Looting is big business

Stealing the Past

Recent artifact raids shed light on today’s looting syndicate and the damage it does to New Mexico’s history

By Laura PaskusOver coffee and a hash breakfast approximately a month after the Four Corners arrests, Young recalls the variety of criminals apprehended during earlier investigations: In 1994, federal agents confiscated 11 objects considered sacred by the Mescalero Apache Tribe from Santa Fe’s East-West Trading Company. In another instance, an energy worker would scout northwestern New Mexico’s oil and gas fields for archaeological sites, then return to loot them. After he was charged, he even admitted to using a concrete saw to slice Navajo pictographs from the sandstone bluffs on which they were painted. “Fifteen minutes per panel, he told us,” Young says, “to steal those.”

Then, in the late ’90s, an operation in the Farmington area yielded indictments of a dozen looters. That particular ring was also involved in the drug trade: “The guy who was the methamphetamine dealer was trading with meth heads for artifacts,” Young says. “They would get high, work off their buzz—their high—doing destructive things to the scientific record, trying to recover these artifacts so they could go get high again.”And:“If you were to take the southwestern part of the state, we conservatively estimate that 95 percent of those sites have been damaged—and that’s [by] everything from a shovel to a bulldozer,” Nelson, who now works at the state Historic Preservation Division and is acting coordinator of the state’s SiteWatch program, says. The prehistoric pottery found in that part of the state—Mimbres-style pottery has distinctive black-on-white geometric designs and, oftentimes, human or animal figures—is a high-end item, he says, that appeals to collectors, particularly those in places such as Scandinavia, Sweden, Germany, Japan and China.

The black-market trade in artifacts is a $5 billion to $6 billion a year business, Nelson says—and it makes up a significant chunk of the illegal global market. “Arms is first, illegal drugs is second and artifacts is third.”Comment: For more on the subject, see Artifact Theft = "Organized Crime" and Redds Plead Guilty to Looting.