U.S. Government to create a new National Park comprising the Great Salt Lake and its tributaries.

All of the pertinent facts concerning the Wanton Destruction of Great Salt Lake (including the fact that 82% of all water usage in Utah goes to produce UNECONOMIC crops, the vast majority of which are sold as alfalfa hay to China!!!) are contained in the 10/31/2016 letters that were sent to the Mormon Church’s President and Twelve Apostles. However, background information such as the July 2014 two-volume engineering report and the Sep. 2016 Draft Water-Strategy White Paper prepared for the Utah Governor (in truly “ready – fire – aim” fashion six months AFTER the enactment of Senate Bill 80 approving the pipeline and its financing from Utah sales-tax receipts) can be downloaded from the posting entitled “Destroying Great Salt Lake To Grow Low-Profit Hay For China” in the second section of this website entitled “Possible Topics For Future Meetings.”

The 10/31/2016 letters to each of the Mormon Church’s President and Twelve Apostles can be downloaded from the first posting entitled “Destroying Great Salt Lake To Grow Hay For China” in the first section of this website.

In the 2.5 months since those letters were received by the President and Twelve Apostles who govern the Mormon Church, there has been no announcement that the Mormon Church will oppose the Bear River Pipeline.

Accordingly, it is time to assess, at least preliminarily, whether we will take effective action to have the U.S. Government create a new National Park comprising the Great Salt Lake and its tributaries.
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johnkarls
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Finders Keepers Book Review - New York Times

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New York Times – 8/26/2010


Den of Antiquities

Review by George Johnson - George Johnson is an American journalist and science writer. He is the author of nine books, including The Cancer Chronicles (2013), The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (2008) and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999), and writes for a number of publications, including The New York Times. He is a two-time winner of the science journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which, inter alia, publishes Science Magazine, the most prestigious publication for reporting scientific studies). His books have been short-listed three times for the Royal Society science book prize.


In a remarkable interlude in Willa Cather’s novel “The Professor’s House,” a New Mexico cowboy named Tom Outland describes climbing a landmark he calls Blue Mesa: “Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as sculpture, . . . pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower. . . . I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries.”

Blue Mesa was Cather’s stand-in for Green Mesa — Mesa Verde in southern Colorado — and she was evoking what a real cowboy, Richard Wetherill, might have felt when, a week before Christmas 1888, he found Cliff Palace, the centerpiece of what is now Mesa Verde National Park. Craig Childs understands these kinds of epiphanies, and he beautifully captures them in “Finders Keepers: A Tale of ¬Archaeological Plunder and Obsession” — along with the moral ambiguities that come from exposing a long-hidden world.

Wetherill’s city of stone, Childs reminds us, was quickly commandeered by a Swedish archaeologist who, over the objections of outraged locals, shipped crates of Anasazi artifacts to Europe. Worse things could have happened. Childs tells of a self-proclaimed amateur archaeologist who in the 1980s removed hundreds of artifacts from a cave in Nevada, including a basket with the mummified remains of two children. He kept the heads and buried the bodies in his backyard.

In his explorations of the Southwest, Childs has often crossed paths with pot hunters and private collectors. Most were driven by curiosity and the excitement of discovering lost history. Cather understood the impulse: “There is something stirring about finding evidences of human labor and care in the soil of an empty country,” Tom Outland says in the novel. “It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.” Then you have to resist the urge to take home what you have found.

After a raid by federal officers in 2009, prominent citizens of Blanding, Utah, were arrested on charges of illegally trading in artifacts. One man was so humiliated that he asphyxiated himself in his Jeep. The niece of another man asked for Childs’s understanding: “Farmers in the ’10s and ’20s would use pots for target practice, potshots. There were millions of artifacts, for Christ’s sake.” Her uncle collected them out of love, she said, to protect them. But according to the arrest warrant, Childs writes, he also boasted of selling sets of pottery for as much as $500,000.

Childs is no angel either, and that gives his book its drama. He tells of a time in the parched lands of the lower Colorado River when he and some fellow desert rats came across a small seashell, a sign that travelers had passed through. Picking up the shell, delicate as “a curl of white paper,” Childs had a Tom Outland moment: “I saw copper-skinned people filing between isolated mountains, baskets weighted across their foreheads on leather tumps. They had bare legs, hard footsoles, and spun countless generations of themselves before asphalt or steel ever came to this land.” As one of his cohort scooped up beads, Childs tried to intervene. “Aw, man, don’t start that,” the scavenger replied.

The beads, spilled accidentally, weren’t museum quality. There was little in the way of archaeological context to preserve. Why leave them behind for someone else to take? Though he knew it was illegal, Childs acquiesced: “Maybe the beads were meant to travel.”

When they came upon a more important site the next day, the moral calculus seemed clearer. In a cave, a pile of rocks turned out to be a hunting shrine concealing a cache of ceremonial bows. After passing them around, Childs insisted they be carefully replaced. Later, he noticed one was missing. “There is a difference between finding and keeping,” he writes. “The two are often lumped together into one action, but there is a blink that comes in between. It is when a thing goes from being its own to being yours.”

Childs doesn’t say whether, upon returning to civilization, he contacted a university archaeology department. Probably not. Over the years, he and others continued to find artifacts in the wild. They would carefully examine them and then leave them behind, telling no one the location. They were “cat burglars of the desert,” he writes.

In one of the book’s most gripping scenes, Childs visits the Peabody Museum at Harvard to study murals peeled from the walls of ruined Hopi kivas, ancient art that might otherwise have been destroyed. But with archaeologists complaining of a “curation crisis,” in which millions of artifacts sit boxed in museum basements, how many more arrowheads and potsherds do we need?

“If anyone tells you there is only one right answer to the conundrum of archaeology, he is trying to sell you something,” Childs writes. “At this point, considering all that has been removed, it is worth leaving the last pieces where they lie.”

Tom Outland may have come to feel the same way. Toward the end of “The Professor’s House,” he takes a train to Washington, where he tries to enlist the Smithsonian in the preservation of Blue Mesa. When he finally gets an appointment with an archaeologist, Outland lends him some pottery to evaluate. The Smithsonian decides to pass. And Outland never gets the artifacts back.

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