Artifacts, the Curation Crisis, and Site Security with Johna Hutira

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Johna Hutira, Cultural Resources Program Manager at Dawson about Artifacts, the Curation Crisis, and Site Security.   Read her full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form

Showtimes: 
2:13  Nic & Laura talk about their burgeoning horror movie franchise
6:32  Interview with Johna Hutira starts
13:32 Artifacts
24:37 Curation Crisis
28:20  Site Security

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Johna Hutira at https://www.linkedin.com/in/johna-hutira-0a2a074b/

Guest Bio:
Johna Hutira has been an archeologist for over 40 years. She currently is the Cultural Resources Program Manager at Dawson. A native Arizonan, she lives in Tempe, AZ.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Laura 
Hello and welcome to your favorite environmental nerds Nick and Laura. On today's episode, we're gonna talk about our burgeoning horror movie franchise. We talked to John Hytera, about artifacts, the creation, crisis, and site security. And finally, elephants are known to bury their dead and remain with the bodies for some time afterwards exhibiting behavior not dissimilar to human morning. Indeed, it is the association of apparent grief or mourning that is considered to indicate a burial as opposed to simply covering up or disposing of a body. Oh, that's so sweet.

Nic 
I know. Right? And they're not serial killers, right? They don't just dispose of a body and run away. So that was, yeah, I mean, fitting with our theme for the day, so this should be an episode for some reason, but here we are. a month early.

Laura 
Yes. Everybody hopefully is preparing but let's hit that music.

[NAEP Event News]

Nic 
will be hosting their next advanced diva training fracture the October 25 from 8am to 4:30pm. Central time. This workshop will benefit those professionals who work in related natural resource disciplines, those who work federal land management or real estate transactions, federal agency planning projects and transportation or other infrastructure projects with a NEPA review component. Check it out@www.nab.org Today's episode is sponsored by Dawson. Dawson is a native Hawaiian Global Business Enterprise serving federal clients through construction pts and environmental services. Operating worldwide. Dawson is headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii with offices across the US rooted in Hawaii values of Aloha embodying humility, respect and compassion for all. And Ohana family. Dawson carries forward a kuleana or responsibility to benefit that native Hawaiian community. Dawson's environmental branch brings science solutions and sustainability to planning compliance munitions and remediation. As a permanent ADA status Dawson is the perfect solution to all of your business needs. Let's get to my segment.

[Nic & Laura talk about their burgeoning horror movie franchise]

Nic
Yeah, so the interview was great was really fun to have her on. Like I know John was a great storyteller, which is just one of the things that we love having on the show but like we ran out of time, but really like, she's done this thing with like, she calls it a pack remains, you know, she blows glass she does. She kind of decided like, you know, what am I going to do with these ashes and she's like, I'm gonna make something of them. So she's actually done that, where she puts remains in with glass which is sad. Which is very confusing to me. But yeah, it's a really crazy process. Kind of finding a way to, you know, honor a pet and a different way. And I think that that was really cool. It was that kind of like we didn't really get to talk more about it, but that is cool. Very unique.

Laura 
Yeah. Cuz like, I don't know I got a little paw print when my cat passed away, Link paw print, but you can get those turned into like jewelry and necklaces. But it's just a little print. Right? But like having the cremains like into something that's pretty cool.

Nic 
I think yeah, like turning it into art. Yeah. Not that we're both not artists, right, I think. So maybe we're a little biased on that kind of thing. Because I kind of maybe it's an odd and unique thing. I never would have thought about it. But

Laura 
yeah, I mean, I don't know. It also could be kind of morbid, I guess. But at the same time like keeping a little bit of someone or like, I don't know, I always think urns are interesting. Like so I think, at least I would assume a nicer piece of art than just like an urn. I think my grandpa's it's just in a box like a nice box.

Nic 
But I don't know if parents are the kind of thing where it's like what is it like? We've all seen the movie need the parents right like that earn. Like, I don't want an urn. I also don't want to be like on a pedestal revered after I'm dead. Here's my dust. You know, please stare at my desk for you know until your kids don't care about who is this guy. At some point, what happens to those? Yeah, just returning to the earth.

Laura 
That sounds like the makings of a good like horror movie.

300 year old urn someone finds like, you rub it a certain way and like

Nic 
it's released and there we go. Yeah, golly, we just do that. We

Laura  
can't write that story right now.

Nic 
We have made a name for it and then we can vote for later. Yeah, no one still this idea of destiny, you know, not to come up with a better name than that. But yeah, you get it. And then one take that it's ours.

Laura 
return return

Nic 
return that's the sequel right? That's got to be the sequel. Like that's like the earn the return the Earn franchise. Oh man. This is great. This is absolutely wonderful.

Laura 
How the magic happens.

Unknown Speaker 
There's two of them. Oh

Laura 
my god. But really, though, this is how big ideas are born, right? You just talking about something and you're like, that would be cool. And then you write it down on a napkin and then 10 years later, there it is, you know?

Nic 
Yeah, I'm telling you. This actually does make a ton of sense because I just realized I mean, I'm really piecing together the sequel, the return. There's literally there's two urns, they put them in two different places. So you thought in the first thing, we need to destroy the thing, and it would never happen again, except there was another

Laura 
the third one that there was a glass necklace Yeah,

Nic 
right. Yeah. It was putting like it was putting glass and then no one knew. Right and they melted

Laura 
down the glass to make something else. Exactly. Or house fire.

Nic  
Exactly. So many options. So many options for the return this is our best and worst. Oh my gosh.

Laura  
Okay, well, that was fun. Let's get to our interview. Sounds good.

[Interview with Johna Hutira starts]

Nic 
Hello, and welcome back. To EPR. Today we have John Hytera. The Cultural Resources Program Manager for Dawson on the show. Welcome, John. Hello, everybody. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so Dawson, pretty great company. Huh? Is that fabulous? Yeah, I love the

Johna Hutira 
Christmas parties in Hawaii, you know?

Nic 
Yes, if only if only. But no, I wanted to have you on the show for a while, truthfully, because you have a really long and storied career and you know, your Cultural Resources Program Manager but like, how did you get your start? Why were you interested and where are you and how did you get to where you ended up?

Johna Hutira 
I was always interested in archaeology. And I was lucky enough to have a social studies teacher in high school that actually was an archaeologist and he left the profession and started teaching and so it sort of, you know, stoke the fires of my interest. When I went to college at Arizona State University, I actually enrolled as pre law because I was also interested in becoming an attorney and I majored in Political Science, and I filled all my humanities and science requirements with anthropology classes. And I was offered a job doing survey, reconnaissance surveying inventory on the Coconino National Forest. It's surrounds Flagstaff, and I had one of the best times in my life we just had a fabulous time with the rest of the crew and camped and was gorgeous and I thought, wow, I could get paid to do this for a profession. So I love political science and switched my major and, you know, I have a minor in poli sci but went to AP Biology and then I got interested in plants and human interaction with plants and how that affects, you know, the subsistence patterns people move across the landscape. So I went to graduate school at Texas a&m to study under a particular person whose focus was coprolites which is, you know, Paleo feces. And, you know, yeah, but, you know, he, he, he has since passed and but he used to say the coprolites are the Cadillac of ethnobotany because everything you eat ends up in your waist. That's how I started and my first big job was for Peabody Coal. Southern Illinois University had a contract with Peabody Coal up on the Navajo reservation, and we would stay out there from Memorial Day to Labor Day live in tents. And again, the social aspect of it was just for somebody who's 19 I mean, come on. No, oil was just like, Yeah, this is what I wanted to do the rest of my life. So that's what I did. And now I'm behind a desk, right?

Nic 
But that's so funny. So you switched degrees and the first thing you started doing was working with with who are old poof or is that what was that later? Because it

Johna Hutira 
was later? Yeah, that was later as I started, when you get a degree in archaeology, most people specialize in some respect. Like they'll be a specialist in ceramic analysis of pottery and that may be looking at the composition of clay. You know, you can look at the clay that the pottery is is made from and source it. It came from this area and so or chip stone or remote sensing people generally have a sub thing in mind was looking at dead bird plants. Oh, yeah. Because seeds and stuff when they are in a archeological site, not a cave, not a rock shelter. Or anything, because there's differences in preservation stability on that, but most sites are what we call open air sites just out there open buried. Really the only thing that is preserved is anything that's been carbonized and so that's why I say I look at dead bird seeds. That's what we find. Yeah, right. Right.

Nic 
So okay, so when you're doing you're starting to do like your first like, Resharper start doing cultural resources. Were like, what are you kind of expecting? What should you be expecting? Is it I mean, like, in my mind, it's just hanging around in a big field, rummaging through dirt. Is that about?

Johna Hutira 
Yeah, that's pretty much it. If you're if you start off in the field. Now, some people again, like I said before, is depending on what your specialty is, you can kind of get a specialty in like, say museum studies, where you're not going to really be out in the dirt that you're you know, preparing collections, you look at preservation techniques of different sorts of artifacts, how to preserve, for instance, perishables, like fiber sandals or things like that. I mean, there's not a lot of people who do that, but those jobs are out there. There's also people who specialize in rock art. The you're not really digging holes. If you go into that bet. But what I started out though, a little different than somebody starting today is I started out in the 70s. And the National Historic Preservation Act was just passed, and federal agencies had all sorts of money. So we did a lot of reconnaissance because originally in the National Historic Preservation Act, one of the section 110 says that land managing agencies need to inventory their land. And back in the day, they had money to do that. So we would do sample surveys or you know, we're be have a 10 The Forest Service, for instance, has these 10,000 square kilometer planning units and so they want to know where sites are and things like that. So you wouldn't necessarily survey the whole 10,000 acres obviously, but you do that nowadays, because agencies don't have quite the budget they did back in the day. It's all driven by project. There's a timber sale here, go out and do this timber sale. There's we want to build a road go out and you know, go to the road. So it is a little bit different. Now, so yeah, if you're looking for a job in archaeology, probably 90% chance it's going to be out in some cornfield. And holes. Yeah. Unless you work in the West, we don't have to dig holes out here. It's a geology thing. It's, you know, this stuff out here, Arizona, you know, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, is mostly superficial, you know, surface indications. You don't have a lot of plants depositing leaf litter and there's basically no aid horizon out here. So to do that, yeah.

[Artifacts]

Nic 
So like when you you know, a site, you know, so it's interesting gives the regional differences in the country for what you expect to see and find. You also probably have like location based issues like you know, like, if coastal region will have different resources then other areas, like what do you look for? Yeah, and you get a site like, what's the first thing you kind of? What do you look forward to understand like how this project should go, what we should expect to find and do you ever get instances where you are surprised by something?

Johna Hutira  
Oh, absolutely. So we just my colleague, Nick Beltran, and I were just out on the field last week, and we were charged with re recording some archaeological sites that had been recorded previous Lee and the agency is replacing some infrastructure and so we're out there looking at that and so we found the sites, you know, relocated these sites. And the original recorders had said that there's not a lot of potential for subsurface deposits that these were just surficial deflated, you know, but we noticed a lot of rodent activity, and coyote and snake and you know, basically animal holes in the ground and if you look at the dirt they've kicked up there was a fair amount of artifacts in that their backyard I guess, and and anthills are also another great thing to look at because they'll bring up little beads and little you know, yeah. So we noticed this recent recent activity and notice that yeah, there was a fair amount of barbettes coming up. So we're, you know, saying yeah, we think there is the potential for subsurface deposits. So if there is the potential for subsurface deposits that will affect the undertaking, in the sense that you have to have somebody out there either, you know, dig it up before the construction happens or have a monitor out there during construction, you know, depending on the nature of the undertaking. So that's, that's the first thing I look for. Is there the potential for something buried because that's gonna make a huge difference on on what comes next.

Nic 
Right? So okay, so you you didn't expect to find something buried and then you do you get evidence for the fact that there could be something very there. What do you do, what's our next step?

Johna Hutira 
Well, our next step is for instance, these, this infrastructure that's gonna get replaced is a relatively small footprint, their power poles, so they're replacing these power poles. And so the direct impact is very small. And in this case, I think we would recommend just monitoring it because to do have full scale excavation, you know, just it's not feasible because it's such a small little footprint. For instance, if we were doing a new road, like currently there's a new freeway going in in Arizona, that is not along the current road, it's virgin desert, and you go out and you survey it. And if there are sites there, if they have subsurface and if they're, you know, eligible for the register, you have to do excavation, and it's called data recovery because you're basically recovering the information that makes that site important so we measure sites, quote, significance, if it can answer questions about past behavior, and that applies to historical sites as well as prehistoric. So that potential, that's the information that you're looking for. Once it's removed from the ground, then the construction can go on because we've basically retrieved that significant information. Now, when you're looking at whether or not a site represents a sacred place, it's a whole nother story. But that's like way above my paygrade. So that's an agency problem. So yeah, and normally you would do most forward thinking land managing agencies do what we call fence defense, which is if it's in the right away, you declare it that way in the future, if they need to put a turn lane in or they want to put a concrete culvert in. You don't have to go back out. Right. So they know the corridor is clear. Yeah.

Nic  
So it's, yeah, it's covering your bases, basically.

Johna Hutira 
Yeah. And not only just seats do that, but

Nic 
right. Gosh, okay, so I'm gonna ask you the obvious question here. What's the oldest thing and what's the coolest thing you've ever found in the field?

Johna Hutira 
Well, the coolest thing is my first big job I spoke about earlier for Southern Illinois University on Black Mesa. I was on survey with the project director and the assistant project directors. So it was PhD PhD PhD and be full 19 year old and we were walking to survey area and the videography of this particular area. It's there's a lot of alleviation. And so you have these really deeply cut washes and these huge cutbacks, and so we were walking up and down these cutbacks, and we're following the sheep path. And Charlie went, Tony went, Bob, were there all my bosses, and then there's me bringing up the rear and they all passed this bowl that was eroding out of the sight of this cutbank I mean, is that at eye level because these things were, you know, probably seven, eight feet at eye level, and I don't Hey, everybody stopped and turned out to be this gorges Citadel polychrome which is late in the sequence, but number one finding a whole vessel is is not rare, but it's unusual. The fact that all the muckety mucks walked right by it was definitely the the icing on the cake on that one. The oldest thing they probably have found his work on site, central Arizona that goes back to probably two or 3000 BCE. It was a large habitation site. And unusual that we would find that at that time there. And there were these pit houses, semi subterranean structures that are very common out here. And it had antlers. It was like full of antlers. And it was also full of 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of Kanzi mustard seeds. Okay, wow. Interesting, which is pretty cool. And it was it was pretty old. So that's, that was the oldest thing. Yeah.

Nic 
That's awesome. Yeah. So I know there's like a few laws that you have to be you work with directly. You mentioned NHPA already, National Historic Preservation Act. So what is what is that? And then what is NAGPRA as well,

Johna Hutira 
the NH NHPA, which we short can to Section 106 Because section 106 of that Act is the mechanism that requires a land managing agencies or any federal agency actually, either through direct action funding or permits to take into consideration cultural resources before the undertaking is done. So if you have to get a permit for a wastewater, if you get government funding, even though might be on private land, or if it's a direct action by an agency on their own land, that you have to do this, that's section 106. So section 106 requires that you look for cultural resources. Let's first step and then determine if those resources are significant and eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. So that means every site isn't necessarily something that we need to. I don't want to use word save, but you know, there are things that occur out there that number one, you can record all the pertinent information just by recording it in the field, or there's like we were talking earlier about subsurface versus surface. If it's purely superficial, you could just pick everything up off the ground and go on your merry way. So we would then assess that if it's eligible for the register. And if it is eligible for the register, then the agency has a responsibility to mitigate the impacts to that resource. And that can be done either by project redesign. Like, hey, we'll move the road or data recovery, or some other sort of mitigative efforts to make sure that the information that's contained in that is collected. So that's the shorthand of section 106. There's also NAGPRA which is a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And again, it applies to federal agencies and those who receive federal funding, specifically museums, and it is a mechanism for the repatriation of human remains to an affiliated tribe. So the museum or federal agency who has the ancestral remains, undertakes a process through which they'll identify the affiliated groups. And then once those affiliated groups are identify, then, in theory, the items get repatriated back. There's also the archaeological resources Protection Act, which is a little bit different because it only protects those things over 100 years old, where section 106 is over 50 and that is you can't be on any kind of federal land and mucking about without a permit. So, for instance, to the Bundy case up in Oregon, when they were occupying that that facility there, they were digging trenches for something I don't know. And they dug through an archaeological site so one of the charges that was brought or could have been potentially brought, I'd have to look at the case to see if they actually did that was ARPA violation, because they disturbed archaeological remains without an arbiter permit. So yeah, that's that's an in state states and municipalities and counties all have various levels of protection. Some have not and some have a lot. So there might be local ordinances in sight that state laws, say Arizona, for example, and many other states have laws that protect human remains on private lands. So, yeah,

[Curation Crisis]

Nic  
so what happens with artifacts after they're found?

Johna Hutira 
Well, we generally it's called curation. So you have an artifact collection, depending on what the land status is, whether it's private or whether it's federal or whether it's tribal if you're on tribal lands, tribes generally take the collections. If it's on federal land, we're obligated to use a federally recognized repository, which has its different levels of requirements. It has to be safe, it has to be climate controlled, they'd have to you know, have that fire suppression, etc. So we would deposit the artifacts in those curation facilities like most museums have have that there is a curation crisis going on right now because we just simply have too much stuff. Like Arizona State Museum, which is the main repository here in Arizona has stopped taking federal collections because they just have to budget out. I mean, it's not necessarily a matter of money. It's a matter of space. And so there's, there's every conference, I go to house session, workshops, committees on the curation crisis that people are talking about, well, you know, maybe do we call artifacts do we? Meaning do we need 20,000 pieces of the same thing as the, you know, example? historical items, like pieces of metal and nails and things like that, that it's fairly well accepted that we can sample those where if you have 10,000 nails you know, yeah, keep 100 up. So, obviously, things that were considered diagnostic, obviously, get curated, but pretty stark stuffs a little more difficult to deal with the curation facilities. They have standards. Do you have to put them in archival quality Bad's the labels have to be archival quality, their process for curation in perpetuity? Acid Free Stock cardstock that kind of

Nic 
thing. So yeah, right, right. Understood. Yeah. That's interesting. I didn't realize there was a were too good or too efficient, or taking too much.

Johna Hutira 
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's where one of those jobs comes through is, is not being in field is if you were interested in that kind of thing. In the curation end of things. There are some there are jobs available at various museums like you know, maintaining those collections,

Nic  
that kind of thing. Right? Which makes total sense. So is there a difference from like, when you find like, artifacts related to human existence versus you know, like, if you find, you know, we used to work bones for example, it mean like, is there a different process for that it's still the same kind of thing. It's just different rules apply or is it all

Johna Hutira 
Yeah, different rules apply? It mean in terms of recovering it from the field? There are, you know, protocols that we have to take if we encounter ancestral human remains? And again, that varies by state. We have to determine are they prehistoric? Are they historic, if it's historic instead of crime, that kind of thing. And then, you know, related to dag probably, depending on if you're working for a federal agency, the agency would have a cold snap plan of actions and it details who the collections gonna go to who we're going to contact that kind of thing. So, but removal from the ground is a little bit different, but it doesn't differ any more than say, digging a roasting pit versus digging a house. You know, I mean, there's obviously variations in follows how the excavation techniques are, but they're, they're specific to whatever you're working on. Gotcha. That makes sense.

[Site Security]

Nic 
Yeah, that makes sense. And it's funny like the other thing, and we're really there's a couple of things I really want to talk to you about and I'm probably not gonna have time to cover them all. But my very first experience with doing a I think it was a phase two survey where the you know, there was like a former house and you know, outhouse and and waste disposal area from a community and like the, I think it was in the 30s or 40s, or something like that. So it was you know, digging out this huge pit. And we'd found you know, glass bottles and you know, all kinds of other common household items from that era. And then one day we came to the site, we pulled the tarp back of the like eight foot pit that had been dug and all of the bottles were gone. Yeah. And then, two days later, somebody who was at this, somebody stopped by our site and returned all of the glass bottles because, quote, he didn't realize that he shouldn't have taken them. And we're looking at him like, well, you would have had to take the tarp off. down into here. Yes, slowly, because there's so many so many that would have taken him several trips, and then put the tarp back over, and then drew so we obviously know you're lying. What actually happened was he found out they weren't worth anything and just brought them back. Is that a common occurrence is

Johna Hutira 
Oh, yeah, yeah. And it
____________________________________
Johna Hutira 
It is something especially when you're working in urban areas. And, you know, there are some instances where in Phoenix we had security guards 24/7 on the site. Yeah. And when one job I worked on it was near the airport, Sky Harbor Airport, and it was out was to be had across our railroad and go under the underpass and follow it dirt road. It was it was in a area along the river and there wasn't a lot of development yet but they were you know, the airport was it's kind of expanding and you know, we're working on this thing and and that was a vessel that just hit the top of the rim and it was late so they just kind of covered it up again and came back the next day and somebody had come in and looted the site. So but they left some tools, they left some of their tools and so we call the cops they came out and they brought their CSI team. And so there's they're running around and take a DNA sample. Looking for fingerprints. I know it was fast. It was fascinating. I was like wow, this is just like CSI. So that's, it's very common in when you're working in Maricopa County, which is where Phoenix is located. You know, we do dust abatement. And so as part of our dust abatement permits, you have to have a fine out every I don't know however many feet with the name of the project, the name of the company, what you're doing and who your contact is. So if somebody drives by and wants to complain about your dust, they know who to call. And we we can't put archaeological investigations on both sides. Because it's a beacon for people that just come and loot and the media sometimes can get the notion that they're getting an idea that this might be something interesting and it's a double edged sword because yeah, you want the publicity you want people to get excited about archaeology. You want them to know what's under their feet on their everyday life. But then on the other hand, as soon as it shows up at the paper, then, of course this was back with newspapers. What's the news that shows up on Tiktok Yeah, the next day I mean, it's like free for all people are out there just DNS so it modern times. Most all excavations are fenced and locked and usually have some sort of security on one job we were working on in downtown Phoenix that security company quit they said it was too creepy. They were scared. Yeah, and then a bad part of downtown but Oh, okay. Yeah.

Nic 
It's like Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of thing and they're worried about curses or like

Johna Hutira 
they were it was in an area where there are a lot of housing challenged people. And yeah, so I didn't want to cope is we had trenches open all over the place and we were trying to figure out how to light them and so we got this little landscape, you know, solar landscape, thick that you stick in the ground, we were putting them around the trenches, and we had like 50 trenches open it was a lot we bought a lot of them, but they didn't want to walk around because they were worried about falling in the trench, which is a reasonable fear. I guess flashlights never entered there. But whatever. Yeah. So it one one job we will work down in Tempe. We had a client was cheap, didn't want offense. It came to work one morning and there was a Jeep face, in face down in one of our trenches. And it was a guy who was trying to impress his date driving around a vacant lot in the dark without his headlights off. So when

Nic 
you pick one that has a giant hole

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, like Yeah, I'm sure she was impressed. Yeah, that's too funny. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's one of the more interesting things like where there's, there's, you know, certain data we can't publish because people publish information, people will go try to find it, regardless of whether it's, you know, obviously that stuff is not it doesn't belong to anyone, you know, it is, and people still want to take it, I guess, because there's, I don't know how much of it actually has value and maybe that's my next question is is it really a lucrative business is that my people take it

Johna Hutira 
it depends on what the item is any kind of, like ceramic that's intact, like not a broken pot, but an intact pot, that value is decreased. If it's painted with a design, the value increases. And if it's from a certain culture like for instance, Hopi pottery, we'll call it ethno historic, that period of time just around contact. The Hopi we're doing these glaze wares and just gorgeous, gorgeous pottery. And there are some big sites out on Hopi like huge YouTube sites. And we call upon honors looters. They helicopter in and dig up and helicopter out and you know, some of those vessels you'll find in galleries in Santa Fe will go in the 10s of 1000s.

Nic 
Okay, yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah. So dollar. So

Johna Hutira 
yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, it is only what the market will pay, you know, playing Where's unpainted vessels unless it's an unusual shape. Generally, or not, you know, I mean, a lot of looting that happens is related to Mecca and feta being use. Particularly, yeah, and rural areas. It's, it's actually good papers written on this. And it's sort of a cottage industry. Get Quick, quick sales of stuff to give money for Yeah, yeah. To get money for drugs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then you have some groups of people that are living in some areas. Don't consider the indigenous populations as warranting the respect for their debt. One in particular, which I will not name and again, they see no problem with going out on you know, digging up a site and having stuff I was doing a survey up in snowflake area in northern Arizona. We're, you know, out there chatting and, you know, you run into ranchers and you know, hey, how you doing, you know, mode, you know, do the two finger wave, and we went out and did our survey and we came back and on the hood of our truck was a small black on white painted fool into intact sitting on top of Book of Mormon with black up gay. Interesting, so, yeah,

Nic  
weird. So yeah, that's that. So it's, yeah, it's a wild industry. I think there's lots of really unique and interesting stories. Like I said, I love that you've been able to share some of those with us. We're close to time. But I want to I want to ask one more question about technology that's changed over time. Oh, with the end

Johna Hutira 
is absolutely absolutely. From everything from you know, 3d laser scanning to map sites. You know, when I started, we would go up map a site with a plane table and then validate and I would probably guess most of your audience cannot know what those are. And now it's you know, you can get this almost millimeter accuracy with 3d laser scanning, and it takes a 10th of the 20th of the time that it would take us to map a site that way, and, you know, ground penetrating radar, and some of the chemical analyses I was speaking earlier about the chemistry that's used to figure out where ceramics are produced, you know, the inductively coupled plasma spectrometry, you know, that kind of thing. But speaking of mapping with a plan, table and validate, I want to share this story with you I was in my field school 1977 We're up on the Coconino National Forest on this huge site new bequia Taka which means last now in Hopi and the Forest Service was having problems but people looting it and we were out there to to clean up. Some lot of the ancestral remains they left and there was a kind of a big open area in the middle of this pueblo. And we were mapping some rock alignments in this big open area. And you know, so for those of us somebody stands at the plain table with the alligator and somebody goes out with a stadia rod and you know, you do all these computations and take a point and then you move to the next one. And so this is what we're doing, because as we're learning it was a field school. Yeah, one of our crew chiefs walked up the hill to where we were, and she was like, on the opposite side of the plane table. And she looked at our map and she said, what the ah are you doing? And we're like, well, we're we're mapping needs. So she spun the table around. And apparently sometime in historic time, somebody had gone up on this big open space and spelled out the word Winslow with an arrow pointing to where Winslow was for airports. And that's what we were mapping but we were looking at it upside down. So we didn't figure out that it was just some Yahoo you know, back in the day. Oh, another word when the flow day always did. Yeah.

Nic 
That's so funny. That's great. As a great

Johna Hutira 
3d laser scanning, we would have only wasted, you know, a couple of minutes with an arrow.

Nic 
That sounds funny, but last question, we usually like to ask, you know, like, we have our day jobs and we all have a little bit of hobbies as well. So what do you do any free time we do for fun?

Johna Hutira  
Well, I love to kayak and luckily for us, there's a beach in Mexico. That's a four hour drive away. And so we go there and get ticker coyotes in this lakes and stuff around around town, but I also do fused glass stuff like recently last year, so I've been doing pet grooming in incorporating those into pieces of fused glass because I was looking I had you know, you get attached to your animals and you go Yeah, I want the remains like this. Sit on and on. The thing but as I get older and you start thinking about your mortality of like, what, what am I going to do with these, you know, my was my, if I die and people are just gonna throw them out. So I started incorporating some of the cremains into the fuse glass piece. And so now I do it for friends and family and for charity people who want something more than just a plastic box on their shelf with their picker names in

Nic  
there. That's what I do. Oh, that's really sweet. That's really cool. When you first told me about that, I was like, blown away. I still am. So that's very, very neat. And again, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today. And I guess last but not least, where can people get in touch with you? They have questions about

Johna Hutira 
you can find me on LinkedIn. And you can find me you know if you Google me, everything comes up. I I have an Alexa so she puts everything everywhere for me. I have no privacy. But yeah John you Tara, you can just find me on LinkedIn. I tell you what the actual thing is, but I don't know. So

Nic 
that's where you can find me. Perfect. Thank you ju Tara

Johna Hutira  
at Dothan. ohana.com Okay, thank you.

Nic  
All right.

Johna Hutira
Have a good one.

Nic
Bye.

Laura 
That's our show. Thank you, Jonah for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Bye.

Nic
See you everybody

Transcribed by https://otter.ai