The move to protect more national monuments, reminds me I once dreamt of becoming a world renowned archaeologist…Mary Leakey was my idol with her discovery of australopithicenes… after I married, and my husband told me I didn’t need to go to college because I was married now (1972), I raided the library and studied the Hohokam and Anasazi, and Richard Wetherill, who worked at Mesa Verde and in Chaco Canyon to uncover ancient relics. He removed many from their original sites, and they became part of personal and public collections around the world…it was the way things were done in the early 1900s. I had friends in the 1980’s who went on private digs in New Mexico, Arizona, southern Colorado, bringing home pots, pot shards, arrowheads, hand axes, metates, thousands of beads from Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo sites. It was fascinating, and I loved seeing and holding these treasures, but over time, we realized removing those artifacts without properly documenting them was not the best thing to do, and attempts are ongoing to return items to sites/museums at the sites. I am glad to know that over the past century, it has been realized that preservation of ancient sites is important for all of us, not only those who claim direct descendancy.
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rJoHerman 
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The move to protect more national monuments, reminds me I once dreamt of becoming a world renowned archaeologist…Mary Leakey was my idol with her discovery of australopithicenes… after I married, and my husband told me I didn’t need to go to college because I was married now (1972), I raided the library and studied the Hohokam and Anasazi, and Richard Wetherill, who worked at Mesa Verde and in Chaco Canyon to uncover ancient relics. He removed many from their original sites, and they became part of personal and public collections around the world…it was the way things were done in the early 1900s. I had friends in the 1980’s who went on private digs in New Mexico, Arizona, southern Colorado, bringing home pots, pot shards, arrowheads, hand axes, metates, thousands of beads from Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo sites. It was fascinating, and I loved seeing and holding these treasures, but over time, we realized removing those artifacts without properly documenting them was not the best thing to do, and attempts are ongoing to return items to sites/museums at the sites. I am glad to know that over the past century, it has been realized that preservation of ancient sites is important for all of us, not only those who claim direct descendancy.
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