Watching and listening before a visit

People remember what they have seen someone do. A hiker stepping around a midden on camera, or an elder explaining in a minute and a half why a granary is not a curiosity, sticks in a way that a printed list seldom does. Land agencies know it. Every overnight backpacker on Cedar Mesa already sits through a short low-impact video at the Kane Gulch Ranger Station before the BLM hands over a permit, as its Cedar Mesa permit pages explain.

What a good etiquette short covers

The best short films on visiting ancestral sites keep to one habit each, shown rather than lectured:

• leaving every artifact where it lies, historic cans and bottles included
• keeping off walls and out of rooms, however solid they look
• walking children through a site and keeping them close
• leaving dogs leashed and outside the site
• camping, cooking and eating well away from the ruins
• leaving the cairns alone and building none
• keeping hands off rock art and old grinding surfaces, and capping pole tips

A viewer who has watched a dozen of these in an evening has most of the etiquette for the canyons.

Longer material takes more looking for. The Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding runs public programs on archaeology and on the living cultures of the Four Corners, and public radio stations in Utah and southwestern Colorado have aired long interviews about the region, many of them kept online.

What separates careful from careless

A careful film names the people speaking and the community or agency they speak for. It shows visitors staying back, never handling artifacts for the camera, and its footage cannot be matched to a map. Long aerial pans that follow a canyon to a dwelling, or a trailhead sign followed by the site, give away locations whatever the voiceover says. It is also dated, so a viewer can tell whether the permit rules it describes still apply.

A careless one lingers on someone climbing into a room, treats the builders as a mystery race that vanished, or ends with a caption naming the canyon. Such videos bring exactly the visitors the good ones try to reach.

Listening to tribal voices

Since five tribes formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in July 2015 and put forward a proposal for the region that October, tribal leaders and elders have spoken about these canyons in news interviews, public meetings and recorded statements. Whatever a viewer thinks of the politics, hearing people describe their grandparents’ gathering places is worth the time. The Society for American Archaeology’s education and outreach pages carry material on archaeology and the public for the other half of the story.

Archaeologists can say a great deal about when a site was built and how people farmed. Only the descendant communities can say what the place means now.