Matt Blanchard and Shawn Rosen had settled into their 18-foot motorboat, put beers on ice and waited their turn at the last functioning boat launch on this rapidly disappearing body of water. It wasn’t until the old Baylinerwas chugging away that Rosen mentioned an ulterior motive for their mid-June excursion.
“We’re hoping today’s trip, besides finding fish, we come across some barrels,” Rosen said. “Everybody’s trying to find the barrels.”
As the nation’s largest reservoir has plummeted to about a quarter of its former size, barrels have taken on a grisly new significance. But the human remains discovered in a rusted-out barrel last month — suspected of being a decades-old mob execution — are not the only artifacts and oddities that have turned up in the mud. There have also been handguns, baby strollers, tackle boxes, vintage Coors cans, Prada sunglasses, exploded ordnance, real human jawbones, fake human skeletons, ancient arrowheads, concrete mooring blocks, dozens of sunken boats and untold amounts of scattered trash. [WaPo]
While not mentioned in this article, I’m sure some archaeologists would argue that the discarded debris constitutes an archaeological signature, and, while I’d be hard-pressed to disagree, I cannot help but feel that the actions of those looking for – or at least stumbling over – this material are, themselves, part of the archaeological record. After all, archaeology is the study of the behavior of ancient human behavior as preserved through tangible materials, as well as histories, verbal or written.
And these folks are behavin’.
In the end, though, I fear the deep deterioration of Lake Mead presages the future of western North America for the foreseeable future, and I’m rather pleased that I don’t live on the West Coast at present, because I’d be facing a need to leave my home and move elsewhere.
