December 5, 1999
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON --
The government has lost track of
millions of artifacts excavated from
federal land, and the agency responsible blames budget problems.
The Bureau of Land Management's oversight of the artifacts is so
lax that many museums that keep
such items as pottery or baskets
cannot say for sure which objects the
government owns or where they
came from, an audit by the inspector
general of the Interior Department
has found.
A spokeswoman for the bureau,
which is part of the Interior Department, acknowledged room for improvement.
"These are things that the agency
would like to be doing," said the
spokeswoman, Celia Boddington,
"but the agency has had stagnant
budgets and declining numbers of
employees for years."
The bureau's budget for managing
such cultural resources is about $13.5
million this year, an increase of nearly $400,000 over last year.
"This is our cultural heritage that
we're talking about," said Jan Bernstein, collections manager for the
University of Denver Anthropology
Museum. "It can potentially get lost
or even destroyed, especially if it's
divorced from its records. By not
keeping good records, the agencies
are doing a disservice to the people
of the United States."
The bureau oversees 264 million
acres of federal land in the West, an
area nearly as large as the states of
Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and
Utah combined. Those lands are
home to an estimated 4 million to 5
million archaeological sites, and
more than 20 million artifacts have
been collected there.
The agency has its own museums
in Billings, Mont., and Dolores, Colo.,
but most of its artifacts are held by
institutions like historical societies,
universities and museums.
The audit found the bureau had not
performed required annual inventories of the artifacts and had not got
signed agreements with the institutions accepting artifacts from the
bureau.
"As a result," the report said, "the
bureau had little assurance that its
museum collections were adequately
maintained for future use."
