THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONSERVANCY AND SITE PROTECTION

Mark Michel

Introduction

In 1979, a small group of conservationists and archaeologists formed The Archaeological Conservancy in an attempt to develop an effective program to permanently preserve important archaeological sites on private land. The effort came from our successful drive to enact a new federal site protection law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, which was designed to protect sites on federal lands from looters, a continuing and growing problem.

Pleased as we were with this success, we knew only too well that the vast majority of archaeological resources in the United States are on private land, subject to the whim of the owners. While publicly owned sites had been seriously impacted by looters, those on private land have been devastated; mainly by development, modern agriculture and professional looters. Since the first Europeans arrived, these sites of antiquity have been obliterated and the process continues, virtually unabated.

Yet even today neither the Society for American Archaeology nor the Federal Government has any program whatsoever for the systematic protection of archaeological resources on private lands.

No one has any idea of what still exists, but the few estimates that are available are appalling. For example, in 1880 the Bureau of Ethnology estimated there were 20,000 burial mounds in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. It is estimated that less than 200 survive today, and those on private lands are still without protection. Just within the past three years, at least four important Anasazi ruins in the Mesa Verde area which were located on private land have been totally destroyed by looters.

Archaeological Looting

One of the effects of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 has been an increase in looting on private lands. As a result, legal looting on private lands has correspondingly increased. Professional looters buy looting rights or simetimes even sites themselves. One old trick used in the Southwest has been to buy a site at a high price, but with little or no down payment, then loot the site and default on the mortgage. In the well known Slack Farm (Kentucky) case several men reportedly paid the owner $10,000 to dig up artifacts at this Mississippian period cemetery.

Whereas other countries have taken possession or at least control of their antiquity, two factors make that unlikely in the United States. First, is the very powerful American impulse of the sanctity of private land (see Fowler this volume for a discussion of the legal basis for archaeological site protection in the United States). No other nation in the world gives such prominent protection of private property rights. Secondly, there is the reality of the dominant group in our society, i.e. persons of European stock, being unrelated either racially or culturally to the Nation's prehistoric archaeological remains. As one state senator told me when I explained that we should protect our national heritage, "Son, it may be part of your heritage, but it ain't part of mine." Not surprisingly, the two largest archaeological organizations in the United States deal with European and Middle Eastern archaeology.

While legislation to regulate the digging of archaeological sites may pass court review, no one that I know believes ownership of the resource rests anywhere but with the owner of the land. To do otherwise would violate the Constitutional prohibition of a taking of property without just compensation. A prohibition on digging on private land may do likewise.

The Archaeological Conservancy

It was with this in mind that The Archaeological Conservancy was founded with the premise that the most effective way to preserve archaeological sites on privately owned land was to own them. This was not an entirely new idea. Various land trusts around the nation had been doing that for years. The most successful is The Nature Conservancy that now boasts 500,000 members and preserves over 1,000 acres of land per day, mostly land containing rare and endangered species. Since 1951, The Nature Conservancy has acquired more than 5 million acres in 50 states.

It is not a new idea for government either. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service acquires thousands of acres to protect habitat. The National Park Service has acquired land for more than 100 years, including archaeological sites. It is not a new idea for archaeological sites either. Beginning with Serpent Mound in the 1890's, the Ohio Historical Society has acquired and protected a number of important sites in that state, but virtually none since the 1920's.

It is a thoroughly American idea. If you want to protect or control some land, then the most effective way to do that is to own it. If you have fee simple ownership, then you hold the cards. If a highway department wants to put a road through your site, then they have to take you to court and prove their need. If a looter trespasses on your property to steal some valuable artifacts, then he is committing a felony. It is something that everyone in America understands.

The other guiding principle of the Conservancy is the belief in "conservation archaeology." Archaeology is perhaps unique among scientific disciplines in that it destroys its own research base in the course of doing research. Thus, yesterday's archaeologist, no matter how competent, missed many clues. But it is very difficult if not impossible to go back and do it again once a site is excavated. Modern technology has many applications for archaeologists, and it is important that information remain in situ for new techniques and new insights. The Conservancy is like a museum, only instead of storing artifacts on shelves, we store them in the ground.

Beginning with start-up grants from The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Conservancy began to acquire sites in 1980. The first step was to evaluate and priortize the sites. Actually much of the data was readily available. Each state has a State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) established under the Historic Preservation Act of 1966. We began our selection process by asking the SHPOs to develop a list of twenty or so of the most important sites in his state in need of protection. Professional archaeologists from the academic community are consulted as well. Once that list is complete, we field check the sites to see what condition they are in today. Often, no one has been to check on these sites for many years, and more than once we have unhappily found an important site to no longer exist.

We then apply practical tests to the list. How endangered is the site? How much time does it have left? Are there similar sites available? How difficult is the project? What is the attitude of the owner? How much is it going to cost?

One of the first states in which we began to operate was Ohio. We got excellent support from the SHPO and archaeological community, and we wanted to build on the past accomplishments in preservation of the Ohio Historical Society. The SHPO provided us with a list of about twenty sites and we began to work. Many of the great moundbuilder sites of Ohio were gone, destroyed by urban development or modern agriculture, making the preservation of those that remained even more important.

Our first target was the famous Hopewell Mounds Group, the type site of the Hopewell culture. This provides a very good case study. The site itself consists of a D-shaped earthen enclosure covering 111 acres with an attached square enclosure covering an additional 18 acres. The outside walls are three miles long and made of earth and stone. Inside the enclosures are up to forty mounds. Extensive research has taken place there on three separate occasions since 1845.

These excavations discovered the fabulous artifacts that made the Hopewell culture famous: huge caches of pearls, copper and obsidian; exquisitely carved pipes and mica cutouts; grizzly bear teeth and conch shells. These materials were collected from across the continent and brought to the Hopewell site and eventually placed in burial mounds. Yet despite all the attention given to the Hopewell site, perhaps the most famous archaeological site east of the Mississippi River, nothing had been done to preserve it. In fact, it had been almost forgotten since 1925.

Consultation with leading experts drew a consensus that despite the extensive research done at the Hopwell site, perhaps as much as 90 percent remained untested. I'll never forget my first visit in the spring of 1980. There it was, the fabulous Hopewell site; impacted by 200 years of farming, crossed by a county road and the B & O Railroad, marred by a high voltage transmission line, but there it was still intact. Mounds were still clearly visible in the dormant fields. The earthen enclosure was plowed down in places but largely undisturbed in others,still clearly visible from the ground and from the air.

Suburban development was getting perilously close to the Hopewell site, now less than one-half mile away. Rural residential developments occur throughout the East along any county road, and a county road bisects the site. Fortunately, the owners, a young engineer and his mother, were sympathetic to preservation. They had considered a subdivision, but were pleased with the alternative we gave them. Shortly, the Conservancy had an agreement to buy 124 acres of the site for about 60 percent of fair market value, or $165,000. The sellers were able to take the balance as a tax deduction.

This agreement covered most of the site, but three smaller parcels with a combined total of about 40 acres remained. The Conservancy then began efforts to raise the funds to pay for the site over the next three years. This was the first test of the Conservancy's ability to raise substantial funds to acquire and permanently preserve endangered archaeological sites.

It quickly became apparent that a lot of education was needed before funds could be successfully raised. No foundation or corporation had previously contributed funds to preserve an archaeological site. The work of land trusts like The Nature Conservancy helped pave the way, but only to a limited degree. After the three year period, the funds were in hand and the first acquisition completed. We continue to seek to acquire additional small pieces of the site and expect to close on two in 1990.

The principal and interest for the acquisition had come to about $185,000. Of that sum, $25,000 came from the "Acquisition and Development" portion of the federal Historic Preservation Fund which is administered by the National Park Service and the SHPO in each state. When the Conservancy was founded in 1979, it was assumed that a substantial portion of acquisition costs would come from this matching fund. But those hopes were dashed by a reduction in such federal funding under the Reagan Administration.

By 1981, the federal matching funds had disappeared in the governments's drive to reduce federal domestic spending. The state SHPO offices were threatened with federal fund cutoffs as well, and turned their attention to maintaining their offices. The decrease of federal funds removed a significant and seemingly dependable source of funds from the efforts to preserve America's prehistoric past. Only in 1990 did federal funds for acquisition and development begin to reappear and in only very small amounts.

The reduction of federal funding for dozens of domestic programs placed the burden of maintaining these service on state and local governments. It was anticipated by the Federal Government that the "private sector" would make up the difference. However, this was not the case. Foundations and corporations were swamped with proposals for funding from all sorts of organizations, including government agencies. The overall net result was a decrease in funding for historic preservation as well as other programs.

Thus, funding for private site protection, which had seemed promising in 1980, became extremely difficult by 1981. Yet the Conservancy continued to identify, acquire and preserve sites in an ever expanding area of the United States. By the end of 1989, it had completed 60 projects in eleven states. Book value of the property reached $3 million.

Today, the Conservancy has about 8,500 contributors from across the nation. Two-thirds of the 60 parcels acquired were purchased -- usually at bargain prices. The other third were donated to the Conservancy, whose staff is trained in real estate and tax matters. Archaeological sites tend to be small and often relatively inexpensive to purchase. The vast majority of Conservancy preserves are under 100 acres and seldom do acquisition costs exceed $100,000 for a single project.

The Conservancy does not pay for archaeology. Occasionally an owner of an important site will have great expectations for a "buried treasure" value of his property. Our first task is to explain the nature of the archaeological resource, while at the same time impressing on the owner the national significance of the property.

This may seem like a paradox, but it is the key to successful negotiations. The commercial potential of a site is offset by the cost of recovery and the resulting damage to the property. In the end, if an owner is not interested in preserving a site, it is unlikely that it will still be there.

The Conservancy's Board of Directors sets goals and priorities on the basis of need. It was determined that the remains of the Caddo culture in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana were in great need of preservation due to the ravages of landleveling and looting. A Caddo project was launched in 1986 with the goal of acquiring as quickly as possible a good sampling of Caddo culture sites. Packaging a number of sites together in one project saves time and money. It is just as difficult to raise funds to save five sites as to save one and a lot less time consuming. Five Caddo sites in Texas and Oklahoma have been acquired and several more are in various stages of negotiations.

Once a site has been acquired the Conservancy stabilizes it and prepares a 100-year management plan that governs research. Volunteers play a large role in both stabilization and preparation of the management plan. At a preserve in southeastern Colorado, more than 50 volunteers, some from as far away as Denver, spent a long weekend stabilizing ancient walls and filling in pot holes with sterile soil. Near Santa Fe, volunteers built a diversion dam to protect important ruins from a meandering stream.

Preventing looting is one of our biggest concerns. We fence most all of our preserves in order to visually and legally establish boundaries. No fence will keep a looter off a site, but if a looter knows that if he is caught inside our fence he will go to jail, he will think twice about it. We then set up a regular patrol system, mainly using volunteers. From this point, most archaeological preserves need little care. In the East, we like to keep preserves in grass and prevent dense brush from over running the site. This is usually accomplished with an agreement with a neighboring farmer to cut hay or graze cattle on the preserve. A well trimmed preserve prevents erosion and deters looters, who have little cover and who are deterred by a "cared for" appearance.

The first decade of The Archaeological Conservancy proved that private acquisition works. We have demonstrated that archaeological sites on private lands can be preserved in the United States by using the oldest American tradition, ownership of the land.

In the next decade we plan to expand this program. Field offices have already been opened in Santa Fe, Sacramento, and Indianapolis. New offices are planned for Atlanta and Washington. Thematic projects now include Chaco outliers, Mesa Verde culture centers, Caddo ceremonial centers, Hopewell and Adena sites of all kinds, Sacramento Delta villages and many more. In the next few years we plan to add even more as funds are available.

With this demonstrated success, it is now time for professional archaeologists and the federal government to adopt a national program for the preservation of archaeological sites found on private lands. At the current rate of destruction, only a short time remains before much of this priceless resource is destroyed forever. Not every archaeological site can be purchased or turned into a permanent preserve, nor should they. Only those with the most depth and most potential for sustained research need be given this highest form of protection. Lesser degrees of protection can be afforded to less important sites. Archaeological easements can be used for some, and owner protection programs on a voluntary basis for others. Kentucky has embarked on such a program, where private owners pledge to protect sites on their land.

Conclusion

Clearly it is time for the federal and state governments to join in the permanent preservation of the nation's prehistoric legacy. Archaeological sites are usually small and relatively inexpensive to purchase. The average private site can probably be bought for only about $40,000. At this rate 1,000 sites, or an average of 25 per sate, could be purchased for only $40 million. It would take ten years to accomplish that, or a mere $4 million per year. Various states have already begun to invest in their cultural heritage with innovative programs to establish archaeological preserves.

The fiscal impact of managing a national preserve system could be lessened by joining a partnership of private organizations, state governments through the SHPOs, museums and universities. Once established, preserves are relatively easy to maintain and protect.

Some skeptics would say that this is only a fraction of the resource. But it would be a large fraction of the sites with good integrity and ample depth for sustained research purposes. Besides what is the alternative? To continue to stand by and do nothing while the best of America's prehistoric past is destroyed.

Preserving the remains of America's prehistoric legacy is a race against time. Every day more of these sites are destroyed and along with them the information that would someday tell of the great cultures of prehistoric America. Our experience confirms that the most effective way to preserve these privately owned resources is to set them aside as permanent preserves (see Kearns and Kirkorian, Knudson, McAllister, Rogers and Grant this volume for further discussion on protecting sites on private property). It is a big job, and we need all the help we can get.

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