Archaeological Resource Crime in Montana: Training the Professionals
The Save History Crew led a 40-hour training on the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) for cultural resource managers and law enforcement at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Billings, Montana this past July. We had about 30 students in attendance with professionals working with Federal Agencies and Tribes coming from states such as Washington, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon, Nebraska, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Minnesota. The goal of the training is to prepare professionals on how to prevent, detect, and respond to archaeological resource crime.
ARPA violations are a unique kind of crime because they require archaeologists and law enforcement to work together to record the crime scene. This week of training provides the tools to help these two different types of professionals work together. Our instructors included archaeologists, law enforcement, and a legal expert all with experience working with these kinds of crimes.
About 50% of the attendees worked in cultural resource management such as Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and archaeologists, and about 50% worked in law enforcement such as police officers and game wardens. This 50/50 mix gave us the perfect opportunity to throw all these folks into the field and get them to record a simulated archaeological resource crime scene together as a team. If you want to know what that experience is like, check out the professional perspective blog posts linked below.
The week of training included in-class presentations and a mock field crime scene at a park in downtown Billings. We ended the week with the instructors visiting the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn or the Battle of the Greasy Grass as it is known by the Tribes who participated in the battle—Lakota, Cheyenne, Dakota, Arapaho, Crow, and Arikara. It was a somber and informative experience to learn about this complicated piece of American history. The landscape of the National Monument is beautiful, and we were all grateful to have been a part of the experience having taken a tour with Apsaalooke Tours managed by the Crow Nation Office of Tourism.
If you would like to learn more about archaeology, archaeological resource crime, the impact archaeological resource crime has, and how to visit archaeological sites with respect, you can follow our blog and our social media: Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, and YouTube.
If you’d like to read professional perspectives from students who attended the ARPA training, check out these blog posts!
Bill Kurtz, Bureau of Indian Affairs Midwest Regional Archaeologist
Skylar Begay, Director of Tribal Collaboration in Outreach and Advocacy