Finders Keepers Book Review - Los Angeles Times

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This section contains book reviews for our focus book, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs from --

(1) The Salt Lake Tribune
(2) The Los Angeles Times
(3) The New York Times

However, as explained in the “Original Proposal” section above, we are using Finders Keepers as a guide for examining one aspect of a preliminary assessment of what would be involved in our pending challenge to The Mormon Church over its condoning of the Wanton Destruction of Great Salt Lake.

Additional information concerning that imbroglio is available elsewhere on this website --

The Mormon Church’s President and Twelve Apostles who govern its affairs, were each requested by certified-mail return-receipt on 10/31/2016 to issue a press release stating that (1) the Mormon Church will sponsor a “legislative initiative” pursuant to Utah Constitution Art. VI Sec. 1 and Utah Code Title 20A Chapter 7 to require an immediate cessation to the Bear River Pipeline Project AND the dedication of all Utah State Sales Tax Funds that would have been allocated to the Bear River Pipeline Project to be spent, instead, on purchasing (or taking by eminent domain) farmland to have been served by the Bear River Pipeline based on the value of the farmland if the full costs of the Bear River Pipeline were reflected 100% in water prices –- AND (2) if the Mormon Church’s “legislative initiative” should fail, the Mormon Church will lobby the U.S. Government to create a new National Park comprising the Great Salt Lake and its tributaries.

All of the pertinent facts concerning the Wanton Destruction of Great Salt Lake (including the fact that 82% of all water usage in Utah goes to produce UNECONOMIC crops, the vast majority of which are sold as alfalfa hay to China!!!) are contained in the 10/31/2016 letters that were sent to the Mormon Church’s President and Twelve Apostles. However, background information such as the July 2014 two-volume engineering report and the Sep. 2016 Draft Water-Strategy White Paper prepared for the Utah Governor (in truly “ready – fire – aim” fashion six months AFTER the enactment of Senate Bill 80 approving the pipeline and its financing from Utah sales-tax receipts) can be downloaded from the posting entitled “Destroying Great Salt Lake To Grow Low-Profit Hay For China” in the second section of this website entitled “Possible Topics For Future Meetings.”

The 10/31/2016 letters to each of the Mormon Church’s President and Twelve Apostles can be downloaded from the first posting entitled “Destroying Great Salt Lake To Grow Hay For China” in the first section of this website.

In the 2.5 months since those letters were received by the President and Twelve Apostles who govern the Mormon Church, there has been no announcement that the Mormon Church will oppose the Bear River Pipeline.

Accordingly, it is time to assess, at least preliminarily, whether we will take effective action to have the U.S. Government create a new National Park comprising the Great Salt Lake and its tributaries.
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johnkarls
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Finders Keepers Book Review - Los Angeles Times

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The Los Angeles Times – 8/22/2010


Book review: 'Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession' by Craig Childs
The author explores the 'underbelly of archaeology' and asks the right questions.

Review by Susan Salter Reynolds – Susan Salter Reynolds was a columnist and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years, where she wrote a column on books called "Discoveries" and a series called "The Writing Life" (profiles of remarkable writers) as well as regular book reviews. Prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was an assistant editor at The New York Review of Books. She has three children and lives in Los Angeles and Barnard, VT. [This was one of her last book reviews for the Los Angeles Times which, shortly thereafter, sold the L.A. Times Book Review to the Los Angeles Review of Books, causing Salter Reynolds to “jump ship.”]


Once upon a time, hiking in the desert, you found an artifact; an arrowhead, a piece of a pot, a fragment of bone. You picked it up, put it in your pocket. Maybe you felt a little twinge of guilt when you moved it, maybe all you felt was the desire to keep that object, to place yourself in the story of which that object was itself only a small part. Whose story? The woman who made the pot? The child whose bone it once was? The man who made the arrowhead? Does it belong to the cultural context — the Pueblo Indians, the Anasazi, the Navajo? Or does it belong to the ecological, geological context?

Whose story?

Craig Childs has spent most of his life asking these questions. Childs is a desert ecologist who also happens to be a fine storyteller. He grew up on the Colorado Plateau and has written several books about his adventures in the desert. Often he finds artifacts, and when he does, he tries to reconstruct the story of their creation and use. He crouches, he walks around, he scribbles in a notebook. Then he leaves the thing where he found it.

Childs' "Finders Keepers" is a fascinating book, full of swashbuckling pothunters, FBI raids, greasy museum curators who don't really care and many, many other characters (including ghosts). "This is a book about the underbelly of archaeology, from both a personal and a global perspective," he explains. But it is not a simple moral tale, as he suggests: "To say the archaeologist is right and the pothunter is wrong seems instinctive, but why? And is it true?"

Childs uses the word "trespass" — which implies an ongoing set of rights, the need for respect and also consequences when rights are violated. He follows the paths of artifacts that have been moved into private collections, museums, universities and glass cases in anonymous buildings. Once, he stole a pot from such a case to return it to the desert. He did not feel entirely good about that. There are pros and cons; in museums, the objects have a longer life. Museums, he writes, are also like the landscape in which he finds objects, places where "lost worlds come back to life." "They offer an experience close to what I have gotten in the wilderness, ducking behind a boulder to find a hidden jar."

Childs writes about archaeology and artifacts from other countries and cultures beyond the Southwest — Central America, Tibet and China — and he's clearly uncomfortable moralizing (though every page in this book screams "Leave it alone!" between the lines). He also admits to times when he wanted badly to keep an object or open a door.

In one of these passages, Childs mentions "a woman named Susan, a senior writer for the Los Angeles Times": Years ago, when Childs' book "The Way Out" was published, I traveled to Utah to do a story on him. He was hiking with friends and his wife, Regan, and they let me come along to watch them work. One day, we came across a 13th century household in an alcove in a canyon. We found some cliff dwellings, one room with a hollow floor, a hatch. "By God," he writes, "you found something important, not bad for a beginner. I did not want to say anything that would cloud this moment for her. She was the one who had found it, not me." Childs describes how much he both hoped I would leave it alone and how much he hoped I would open it. In the end, of course, I left it.

But here's the thing: I barely remembered that moment. What I remembered about that trip was a dream in which Pueblo Indians in a full-dress parade tried to coax me into joining them. In the cliff dwelling, I had no idea what was going through Childs' mind. I had no idea that he would even think it would be possible for me to violate that space — something that would never have occurred to me. Stumbling on that passage was a kind of archaeology. Reading it was like crouching by a pot in the desert, trying to re-imagine a context, finding myself in someone else's story, clutching a detail that with time had ceased to belong to me.

Childs looks at moral issues from a variety of angles. He doubts others as he doubts himself, a beautiful inverse of the golden rule. He raises questions like the best teachers, the real teachers — have you thought this through? What are the results of your actions? What is your role in this brief chapter?

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