Childs - Finders keepers: a tale of archaeological plunder and obsession

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Copyright 2010 by Craig Childs

Reading group guide copyright 2013 by Craig Childs and Little, Brown and Company

Cover design by Karen Horton, cover photograph Visions of America, LLC/Alamy

Cover copyright 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at . Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

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First ebook edition: August 2010

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ISBN 978-0-316-05249-8

A fascinating book, full of swashbuckling pothunters, FBI raids, greasy museum curators who dont really care, and many, many other characters. Childs looks at moral issues from varied angles. He doubts others as he doubts himself, a beautiful inverse of the Golden Rule.

Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Craig Childs understands archaeological epiphanies, and he beautifully captures them along with the moral ambiguities that come from exposing a long-hidden world.

George Johnson, New York Times Book Review

Finders Keepers may be Childss most tender and ferocious dissection. If you have ever ached to possessor lost what you believed you possessed to change, time, or someone elseyou may find yourself equally possessed by Childss razor-edge analysis and compassion.

Mary Sojourner, Psychology Today

Reads almost like a thriller, chock-full of vendettas, suicides, and large-scale criminal enterprises dedicated to the multimillion-dollar trade in antiquities.

NPR

Childs is a superb storyteller. A cross between Indiana Jones and a parliamentary debate. As Childs makes clear in this engrossing book, how people grapple with the past is as varied as history itself.

Jonathon Keats, New Scientist

Childs is the love child of Indiana Jones and George Hayduke. In his passionate and outspoken new book, he expands his scope to a global scale to look at the ethical dilemmas archaeology poses. His topic is the past, and particularly its material remains. Who owns the past? And what, if anything, do we owe it?

Anita Guerrini, The Oregonian

Even Indiana Jones would be scared by some of the plunderers Childs uncovers.

Billy Heller, New York Post

This is a delightful account of the complicated world of archaeology by an author who loves (one might say is borderline obsessed with) the past. This nicely wrought, even poetic book about archaeological excavation and the variety of people who are passionate about the past and its artifacts will fascinate everyone from high school students to professional archaeologists digging in the field. Highly recommended.

Library Journal

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The Secret Knowledge of Water

Apocalyptic Planet

For my dad,
his bones and ashes
scattered across the desert

Events in time are notboomover.
They have tentacles, and they wrap around,
and they swish back and forth,
and they sink and swim.

A MY F USSELMAN ,
8: A LL T RUE: U NBELIEVABLE

A ll characters and names in this book are real but for Art and Betty Cooper, who requested anonymity to keep their collection safe.

I frequently use the word archaeology, which has different meanings based on context. While it describes the scientific discipline itself, I also use the word to define the presence of archaeological material, e.g., There was archaeology all over the place. It also refers to the larger arena surrounding artifacts, e.g., Archaeology is one big stinking mess.

H er eyes looked tired, as if she had not slept in days. When I asked if shed talk to me about her work as an archaeologist, she told me she was an unreliable source. I said not to worry, that Id just like to hear her story. But her face worried me, and I felt like I was interviewing a vampire.

I had a beer, nothing for her. An attractive woman with a penetrating gaze, she had her legs stretched out in the booth. She had been working as a contract archaeologist documenting and clearing human remains and artifacts for a highway expansion across the Navajo reservation in northern New Mexico. She said dead people were everywhere, remains of thousands of years of occupation; the whole place was a graveyard. She and her crew would dig by day, then go back to some cheap motel room. She said that there was so much sex and drinking that now it seemed like a dream, a hedonistic foray in the land of the dead. She was raw labor in the growing field of cultural resource management, working for an environmental consulting firm that sent excavators out to clear the way for development, to pull up pots, effigies, offerings, and bones in accordance with the law. She called herself a death-eater.

Sitting at the booth she whispered, I hate the Navajo.

The people? I asked.

No, the place, she said. The reservation.

She told me guys would come up to her, Navajo men, and tell her she should not be doing this. They said witches would come at night, steal the bones of people she was digging up, and grind them into powder that would be used in black magic rituals, hexes. She tried to reassure them by saying that when she and her colleagues found burials, the police would keep an eye on the sites until they could get them cleared out. That is when one man told her that police sell bones to witches, not enough that she would even notice, but enough to kill with. Navajo traditions are rife with death taboos and rumors of sorcerymakes sense in the Southwest, where bones are constantly weathering from the ground. The Navajo have learned you dont touch dead peoples things. They arent yours. They just bring trouble.