social trail.” In May of that year, rangers returned to find the nook empty and the pot sitting on the ground a short distance away. “It sure seemed like someone was getting ready to steal it, but then got cold feet,” said Ellen Brennan, an archaeologist who’s spent half of her long career at Grand Canyon National Park and recently wrote a paper about the olla.
Brennan and her colleagues faced a tough choice: Should they pluck this invaluable object from its longtime home, severing its connection to this particular bend in the river and carrying it off to sit in a dark room miles away up on the canyon rim? Or should they leave it in place and risk coming back to find it shattered, or worse, gone?
The case of the wandering olla reflects both the promise and the peril of caring for America’s heritage in the 21st century. In part to honor the wishes of Indigenous communities with ancestral ties to national parks, archaeologists now strive to leave artifacts where they’re found. This is a significant change from the era of indiscriminately collecting Indigenous cultural objects. But with growing park visitation and the widespread use of social media and mapping apps, visitors are ever more likely to stumble upon or seek out objects that have long persisted by dint of their relative obscurity. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change are exposing and damaging artifacts that were once safely buried. All of that means that leaving irreplaceable objects in their original locations also raises the risk of theft or destruction and that Park Service archaeologists are increasingly facing difficult decisions about the cultural resources in their care.
“I’m sure you’ve heard all about the paradox of the parks, right?” asked Josh Torres, the Park Service’s acting chief archaeologist. “We desperately want people to come and enjoy the amazing resources that we’re entrusted to preserve and protect for the American people. But there are times when doing so is almost antithetical to conservation and protection.” Conflicts between t