Finders Keepers

Buy this book.

Non-fiction
Living among contradictions

FINDERS KEEPERS:
A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession
By Craig Childs
288 pp. Little, Brown

Reviewed by Sarah Morgan

Have you ever seen a coin on the sidewalk and had that instinctive thought, mine? How about a ten or a twenty-dollar bill? Now imagine finding a pre-Columbian artifact, an appealing little statue of a frog, for instance. Or Sitting Bull's pipe? Could you leave it where you found it, or would you feel the treasure yours for the taking?  Even if it is a small potsherd or a bone or an arrowhead, the conundrum is the same, and one desert ecology writer Craig Childs discusses in his latest book. To whom does the booty of civilization belong? And who is the best steward if it belongs to no one?  

“There is a difference between finding and keeping,” he says. “The two are often lumped together into one action, but there is a blink that comes in between. It is when the thing goes from being its own to being yours. It happened when archaeologist Howard Carter used hot knives to cut off King Tutankhamen's amulets and mask, which had hardened into the mummy's resin. It was when he severed the arms and legs of the dead king, split the torso in two, and cut off the head—just to make transporting easier.”

Finders Keepers is full of pothunters and archeologists, FBI raids and suicides, museums and storage vaults, and collectors and dealers, some slimy, some not. Childs is not easy on anyone, including himself. He admits if he had grown up with a father who was a pothunter he would probably have been one himself, but fate made him a curator of the wild instead. He is equally hard on museums who stockpile artifacts in basements never to be seen by the average visitor as he is on the pothunter who drives a shovel through “a nest of bones” to recover a valuable relic. His narrative ultimately gets down to the baser instincts of humans: avarice, addiction, righteousness, and cultural heritage. 

For those familiar with his writing, it's no surprise that this would be the subject of Childs' most recent work. He has touched on it in several of his previous books, most notably House of Rain, in which he tracks a vanished civilization from the Four Corners area of the American Southwest down into Mexico. During his trek southward, he uncovered plenty of artifacts but left them where he found them—or most of them. 

His newest book is ultimately a discussion of the gray areas of life, the ambiguities of owning versus observing, archiving versus allowing things to archive themselves. When items move from their natural locale, he argues, their dynamic changes. We cannot feel the same connection to history by looking at relics through glass cages as we can by seeing them in situ. A seeker, Childs is given to asking questions rather than giving answers.  He knows there are no absolutes, and what happens with artifacts ultimately falls to our conscience and the human heart. 

He asks if artifacts are better off in our hands.  What of London Bridge, now relocated to Lake Havasu?  Or pre-Columbian artifacts, shipped off to warehouses; items plundered from Pharaohs' tombs and Mayan ruins, now in London or New York; or private collections? And then there are people who simply pick up something in the desert and take it home where it may end up on a dusty shelf or forgotten in a sock drawer. In a KNAU radio interview with Daniel Kraker, Childs says, “The ground is losing its memory. I want to say, 'Hey, this may seem like a good idea to put this in your pocket, but it's killing these places.' “

Owning stuff for Childs is too much responsibility. He admits he possesses a small, tattered box that his grandfather passed to his father and his father passed on to him. In it are a few arrowheads, some rocks, and potsherds. Not much. He says—and this endeared him to me forever—he is someone who finds himself in a quandary when a favorite soup bowl breaks. What are we to do with these things, things that have become a part of the heart? Like a zen practitioner, he owns little and prefers to commune with history and ancient people through found objects in the wild. He either does not move relics or he returns them when he is finished looking. He never marks their location on a map or keeps a journal of where they are. 

For anyone who has read his other books, some of the lyrical writing is noticeably absent, but this book is a critical examination and not given to the effusive. However, when Childs is hunkered over a found object in the desert, ancient worlds come alive in his writing. 

“Time was never made to last,” he says. “It couldn't. It has no shape. It threads through your fingers like water, no stopping it for any longer than you can cup your palm. Beyond the small memories of our generations, there are artifacts, the substance of history.” 

In the preface, Childs writes that you have probably already made up your mind about what you would do with that pre-Columbian pot I mentioned earlier, but, whatever your inclination, he makes you think about the ramifications of your actions.