Over the years, rancher Waldo Wilcox had told very
few people about the well-preserved Fremont Indian settlement on
his land in eastern Utah’s Range Creek Canyon. The site,
which includes a thousand-year-old treasure trove of pottery,
arrowheads and cliff dwellings, is one of Utah’s most
dramatic archaeological finds.
But in the late 1990s,
when Wilcox was nearing retirement, Utah officials who knew about
the settlement approached him with an offer to manage the site for
its preservation.
In 2001, Congress allocated $2 million
of U.S. Department of Interior Land and Water Conservation Fund
money to purchase the land for Utah, and the state contributed
another $500,000. The Trust for Public Land brokered the deal, and
the Bureau of Land Management served as interim owner. After the
sale, archaeologists quickly began an inventory for the BLM.
“We’re talking about 5,000 sites in pristine
condition,” says College of Eastern Utah archaeologist Jerry
Spangler. “For an archaeologist, that’s an open book.”
The state of Utah, which acquired the almost 4,000-acre
property this year, intended to keep the area closed to the public
until early 2005, while it developed a land-management plan. But
news of the site leaked to the Associated Press this summer,
prompting a flurry of media attention, along with fears that
looters would raid the area. Several artifacts may have disappeared
already, Spangler says, but widespread looting has yet to occur.
Darin Bird, assistant director of the state’s
Department of Natural Resources, says it’s unlikely the state
will open the site as a public exhibit. But the land will be
preserved almost as is, under a conservation easement that
prohibits development other than pre-existing farming and ranching
use.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Ancient archaeological secret is revealed.
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