e those adverse effects to those resources however we can.” These days, Park Service policy dictates that whenever park managers need to make a call about artifacts or sites that are at risk, they discuss options with the descendant communities of the people who created them. “In some instances, the management actions necessary to preserve or protect a particular site from destruction or a federal project may be counter to wishes of the Tribes,” Torres acknowledged. “But that’s the whole purpose of the consultation process: to try and work out amenable solutions.”
And as more material traces of the continent’s human past disappear under rising seas, wash away in freak storms, burn up in raging wildfires and melt out of waning ice patches, these sorts of decisions will only become more common. After unusually heavy rains in 2013, rangers at Arizona’s Wupatki National Monument noticed that a partially exposed structure built out of sandstone slabs on a hillside had started to erode. They spotted three clay vessels, exposed to the elements and teetering in a newly formed gully. Park staff couldn’t figure how to stabilize the slope, so in concert with Tribes associated with the park and Arizona’s State Historic Preservation Office, they decided to excavate the whole structure. All told, they found seven intact pots dating to the 12th century.
It’s rare to find one intact pot in the field, let alone seven, said Gwenn Gallenstein, museum curator for the three national monuments near Flagstaff including Wupatki. “It caused quite a bit of excitement in the community.” Friends of Flagstaff National Monuments drummed up some funding for a new visitor center display, which would feature the vessels and other objects as part of a story about how climate change is accelerating threats to the park’s archaeological resources.
But in consultation for the exhibit with a group of Hopi elders, Gallenstein learned that the site had most likely been a shrine that could have been created to contain something harmful, like an illness. The elders explained that “its contents shouldn’t be utilized for any purpose, handled by any person or kept in storage for research,” Gallenstein recalled. It would have been better, the elders told her, if park staff had left the pots to erode away, but federal regulations mandate that archaeological objects recovered from federal land be preserved, meaning Gallenstein couldn’t just return the pots to the gully where they’d soon be smashed to bits. So the Hopi elders and the park’s superintendent struck a compromise. A few weeks later, park archaeologists dug a pit in a stable area near the site and reburied the shrine’s contents.
Back at Grand Canyon, Brennan and her colleagues also sought a solution somewhere between accessioning the olla into the park’s permanent collection and leaving it in its increasingly perilous home. Tribal representatives had told Brennan that they wanted the pot to stay in the canyon — unless it seemed the object was in danger. “Once someone took it out of the site context, we knew at that point we had to remove it,” she said.
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So with a go-ahead from the Tribes, park staff orchestrated a rescue mission involving cotton gloves, bubble wrap, a sturdy metal box and a 166-mile river journey through dozens of major rapids. (“Intact vessels are so fragile and so rare. You don’t want to be the one that breaks it,” Brennan said. “So yeah, it’s nerve-wracking.”) The olla arrived at the park’s museum undamaged. In the past, the park’s archaeologists might have proceeded to zap the pot with an X-ray machine, swab its surface for traces of ancient pollen or put it on display in the visitor center, but Brennan and her colleagues made a different plan. “It wasn’t just that I want to protect the object from theft,” she said. “I was also thinking about how the Tribes think about these sit