Thousands of relics left by a lost Indian tribe in the ruins of their famed cliff houses were methodically looted before the turn of the century. Now a band of ``reverse archaeologists'' wants to bring them home. Before Congress outlawed the practice in 1905, collecting baskets, pots, tools and other everyday household items from Anasazi Indian ruins was a thrilling romp through history for explorers hired by East Coast collectors. Like the swashbuckling treasure hunter in the ``Indiana Jones'' movies, they took the ancient ruins of a culture that vanished before Europeans reached the New World. Most of the loot eventually found its way into museum display cases. Large collections are housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Museum of the American Indian in New York, among others. But a group of volunteer researchers is eager to bring them home to the Four Corners area of the Southwest where the Anasazi pioneered farming and built dense communities hundreds of feet high in scenic cliffsides. Julia Johnson, the director of the volunteer Wetherill-Grand Gulch researchers, decried the looting at a recent symposium on the early Anasazis, known as the Basketmakers, in Blanding, Utah. The group wants to reverse the actions of 1890s explorers and return the artifacts to museums as close to the ruins from which they were taken as possible. To help achieve that and to help scientists study the Anasazi, 5,000 pages of documents and 500 photographs have been compiled on the museum artifacts to trace their origins. Since many of the early-day explorers kept meticulous diaries, ``it's possible in some cases to identify exactly which hole something came out of,'' said Fred Blackburn, a biologist who joined the ``reverse archaeologists.'' Blackburn, 40, and his colleagues crawl through Grand Gulch in Utah, about 100 miles west of Cortez, searching for signatures the explorers carved into cliff walls. By matching the individual artifacts on display in Eastern museums with the diaries, Blackburn's group can supply a research base for scientists studying the Basketmaker era of the Anasazi, he said. The ruins were virtually cleared out and their treasures carted off by the time Congress forbade the practice in 1905, Blackburn said. ``And the expeditions weren't real researchers,'' said Blackburn, whose wife, Victoria Atkins, is an archaeologist. ``There's so much we don't know about the Basketmakers.'' The Basketmaker Anasazis lived in the area from about the time of Christ until the year 700, Blackburn said. They are believed to be the farming pioneers of the tribe that built a thriving civiliation in the famous cliff houses of Mesa Verde National Park. Their Pueblo Anasazi descendants disappeared from the area, apparently driven by a long drought, in about 1300. ``We're putting this together so researchers can go back and find out what the origins of these people were, their customs, where they came from and where they went,'' Blackburn said. He started with the diary of Charles Cary Graham, who with Charles McLoyd began excavating Grand Gulch in 1890. The pair met Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason just as the latter two were riding out after discovering the landmark Balcony House at Mesa Verde. Wetherill, a nearby rancher and amateur archaeologist, hired Graham and McLoyd to bring artifacts from Grand Gulch to the local historical society. The collection later ended up at the Field Museum in Chicago. As news of the rich ruins spread, other expeditions followed, explorers erasing clues to the mysterious Anasazi's past in their diligence to gather prized artifacts. One likely site for any relics returned to the region would be the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, a town north of Cortez. Initial efforts will try to arrange artifact loans, with the eventual goal of establishing permanent exhibits, volunteers said. Fund-raising is under way to pay for lobbying visits to museums that house large Anasazi collections. Blackburn, who specializes in studies of Bighorn sheep, says his strong ties to the Four Corners area prompted his ``reverse archaeology'' work. He's especially fascinated with evidence of the Anasazis ability to co-exist with the sheep that used to roam the area in large numbers. The fledgling ``reverse archaeolgist'' movement _ looking for artifacts in museums to bring them back to historic sites, rather than the other way around _could provide clues to true archaeologists enabling them to unravel the mystery surrounding the demise of the Anasazi, he said. ``Archaeology is really pretty new here in southwest Colorado,'' he said. ``And there hasn't been much done on the Basketmakers. ``There are a lot of parallels between the Anasazi and what we have today. Overpopulation and drought were a major problem for them and many archaeologists think that's what drove them out of here. Overpopulation and drought are big problems for us, too.''
