There is a moral dilemma inherent in the act of exhuming historic burials, whether you are an archeologist or a grave robber. Does anyone have the right to disturb the sleep of the ancient ones? So much went wrong for people associated with the excavation of King Tut’s tomb that it's plausible to consider you might be enraging spirits that linger near hallowed ground.
The Navajos will tell you that the Anasazi do not like their graves robbed. No Navajo or Zuni workman will dig at a prehistoric site unless they have a personal charm or medicine beads that can protect them from the wrath of ghosts. Many will flatly refuse to dig up the graves of their ancestors.
Ann Axtell Morris, one of the first archeologists to excavate and write about the prehistoric civilizations of the southwest tells an interesting story about a supernatural occurrence that serves as warning to all who disrupt the burials of Native Americans:
Archeologist Ted Kidder and a friend were having lunch in a remote cave at Mesa Verde. A cool spring and sheltering shade in one of the Cliff Dweller rooms made it ideal for a picnic on a sweltering day. Out of the blue an irate voice began to harangue them from close at hand. Yet they were alone and had scaled a treacherous narrow path to reach this remote place. The voice kept up for almost a minute in some unknown language. When they searched for the source, they found none.
“He seemed very angry about something, and carried such an air of righteous indignation that my first instinct was to apologize for whatever it was that was displeasing him,” Kidder said.*
They ran to the entrance of the cave but the sheer slope was bare and far beneath the canyon was vacant. No people were visible on the rim above or across the ravine. They called loudly to no avail. Then they searched ever nook and cranny of the cave but there was nothing, only an eerie emptiness and the echo of the wind. Reluctantly, for rational men of science, they were forced to conclude that they had been visited by an Anasazi ghost and heard the extinct Anasazi language.
One of the strangest burials to exhibit the esoteric use of beads was unearthed at a prehistoric cave dwelling in New Mexico called ‘Tseahatso’ from the Navajo word for ‘great cave.’ This spot may have been occupied for thousands of years by the Basket Maker cultures which pre-date the legendary Cliff Dweller cities such as Mesa Verde, Aztec or Bonito. Tseahatso is a cave twelve hundred feet long. Its floor, from thirty to seventy feet wide, is so deeply entrenched in trash that archeologist still have not reached bedrock, except for a few shallow spots.
There, buried almost to the level of bedrock in an area free from any molestation or grave robbing, on a nest of carefully selected grass lay the hands and forearms of an adult, still held together by the dried ligaments. The rest of the area excavated never yielded any other part of the skeleton and the placement of the hands in bedrock established that the burial was complete as found. The hands were accompanied by all the traditional burial furnishings, including two pairs of exceptionally well-made red and black woven sandals. On top of the sandals were three necklaces. Two of them had abalone pendants. The third was a unique southwestern creation designed of about eighteen white shell rings, each about three inches in diameter and attached to the neck cord in a way that they overlapped each other. There was also a basket filled with long crescent-shaped beads and covered with another basket on which was laid a huge stone pipe. This burial has never been successfully interrupted, but a puzzled archeologist quips, “Shoes without feet, necklaces without a neck, and a pipe without a mouth—truly metaphysical triumphs over physical negation.”**
*Digging In the Southwest by Ann Axtell Morris
** Ibid
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