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 the agency’s preservation mandate and its public access goal are nothing new, but it’s up to each new generation of park stewards to renegotiate those competing priorities as attitudes evolve and new threats and challenges arise.
Well into the 20th century, archaeologists in national parks tended to collect whatever artifacts they came across, often without regard for either scientific rigor or the rights of the people whose ancestors created these objects. A Finnish museum, for example, currently houses about 600 Ancestral Puebloan artifacts that an archaeologist removed in the 1890s from what would become Mesa Verde National Park. (In 2020, the museum repatriated the remains of 20 people and 28 funerary objects that had been part of its collection to the Hopi Tribe, the Pueblo of Acoma, the Pueblo of Zia and the Pueblo of Zuni.) Yellowstone National Park’s museum holds over 35,000 archaeological objects collected within the park in the past 150 years. Brennan said the museum at Grand Canyon holds boxes of “r