But that isn't what happened on the ground.
In February 2011, Miles Gilbert, the NRCS archaeologist, and Kelly Meyer, a fish specialist with state Game and Fish, went out to survey the land just north of Amity Pueblo.
Arden Kucate, head tribal councilman, after his second visit to Amity Pueblo.
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The survey was supposed to be conducted by specially certified archaeologists. Neither man was specially certified. In his report, Gilbert submitted that no historical properties would be affected by the project and noted that construction would avoid the Amity Pueblo.
The State Historic Preservation Office signed off on Gilbert's findings.
Hovatter says the archaeologist wasn't certified to work on the project and that — in violation of state law — neither Game and Fish nor the federal NRCS obtained a permit from the Arizona State Museum before sending an archaeologist to root around on state-owned land.
Hovatter disputes that his agency's fish specialist, Meyer, played a role in the cultural survey. A field report and a letter submitted to the Historic Preservation Office notes that he did assist Gilbert in field work that involves scanning the ground for signs of history or clues of cultural value.
It appears to be yet another error, one that helps explain how the ill-fated project veered so far off course.
Hovatter bemoans a lack of guidance from the State Historic Preservation Office. He says his agency submitted paperwork to officials there, and preservation authorities didn't "review the name of the [federal] archaeologist we submitted" against the list of certified archaeologists.
"If they had, we would have stopped and gotten a qualified archaeologist," he says. "We submitted our documentation, they reviewed it, and they said we were good to go. [That's] supposed to mean something."
Keisha Morten, director of the federal NRCS in Arizona, blames her office's failure to obtain an archaeological-review permit on Game and Fish's not telling NRCS that the federal archaeologist would be working on state-owned land. She also defends her archaeologist's qualifications to perform cultural-review work, even though he isn't on the state's list of approved archaeologists.
Those were the first in a smattering of government failures that Zuni Governor Quetawki doesn't understand.
"What is unclear is how 9.1 acres of land could be disturbed . . . without backhoe operators' immediately recognizing the importance of what they were disturbing," he wrote on June 10 to the Arizona State Museum. "It suggests that someone . . . had knowledge of the ongoing disturbance and either chose to ignore it or consciously made a decision to authorize a continued disturbance."
Lending to the problem in the field, Quetawki says, was that state Game and Fish wanted to get the project done for "next to nothing." It contracted with the Northern Arizona Vocational Institute of Technology to provide students to run the heavy machinery. When the students started digging on April 27, 2011, according to state and federal correspondence, there wasn't an archaeologist or anyone from Game and Fish on site.
For two days, the workers were unsupervised. Equipment started exposing artifacts and human bone fragments, but the young operators kept going. They scraped vegetation and topsoil from a nine-acre swath — digging more than six feet deep in the proposed pond's western end and about four feet deep in its eastern end. When the NRCS archaeologist visited the site, he waved them on, believing that the bones and artifacts emerging were simply bits of previously disturbed materials, according to Hovatter. Construction activity continued under fish specialist Meyer.
Some records suggest that archaeologist Gilbert was on site at least three times and advised that the work could continue — despite the obvious ribbons of white bones swirling through the dirt. But Keisha Morten, Gilbert's boss, says he made only a single visit to the site, on May 2, and advised workers to stop construction. She says it was state officials who didn't follow her archaeologist's recommendation.
But Hovatter says it was his employee, Meyer, who decided that it was too much — the endless churning of artifacts and human bone out of the ground. He disregarded the archaeologist's opinion, Hovatter says, and called his supervisors at Game and Fish, who halted construction.
Officials' inability to agree on facts — who conducted the cultural survey, how many times the archaeologist visited the site, what advice he gave, and who stopped the project — doesn't bode well for the Indian tribes who want to resolve the emotionally charged situation.
The officials' posturing also suggests that each may be trying to minimize his or her particular agency's legal and financial liability.
It's clear that at the first sight of bone or native pottery, the workers were legally required to stop and notify the Arizona State Museum, which administers Arizona's Antiquities Act, a law meant to preserve the state's heritage.
Instead, the desecration of the ancient burial site went on over a 10-day period.
Excavation ended up going within the artificial 100-foot barrier that workers were supposed to stay outside to protect Amity Pueblo. And, at some point, bones were picked up from the construction site, put in a box, and taken to the Eagar Town Hall, where they remain. Their locations weren't cataloged, complicating approved archaeologists' ability to return them to their rightful graves.
