The West’s public lands cradle some of America’s greatest cultural treasures: kivas, petroglyphs, cliff dwellings, Ice Age camps, Indian burial grounds and other archaeological wonders. So impressive is the far-flung trove of antiquities that Preservation magazine calls it “a kind of American Mesopotamia.” Yet the irreplaceable links to our past are at extreme danger of being lost forever.
Last week in Denver, the National Trust for Historic Preservation issued a sobering report on the risks to our national heritage on Western public lands. Only a fraction of the artifacts and ancient ruins are found in national parks such as Mesa Verde. Instead, most exist on 261 million acres in 12 Western states supervised by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Yet the BLM lacks the staff, money and other resources to properly care for the archaeological cornucopia.
Many astounding sites are in the BLM’s Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in southwest Colorado. There, at least, BLM officials are trying to identify all the sites and have plans to protect them. On most BLM parcels, those basics haven’t been done.
The neglect stems from the long-outdated view of BLM properties as throwaway lands. While the BLM employs many dedicated professionals who want to do right, their political bosses seem oblivious to the damage their myopic policies encourage. Several federal laws require identification and protection of historic resources, yet the good intentions are failing on the ground.
The BLM doesn’t even know how many ancient sites are in its care. To date, it has surveyed only 6 percent of public lands for cultural resources, yet those inventories found an astounding 263,000 sites. Based on those numbers, the National Trust for Historic Preservation estimates there may be 4.5 million such sites on all BLM properties. Doing more surveys should be a priority.
But BLM gets just $15 million a year to survey and protect archaeological sites – barely 20 percent of what the National Park Service gets for similar but fewer projects. The 256 square-mile Canyons of the Ancients, for instance, has just one law enforcement ranger. By contrast, this year the BLM got $87 million for oil and gas drilling, $107 million for other minerals development, $33 million for mining and $69 million for grazing.
In 2000, then-U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt sought to create the National Landscape Conservation System, including Canyons of the Ancients. But Congress and the Bush administration never properly supported the system’s conservation goals.
To do right by our nation’s heritage, the BLM should inventory the sites, hire more rangers, stop off-road vehicles from wrecking archaeological sites, reduce livestock grazing in artifact-rich areas, put archaeological zones off-limits to oil rigs and promote public understanding of the issue.
That work costs money, though. Congress should allow the BLM to tap royalties from its mineral resources to fund the protection of our nation’s antiquities.
