[Source: Richard Moe] -- This May the nation celebrates the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in America. It was a consequential event in 1607, to be sure, but we shouldn’t confuse it with the beginning of the American experience. For thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived, there were people on this continent who represented highly developed civilizations and who were proficient in art, architecture, agriculture and astronomy. These were the first Americans, and their story is also part of our common heritage. The most significant evidence of this legacy is here at Chaco Canyon, in the remote desert of northwestern New Mexico, where Native Americans a thousand years ago built a huge complex of great houses, pueblos of exquisite stonework whose rooms sometimes numbered in the hundreds. They built roads that were as wide as 30 feet and extended up to 60 miles to ease trade, ritual and communication. They created, in effect, an empire. Chaco Canyon today is a collection of magnificent ruins whose archeology tells us as much as we know, which is not enough, about these mysterious people. A unit of the National Park Service, the canyon is as well preserved and interpreted as an underfinanced budget allows. Unfortunately, other significant archeological sites nearby are increasingly at great risk. Most of these are also on public lands, largely those of the Bureau of Land Management, which has a bifurcated and inherently conflicted mission to both preserve and exploit the resources entrusted to it. With ever increasing pressure for oil and gas drilling on these lands, coupled with greater access by off-road vehicles that can go nearly anywhere and when unmanaged can do great harm, more and more of our heritage on these lands is in danger of being obliterated. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]
