<< BACK TO ARTICLES

There are stories among the rocks around Indian Head, near Study Butte in Big Bend National Park’s backcountry. Where boulders tumbled and created shelters from the desert heat, and nearby springs offered precious water, prehistoric people lived and left their mark: symbols scratched and painted on boulder walls; stone mortars worn smooth by the crushing of mesquite beans; rock hearths circling charred spots of earth; glossy stones shaped into arrowheads.

Touring the site last month, Tom Alex, the national park’s archaeologist, pointed out how present-day people have been leaving their mark on this place. Graffitied names and scattered lines obscure pictographs and petroglyphs on many boulder faces and rock-shelter walls. A few years ago, someone smeared red paint over two joined stick figures thought to be an ancient symbol of a woman giving birth. On a stone metate, someone recently engraved the word “PEE” and scratched an arrow pointing to the depression where the metate’s long-gone creators ground plants for medicine or food.

“This site is like a book,” says Alex, who has been seeing more such damage since he began working at the park in 1982. “When people come in and do what they’re doing here – mucking around with everything – that changes the story. Or sometimes the story is totally gone.”

Around the Big Bend region, the stories told by archaeological sites have been tampered with or destroyed by looting and vandalism. Wherever arrowheads are stolen, rock shelters dug up, and rock art panels chipped away or marred by graffiti, archaeologists have a much harder time interpreting the distant human past. Not only that, damaging or removing archaeological artifacts on public lands is in most cases also against the law. Myriad federal regulations provide a range of penalties, from a $500 fine per artifact taken to a $250,000 fine and two years in jail, according to Alex.

It’s a decades-old problem on public as well as private land, but at some public places, particularly in the national park, the damage has been getting worse as more people visit.

Andy Cloud, director of the Center for Big Bend Studies of Sul Ross State University, says even the first archaeologist who visited the region at the turn of the century found rock shelters that had been looted. Cloud says at least 90 percent of rock shelters studied in the area show some evidence of previous damage. Sometimes that damage was committed recently and other times years ago. He still comes across rock shelters where a hole or an old shovel indicate artifacts have been taken and the site’s story disturbed.

“These are not renewable sites. These are things that can’t be replaced,” Cloud says. “Every one that we lose through these kinds of activities is gone forever. You’re left with just a little piece of the puzzle, and it’s tough to put together a puzzle when you’re missing most of the pieces.”

For archaeologists to analyze a site, the context of artifacts is even more important than the artifacts themselves, Cloud and Alex explained. The layering of objects unearthed during a rock-shelter excavation offers clues to the artifacts’ relative ages. Finding a metate might mean that area was used for food preparation. If one pictograph has been painted on top of another, archaeologists can infer the top image is more recent. But these interpretations are made more difficult if the rock shelter floor has been dug up, the metate moved, or the pictographs obscured by graffiti.

Alex uses the book analogy to explain the importance of this to park visitors and volunteers. “If somebody has moved stuff around, it’s like taking a page out of a history book and sticking it somewhere else in the book,” he says. “Or if they carry artifacts away, it’s like ripping pages out of the book.”

Often well-meaning park visitors are unwitting culprits. Alex regularly finds piles of stone chips and flakes along the faint trails around Indian Head. The chips and flakes are the detritus of ancient stone-tool makers. But the piles are being left by recent visitors, who pick up and deposit the artifacts in an obvious spot for others to see.

“There’s a lot of folks that don’t have any qualms about picking up an arrowhead,” he says. “Shoot, when I was a kid, I picked up arrowheads and never thought anything about it. ‘Till I got religion – archaeology religion. Then I began to realize what you can actually learn from places like this and why it’s very important they not be disturbed until somebody’s had a chance to look at them with an educated eye.”

People might also not think twice about scratching some record of their presence into a rock, especially if others have done so. On one boulder face at Indian Head, three Marfa residents deeply engraved their names and the dates of their visit – July 24 to August 2, 1902 – right on top of meandering archaic designs. Such graffiti, besides destroying whatever is beneath it, poses a particularly challenging problem: one person’s graffiti usually inspires another’s.

“If you don’t remove graffiti, it just perpetuates itself,” Alex says.

But removing graffiti can be very hard, if not impossible, and requires specialized techniques suited to the type of graffiti and rock surface. As an example, Alex pointed out a cluster of red pictographs, above which someone painted in black, “JESUS,” a few years ago. While Alex tried to figure out how to remove the black paint without damaging the pictographs or forcing the ink deeper into the porous rock, a subsequent visitor tried to cover the word with a mottled smudge of white, inadvertently making the removal problem even more complicated.

Alex struggles to balance the public’s ability to see and appreciate archaeological sites with the sites’ preservation, and so far he has approached these problems by educating and guiding visitors to do the right thing. But the success of that approach has been limited. At Hot Springs, pathways and viewing platforms were built to guide visitors to see pictographs on the cliff walls. To deter visitors from touching the pictographs, which would be damaged by the natural oils on people’s hands, the platforms were placed just out of arm’s reach of the cliff.

“It’s obvious not only have people stepped up beyond the barrier, they’ve scratched their names up there,” Alex says. “What do you do? Walk around and stick someone there to slap hands? You can’t do that.”

“That’s one of the quandaries we wrestle with,” he went on. “Do you lock it away? Put a big fence around it? Do you close it off and allow people to only come in under a guided tour?”

Those are among the more severe approaches taken at other sites in West Texas. A steel fence was erected to protect Panther Cave in Seminole Canyon, near Lake Amistad, where visitors kept scratching their names into and chiseling away souvenir pieces of a renowned rock art panel.

At Hueco Tanks State Park, northeast of El Paso, a big increase in visitation coincided with a big increase in graffiti and gang tagging on rock art, according to Tim Roberts, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s regional archaeologist. In response, the number of people allowed in the park at one time was limited, a large area of the park was restricted to guided use, and an orientation program was put together for visitors. Since those measures were implemented, Robert says there’s been a dramatic drop in new graffiti.

Alex does not see such measures as feasible at the national park though for now. “We don’t have the people or the wherewithal in this park to do that,” he says. But the problem at Indian Head has gotten bad enough that law enforcement patrols of the area are being increased, and other efforts to monitor the site are being considered. Meanwhile, Alex advises park visitors to report to rangers any damage they find at archaeological sites, and to appreciate and help preserve these sites for future generations to enjoy.

Sitting in a cool rock shelter, underneath small red prints made by tiny ancient hands, Alex recounted the advice of a Native American elder. “She said, ‘When you live with the land, the land speaks to you, if you listen,’” he says. “Her opinion was that these places could tell you things. That the place had a history and if you went there, and you listened, it would tell its story to you.”

<< BACK TO ARTICLES