Visiting with respect

Respect is an easy word to agree with and a hard one to pin down. Applied to a granite peak or a scenic overlook it means little more than staying on the trail. Applied to a room built by a Pueblo family eight centuries ago, in a canyon that their descendants still visit and still name in prayer, it comes nearer to the manners of a guest.

The greater Cedar Mesa country holds tens of thousands of archaeological, historic and paleontological sites: cliff dwellings, rock art, granaries, homesteads and trading-era cabins, fossil beds and dinosaur tracks. None of them can be replaced. Every season some of them lose a course of stone, a scatter of sherds or a panel’s surface, and very little of that loss is the work of looters.

An education problem across the plateau

Across the Colorado Plateau, land managers, museums and archaeologists answer the daily damage of careless visits the same way: education. A few plain tips, learned before reaching a cliff dwelling, a rock art panel, a fossil bed or a historic cabin, protect more than fences can. They come down to a short list:

• Leave every artifact where it lies, from potsherds and corncobs to stone flakes and old cans.
• Stay off walls and out of rooms, and keep hands off rock art: no touching, chalking, tracing or wetting.
• Keep to existing trails and roads, and walk around the soft, ashy slopes below dwellings.
• Camp, cook and eat well away from alcoves and ruins, and keep dogs out of them.
• Leave cairns as they are, neither adding new ones nor knocking old ones down.
• Keep locations private: no map pins, no geotagged photos, no captions that point the way.
• Give room to anyone visiting a place for ceremony or gathering, and ask before photographing people.

What follows here is the attitude that keeps the list in mind when nobody is watching.

Whose place it is

Start with ownership, because almost every mistake comes from getting it wrong. A visitor who hikes four hours into a side canyon can easily feel that the reward at the end belongs to whoever made the effort. It does not. The walls, the corncobs in the alcove dust and the figures on the cliff were made by ancestors of the Hopi, the Zuni, the Rio Grande pueblos and other Pueblo people. Navajo and Ute families hold their own histories and ceremonies tied to the same canyons. The Hopi Tribe’s Cultural Preservation Office speaks of the old villages, sherds and rock art as footprints left by Hopi clans on their migrations. Zuni, Navajo and Ute people tell their own histories of the same canyons, in their own terms and through their own nations, and those accounts are not interchangeable. Either way, a hiker is passing through someone else’s family ground.

The legal title belongs to the public, held by the Bureau of Land Management for everyone. That is a reason for more care, since the site belongs equally to people who will never see it and to people not yet born.

Holding back

Vandals and looters do real harm, and federal law treats them as criminals. Yet much of the slow wear comes from ordinary, well-meaning people. One visitor puts a palm on a wall to steady a step. Another lifts a painted sherd to see the other side and sets it down a foot from where it was. A third walks the soft slope below a dwelling to frame a photo. Multiplied by every person who reaches the same alcove in a decade, those small acts are the damage. Walls that stood for a thousand years come down that way.

Asking instead of taking

The visitors who treat these places best tend to be the ones with the most questions. Who lived here, and for how long? Why build in an alcove instead of on the mesa top? Curiosity of that sort keeps a person in the role of a learner, and a learner has no use for a souvenir. It also leads somewhere useful: to the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, to books by archaeologists and tribal authors, and to the Society for American Archaeology’s ethics principles, adopted in 1996, whose first principle treats the archaeological record as something held in trust.

Slowing down

The last piece is pace. Sites reward people who sit quietly at a distance for a while and notice the handprints in the mortar, the soot on the ceiling, the view the builders chose. They punish the checklist hiker who tries to tick off five in a day. Lower voices help too, since some of these places are still visited for ceremony.

The comparison many people find useful is a house where the family is out for the afternoon. A guest does not open the drawers or carry off a cup. The BLM’s Cedar Mesa permits page sets out the practical rules for the canyons, and the companion list of tips goes through them item by item.