How well does the military safeguard priceless archaeological sites on land controlled by the Defense Department?

BY TERRY GREENE STERLING

On a hot October morning, I sit in the back seat of a four-wheel-drive truck as it rumbles down a ribbon of asphalt slicing through a desert landscape of yellow daisies, waist-high creosote bushes, and palo verde trees with twisted green trunks. The truck, which belongs to the Air Force, passes one of several bombing target areas on the Barry M. Goldwater Range, a 1.7-million-acre tract of southwest Arizona desert. Only 13 percent of the range is used for bombing practice, but the military needs the remaining acreage to reserve the vast skies above for air combat maneuvers.

On many days, supersonic F-16s pierce the sky, dropping bombs onto old tanks or vans centered in circles of tires, or sturdy A-10 Warthogs swoop out of the clouds and in less than a second pump 29 rounds into a target. When the sorties end, the Sonoran desert is still. Today, a butterfly hovers over a creosote blossom near the ruins of a prehistoric Native American village called Lago Seco ("dry lake" in Spanish).

Lago Seco is one of more than 56,300 archaeological sites on the public lands owned or rented by the U.S. Department of Defense, and there are many yet to be discovered. This is because the total acreage controlled by the department is vast—25 million acres, nearly the size of Kentucky. The land is used, among other things, for troop housing, for bombing practice, for weapons testing, for massive war games, for tank maneuvers—in short, for preparing the armed forces to protect and defend our nation. But the military's land also holds secrets of the first people who ever lived in America, and if the sites are lost, so is part of America's story.

Inspired in part by the distant war in Iraq, I have come to the range to see how the military is treating the archaeological remains in its care. The controversy over reported losses last year of priceless artifacts from the National Museum in Baghdad led to accusations that the military had failed to properly guard those treasures, and this gave rise to the question, how does the military deal with our own archaeological resources at home?

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