By all accounts, the looting was terrible. Across the Southwest a century ago, 1,000-year-old Native American granaries were pillaged by clay pot hunters. Grave robbers worked in the open. In the sandstone dwellings perched high in the cliffs, tourists cut souvenirs out of the ancient ceiling beams. Vandals carted off heirlooms by the wagonload.
In response, Congress acted swiftly. In the summer of 1906, the House and the Senate passed, and President Theodore Roosevelt quickly signed, a law known as the Antiquities Act, which was designed to protect America’s cultural and physical treasures. Results were immediate. Within two years, Roosevelt had invoked the new law to protect Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower (held sacred by the Cheyenne and the Lakota as “Bears Lodge”) from timber and mining interests, to provide new security to Chaco Canyon and Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico, and to safeguard Arizona’s Montezuma’s Castle and the Grand Canyon.
A century later, a similar (if less intense) looting spree is once again destroying tribal artifacts in Utah’s red rock country, in an area known as Bears Ears....
http://www.alternet.org/environment/utah-monument-fight-pits-native-americans-against-land-use-militants
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