Report from Santa Fe; Michael Bremer

music Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tells New Mexico. I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to Report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Michael Braemer. Thank you for joining us. That's a pleasure. Thank you. You are the forest archaeologist for the Santa Fe National Forest. That's correct. Now I wonder if you were to understand the structure of the National Forests in New Mexico. How many are there? Where are they? And where are you? The Forest Service in New Mexico is divided into five different forests. There's the Carson National Forest around the house. There's the Santa Fe National Forest around Santa Fe.

The Seabland National Forest around Albuquerque. The Hila National Forest around Silver City. And the Lincoln National Forest around Alamogordo. And those are five separate forest service entities that make up probably close to 8 million acres of public forest service land. And I work for the Santa Fe National Forest, which is the forest in Santa Fe. And you are the archaeologist on the forest. I'm the forest archaeologist, which is the lead archaeologist. We have a staff in my office of six and then the five Ranger districts that make up the forest have one to two archaeologists on each of those units. Well, what does being the archaeologist entail? Because you're looking at such ancient land, such ancient sites. Well, obviously it depends on what forest you're on. But on the Santa Fe National Forest, I'm the primary preservation officer of the primary archaeologist, the go-to person, for learning about archaeology

and historic issues on the Santa Fe National Forest. And our primary job is keeping the forest in compliance with the requirements of federal preservation law. In those laws, the primary law that we work under is the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. But we also work with something called the 1906 Antiquities Act, which is kind of the Grandparent Act for all preservation law in this country. But the National Historic Preservation Act says that federal agencies have to take into account the effect of their work on cultural resources and on other historic resources, on public lands. What are cultural resources? Most people would think of them as archaeological sites. So if you go to any of the state monuments like Chaco Canyon or Coahua down in Bernalillo or any of the kind of the big cultural resources that we have, we have Pecos National Monument, who Ye Cliffs, Bandilear, places like that,

are all archaeological parks that have archaeological sites in them. And that's kind of the most recognizable cultural resource that people would know. Other cultural resources include historic trails, historic cabins, historic places, just kind of landscapes, historic neighborhoods. Those are all cultural resources. Cultural resources can be as simple as artifacts, and they can be as complex as big sites like Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, or like neighborhoods. Downtown Santa Fe is a cultural resource. If you know what I mean, the buildings are very, very old down there. And it has a context of histories. If you saw the recent opening of the history museum, you know that the focus of Santa Fe is on its cultural resources and downtown Santa Fe. Well actually in light of what you're talking about cultural preservation, one of the reasons it took so long to open up that history museum, which was in effect they call an extension of the Palace of the Governors,

was that of the archaeological work they had to do, layer and layer of building to be sure they had everything before they build over it. Right, archaeologies are really kind of unusual science in that it studies the layering of human activities. Santa Fe is a great place to study that because we have, some people say we have 12,000 years of history in downtown Santa Fe, all the way from big game hunters who were the people who honored Buffalo and by sent in the past, and up through the Pueblo people who occupied it before the Spanish got here and built the Palace of the Governors. There was a Pueblo in downtown Santa Fe before the Europeans got here. And a lot of people didn't know that until the history museum was built. Well, there's a lot of people don't know. And that's why I've invited you here to kind of bring us up to speed. One of your main jobs you say is compliance with these laws is back to the 1906 historic preservation law in the 1996.

But there have been many cases lately of people who've been arrested by BLM and other federal agencies for trafficking and artifacts. And I'm wondering if people know what you can own or sell or trade and what you cannot. I know this much, I know that if it's from public lands, it belongs to the public, is that true? That's correct. If it's on federal public lands, which is land owned by the people of the United States, it's protected by something called the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. And ARPA is the way archaeologists refer to it. We're acronym crazy. Everything we refer to, especially in the government. But ARPA is the act that says that cultural resources on public land that are 100 years or older are not to be disturbed and are to be left in place for scientific study, and it is illegal to remove them from public lands. And so that's the primary law that protects cultural resources on land. There are other laws such as theft of government property statutes

that kind of prevent you from picking up and taking home pot shards, arrowheads, even historic artifacts that are 100 years old. That's the thing about ARPA is it covers artifacts that are 100 years or older. The theft of government property laws and the things that control just kind of the resources that everybody owns on public land kind of don't pay attention to dates and those cover kind of the smaller, more recent artifacts. In general, archaeologists consider anything that's older than 50 years as culturally significant. And that it has to be evaluated. I mean, some stuff is garbage. I mean, but a lot of garbage to an archaeologist is very important because it tells the story of the past. But a lot of, you know, it's that borderline stuff. At 50 years old, does it need to be protected? Is it important? That's the work with an archaeologist to kind of make that determination. I mean, we're not really focused on protecting plastic olive oil cans

and, you know, milk jugs and stuff like that. But there are sites, you know, I'm actually over 50 myself. So anything that's over 50 years old, is it really old? Yeah. Most times it is because it's important to our past. So one of the problems with these dealers, these dealers in artifacts, they were saying there was a cultural problem because some of them in their 70s that were quite older would grow up, for example, the family in Blanding, Utah. Just when there were kids that went on picnics, they had shovel in a bucket and they just were out, you know, gathering potards. When, how are people going to know that this is no longer okay? Well, those people found out because they were... Well, most archaeologists would agree that it's education that's going to help us get there. I mean, there's going to be some people that you'll never get to that will always think that it's their right to pot hunt on public land.

But in general, there are lots of families who had a tradition up through the 50s and 60s of going out after church or after dinner on Sundays and visiting sites and picking things up and kind of just kind of treasure hunting, I think is probably what they viewed it as. The law say you can't do that anymore. For people who have done that, I don't think that federal governments or state governments or county governments or municipal governments have the funds to go chasing after people who violated laws before the 1960s. In the 1960s, there's a change in the way the public and the government perceive preservation of cultural resources. And that, you know, it starts out with the National Historic Preservation Act that says federal agencies have to account for what they're doing. And then there's the ARPA, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act in 1979, which comes about because even though we had a law in 1906,

I mean, the country recognized for a long time that it didn't want people picking stuff up off of public land. But the 1906 Act was generally okay, but in the 1960s and 1970s, it became unenforceable as a result of a couple of cases. And it didn't have enough penalty associated with it that it would act as a deterrent. And so that's the reason that the Archaeological Resources Protection Act came about. And even though it 1979 seems pretty recent in our time, it was 30 years ago. It's a very important act. We've prosecuted a lot of people under it. We've had a lot of successful prosecutions by the federal government and other agencies. Under ARPA, probably this one most recently in Utah, and some of the investigations that have gone on in Arizona and New Mexico is one of the more visible ones. I know it was a two-year period of investigation and infiltration into these artifact dealing networks.

And was it primarily focused on people who were selling these things? So in other words, I don't know enough about the investigation, because I didn't partake in the investigation. I had friends who went with law enforcement officers to do the investigations when they served the warrants. But the investigation, I think, focused on all the channels, all the way from the procurement, from the ground, into the selling. And as we were talking about the other day, it ultimately is the market in antiquities or in selling old things that drives people collecting things in the field. I mean, it creates a market for it. That's very much a philosophy of most preservation-oriented archaeologist is that the market fuels the need and the need fuels the pot hunting. And so to go after the people who are trading illicitly in these materials is probably a good thing.

Try to get the head of the beast. Well, I was so surprised to find out that the three items of illicit trading in this country, probably in the world, are weapons, drugs, and antiquities, illegal artifacts. And I think that's nationwide. We all have an impression of what gun running is worldwide, and what drugs are worldwide. And recently, we've discovered that the illicit trade in antiquities is probably not as large as gun running or as drug smuggling or anything like that. But it has a huge market. And kind of the unfortunate or dangerous thing is frequently these things are tied together. And I don't know if it's myth or if it's kind of the stories that get told, but I also know that it's fact that when you, when these people are busted, a lot of these, at certain levels, the people who are digging in the ground are carrying weapons. They also have illegal drugs with them. And they have very little disregard for the context of the materials

that they're taking out of the ground. To take it to the next level individual, to sell it up the chain until it gets to the higher end antiquities market. And the most grievous thing for the archaeologist is that because the context where you find an item in the strata is so important to have these, to go there and find a big hole. When people are looking for a grave, you don't see how it was. Yeah. Well, the, I think the important thing for people to understand is that cultural materials on the landscape actually live on the, or have been placed there on the landscape by people who lived in that. And people didn't just live in a house and not leave stuff all around it. But it's important to try to tell the story about how those people live. So if you, if you take away the remnants of what they ate with and what they ate from and what they ate and what they wore and what they traded and you destroy, I mean, all that,

how that is arranged on sites is very, very important. If you take that away or if you go in there and just kind of dig around and throw it around, it messes up societies. And I don't want to just say it's archaeologists who do this because I think as an archaeologist I've learned, and I work with a large number of volunteers who tell me that part of the reason they get into archaeologies because they want to know how people lived on the, on the landscape and they want to know how things came to be. And so when you, when those things are trashed basically, there's, there's no way to be able to tell that story to the people who are interested. And it's a huge percentage of people who have an interest in learning about the past. Well, they say you don't, you can't understand the present without setting the past. And that's one thing that I would love to have you talk about. There are programs both with the Forest Service, I think years are called Site Stewards. Right, the Forest Service has a Site Stewardship Program but there are lots of volunteer opportunities.

Well, tell us a little about them because, you know, kind of the older people get the more, the more passion they get, you know, I've always been drawn to Cassis Grande's or to the healer or these places and they have a chance, you know, even the Tassouki Pueblo, even Nambayam, there are places here where people can go and contribute to the preservation of this, of this strata of life. Right. Our past. Nationwide, there's been kind of a rise in Site Stewardship Programs and so many, many states have Site Steward Programs either with individual agencies or with the states themselves. You know, on the Santa Fe National Forest, we have a program called the Santa Fe National Forest, a Site Stewardship Program and that's made up of, between 60 and 70 individuals we have in flow as people do it and then leave. But the volunteers in our organization are certified by a governing council that sets instruction and sets up qualifications for people to belong to the organization.

And it's not onerous or anything. It's just kind of teaching people about ethics and teaching people about methods. And those volunteers monitor sites on the forest. We have about 200 sites on the forest that these 60 stewards, that we asked them to visit once a month. Now the Site Stewardship Program on this forest is also mirrored throughout this state by a larger program in the state called New Mexico Site Watch. And that's run out of the Historic Preservation Division at the Department of Cultural Affairs, I believe. And it's in something called the State Historic Preservation Office, which is the acronym SHIPO. Another SHIPO, ARPA. But in the SHIPO's office, Norm Nelson is the coordinator for the New Mexico Site Watch Program. That program is much larger and it extends across a number of volunteer coordinators in regions throughout New Mexico. And they have probably 200, maybe 300 volunteers who do stewardship.

They're stretched pretty thin and they're heavily reliant on volunteers to do the coordination. It's a great program though. It started almost 20 years ago, had a little hiatus, and then came back to life about five years ago. There's a stewardship program at various agencies. Probably one of the best ones in the state is with the Bureau of Land Management up in Farmington through their field office up there. And that's run through the... There's a museum in San Juan County, I believe, called Salmon Runs. And Salmon Runs is the bureaucracy out there. It kind of runs the volunteer program for the BLM out there. And they monitor sites like Chaco and Mesa Verde sites that occur in the Farmington area. And also probably some of the more famous sites, the Navajo Pobleto sites that are on state trust lines. But there seems to me too many sites and not enough people.

Because, for example, in the Santa Fe National Forest, you have how many sites that could use a site what volunteer and how many actually are watched over by a site. We have about 200 that are monitored. The stewards are after us to always give them more to monitor because they tend to like to monitor regions and areas. You don't always like to go back to the same one place. And it's good to teach people about archaeology. Isn't the archaeology of just a single place. It's the archaeology of a neighborhood or a region. The forest has 10,000 sites recorded on it. About 25% of the forest has been investigated intensively. And that's where the recording of those sites have come from. There's probably a total eventually, if we ever finished inventory of the whole forest between 30 and 40,000 sites on the 1.8 million acres that make up the Santa Fe National Forest, we'll never have enough people to visit each one. But you have to remember a site varies from...

We call things as simple as a single spearhead from a mammoth kill site, a site, all the way up to 1,200 room pueblos as being sites. We have a wide variation of sites. The stewards will never have enough volunteers to do all the work. But we don't have enough employees to do even a quarter of the work. So we're extremely grateful for all the work that the volunteers do for us. Well, how do you evoke that in the public say our audience to balance the thrill of discovery? And then the passion for ownership. Say someone is walking, sitting, looking at a canyon and they find arrowheads there. What is the message that you can get through to them to leave them? And then maybe tell a ranger what you found and where it was, but to not pocket it and go away. And that is seemed to me the function of communication. That's a constant battle is fighting the need to own or to have something.

All we can say is that we try to tell you why it's important to leave it. And it's incredibly important that things get left on the ground. Or even if you leave it on the ground and you feel like you might not be able to find it again, at least take a major, you know, electronic major to get something called the UTM or the GPS location. And tell us where it is on a map so that we can map it. I don't know how to answer your question about to fight the urge to own because all of us have material urges to have things. For most archaeologists, it just feels so wrong. It just violates everything that we ever learned in school to own these things. We learn that nobody owns these things. You have to realize that the people who put those things on the ground or the reason are on the ground in the first place is because somebody, a human being, made those in the past. And I don't want to talk for Indian or Native American lifeways or anything like that.

But a lot of times those people felt and what they tell us their ancestors felt was that those things belong with the land. They belong to the land and that nobody actually ever owns things. It's a huge cultural difference. Yeah, because humans are born and die and what remains the culture. The cultural material that got left behind. And it's important to tell that story. If there was anything that one of the things that I like working with the volunteers for is because they give me confidence that I'm succeeding in getting my message across. And they push my message too. The volunteers will go to things like Sun Mountain Gathering, which is a museum annual event that kind of a cultural event. They'll go to the archaeology fair. And they'll talk about why they became stewards. And that they think it's important that things stay in place. And that it's important to record it.

Because it's bad enough naturally in the world for the condition of archaeological sites. Things fall apart. I mean, entropy works. Things just decline. Gravity works. Things fall down. And we're waging a battle. It's sort against pot hunting. But we also are fighting the forces of nature too. Because sites fall apart. And there's been a move. It's funny. We press this preservation message. But we also try to understand the things deteriorate. You know, and how much the country has to decide what it wants to keep as a relevant expression of its heritage. And what is it willing to let deteriorate? Well, I extend this a little bit to the international scene. Because in so many, now, countries and cultures, for example, the Elgin Marbles, should they be returned to Greece from the British Museum, Greek sculpture, that is, say, in the Getty Museum in California.

Should it go back? There is this movement, as you say. I think it's tied to Native rights movements and stuff that, or even for Indian artifacts and skulls, should they go back to their people. And I see this as finally, you know, people are getting it. People are understanding that this might be the right thing to do. That's where these belong. The official recognition of kind of that for the United States was something called the Native American Grey's Protection Repatriation Act. And that was 1989, I believe. But that act essentially said that the cultural remains, human remains, in burials and the artifacts that were buried with those materials, and to other objects of cultural patrimony, don't belong necessarily to anyone other than the descendants of those people who are ancestral, who they're ancestral to. And so the idea is, is that under that act, on federal lands and in federal museums, that items meeting kind of the definition of human remains

and objects of cultural patrimony and associated burial remains will get repatriated to affiliated communities so that those communities will determine what happens to them. So when you talk about skulls and bones and stuff, those were human beings, right? Tribal communities feel those were human beings. They probably are the best ones to decide what should happen to those. If they're affiliated, there's a lot of human remains in museums that don't have any cultural affiliation. And it's hard to tell who should be the determiner of what happens. With those remains. You know, it's gone so quickly. I really want to give you a moment to tell people what you would like them to know about antiquities and about your work as an archaeologist. Well, I'd like for folks to come away from whatever I'm talking about here with the idea that they have access to their cultural patrimony or to their heritage through the public agencies that are all around them. In the United States, public land and public agencies are a fact of life.

And many of those agencies manage public lands that have cultural resources on them that people have access to, not to take or to own, but to learn about. And I would hope that people in order to get that message across about why owning is not the important thing, but understanding. It's just that people can work with their public land's archaeologist to learn about those materials. There are two volunteer opportunities. There's lots of public lands archaeologists that do public lectures. There's lots of, besides public lands archaeologists, there's like the office of OAS, Archaeological Services. Is that what it's called? It's with HPD. It's with the Historic Preservation Division. The State Archaeology Office here has, mostly excavations for projects that are going to trash things. Development. But those people, people like Eric Blinman, Dean Wilson, Reggie Weissman, I don't know if you know those names.

Those people have all, those archaeologists have a strong history. They formed a group called the Friends of Archaeology through the Office of Archaeological Studies is what it's called. OAS is the Office of Archaeological Studies. The Office of Archaeological Studies formed an organization called The Friends of Archaeology, and that's one of the most visible entities in Santa Fe that teaches people about archaeology. How many people know that those exist? How many people know that there are archaeologists in most public lands offices? And that those archaeologists are working kind of tirelessly to protect the cultural heritage of the feds, states, counties, and municipalities. Santa Fe has an archaeological ordinance. People know that, and they have a group of archaeologists that meet once every two weeks to review projects. The county has a person who specializes in archaeological evaluation. They have an archaeological ordinance. State has an archaeological ordinance, and that's administered to the State Historic Preservation Office. And there's several archaeologists up there.

Federal agencies, Bureau of Land Management, Park Service, and the Forest Service all have archaeologists that manage this land. There aren't a huge number of us out there, not equal to artists or lawyers or dentists. But there are a lot of archaeologists out there, and you have access to them. And they want to tell you about the past. They want to show you why it's important. Well, I love that phrase, Friends of Archaeology, because I've become much more friendly to archaeology, through knowing that we have this whole structure of people working to preserve our past. Our past is here because we're out of time for our show. But I really want to thank you, Mike Braemer, who is a Forest Archaeologist with the United States Forest Service, particularly the Santa Fe National Forest. Thank you so much for being with us today. So you're welcome. It's my pleasure. Well, my pleasure. And I want to thank you our audience for being with us today on Report from Santa Fe. I'm Lorraine Mills, and we'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by Grant Strong, the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico,

an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.