Book: Finders Keepers by Craig Childs

Also titled "A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession."

Craig Childs is a self-proclaimed desert rat sort of person, one who thrives in the dry landscape of canyons and mountains in the archaeologically rich Southwest. He tells of those who collect, steal, ravage, curate, buy, sell and discover artifacts, whether they are great museum pieces or a collection of broken potsherds. There are amazing stories of others' discoveries and of a few he found himself.

The book is provocative, fascinating, peopled with crooks, high and low, with collectors, with salvage archaeologists (those hired when a new development or strip mall or stadium is to be built on grounds that very possibly contain artifacts) and with a few, like the author, who believe these treasures should remain in the ground and crevices where they were placed or where they were left behind and where they remained years or decades or centuries after the humans who made them were long gone.

He talks of Aurel Stein, who finds the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas on the Silk Road in China in the early 20th century. He talks with Thomas Hoving who wrote "Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art." He tells of the artifact diggers on St.Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait and the amazing artifact wealth of southeastern Utah and the Four Corners area. He tells of his own rambles in the southwest and of returning to one of his secret places to get a small sample for carbon dating; how he and his wife lose their way temporarily and spend the night on a two-foot ledge with a rock underneath his sleeping bag on the drop-off side so he wouldn't roll over in the night. "I have never slept so well, so beautifully, as that night...still as a mummy...It was like being suspended by a silver thread over the desert."

He tells of a collector in Santa Fe who has Sitting Bull's pipe in his home and of the repatriation of artifacts, all the while arguing gently for artifacts to remain "in situ."

He ends with this: "I walked a circle until I spotted a small red arrowhead. It was perfect. I picked it up, a fine piece made of jasper stone....I held it against the sky, a fine little bird-point no bigger than a dime, something a person had knapped with great skill.....FInders keepers, I thought....I considered the gamut of opinions, from archaeologist to dealer, from conservators to collectors and no one has convinced me there is a better thing to do at this point than this: I flicked the arrowhead away with my thumb, and it landed back in the dirt. I left it here, wishing the earth to be populated with memory, a stone on the ground as bright as blood."

Even if the subject isn't particularly interesting to you, this book is certainly well written and has stories of human nature and large passions, adventures in the landscape of the southwest and an account of one way one man lives and makes a living outside of a cubicle. Vicarious living.....