- Utah officials offer $3,000 reward for information on stolen skull from ancient site.
- The investigation began in January following a Facebook post.
- Authorities emphasize the site's significance and seek public help to solve the case.
KANAB — State officials are offering a $3,000 reward as they continue to investigate who stole a human skull from a protected ancient burial site in southern Utah.
The investigation began in January, after archaeologists were alerted by a person concerned about a Facebook post photo depicting a person posing with human remains. It was passed around to various government agencies to determine its location and jurisdiction before experts were able to determine that the remains were on land managed by the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration east of Kanab in Kane County, said Joel Boomgarden, the trust's lead archaeologist.
The agency traveled to the site and found that the skull had been removed from the remains at the site. It's unclear if anything else was taken from the site, which was found to be an ancient burial in the 1990s.
The trust lands administration announced information about the theft on Monday, adding that it's offering a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible in the case.
"(Land vandalism cases) come up from time to time. ... Sometimes it's malicious; sometimes it's just people loving the site to death, they start visiting the site and things just start to deteriorate. But this one clearly seems to (have) a malicious intent," Boomgarden told KSL. "I don't understand what causes a person to do this sort of thing. It's beyond me."
Trust officials declined to share photos or the exact location on Monday to dissuade further damage to the site.
Boomgarden's team is currently working on a formal redocumentation of the site in the wake of the theft. It's unclear how old the remains are, but Boomgarden points out that Kanab is home to plenty of "basketmaker era archaeology" dating back thousands of years.
"It's an important site. I mean, all these sites are important," he said. "Any time you have human remains, it's a sensitive site."
Anyone with information about the case is urged to call the Utah Attorney General's Office at 801-538-5113 or send an email with information to aginvestcomplaints@agutah.gov. The office says it will respect requests to remain anonymous.
The incident comes after another land vandalism case in Kane County, which made headlines last year. A Washington County woman was arrested in connection with the defacement of an ancient petroglyph near the confluence of Wire Pass and Buckskin Gulch.
She was ordered to pay nearly $15,000 in fines and restitution, and write an apology letter to all "relevant stakeholder tribes" in the area as part of her sentence handed down last month, after pleading guilty in the case.
State archaeologists and local tribes said that the incident underscored the growing problem of land vandalism on sacred Native American sites.
"It takes away that tangible connection for people to realize that Southern Paiute people have been on this landscape for eons," said Autumn Gillard, cultural resource manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, last year. "It's an erasure of us."
