To Collect or Not to Collect
As higher visitation and climate change increasingly threaten artifacts, can the Park Service afford to leave them in place?
The olla lay in a hollow under a boulder on the right bank of the Colorado River for a very long time. Sheltered from monsoon rains, shaded from the desert sun and perched above the floods that scoured the Grand Canyon every spring until dams were built upstream, the ceramic jar sat as a silent reminder of the Ancestral Puebloan people’s millennia-long relationship to this place.
National Park Service archaeologists first documented the pot in its niche in 1990. Though park staff sought to keep its location secret, word of the remarkable object started to spread. In 2008, rangers noted a faint trail up to the olla’s perch from the riverbank. “The pot remains intact and in place, though it has clearly been removed and handled, perhaps multiple times,” read a monitoring report. In early 2012, staff noted that “the site is regularly visited with a well-defined 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 