The following article is from Karen Olsen Bruhns, full time academic archaeologist at San Francisco State University and part time United States customs agent.
Mostly my time is spent doing ordinary, mundane tasks: preparing and presenting classes, reading papers and exams, consulting with students, keeping up the Cihuatan WWW site and writing the immense piles of stuff that accompany finishing one project while trying to get a new one really, truly, underway. But every now and again something else happens. Some people work in shelters or clean highways for community service; I consult with US Customs with cases of stolen and illegally imported precolumbian antiquities. When Customs stops a shipment, they need expert help in ascertaining that the items are indeed authentic and that their country of origin has laws which prohibit trafficking in ancient artifacts. This is where I come in.
9:30 AM a few weeks ago found me leaning up against the lamp in front of the San Francisco Customs House waiting for Kit Welsh, US Customs Special Agent. Earlier in the month I had gone with her and some of her colleagues out to the San Francisco International Airport, where an alert agent had stopped a couple of cases marked "handicrafts". He had seen the USIA WWW page. This has picture galleries of the classes of objects whose export was prohibited from each country with which we have a special agreement. The agent didn't think what he saw looked like modern handicrafts. He was right: it was a shipment of ancient artifacts from El Salvador to middlemen living in the San Francisco Bay area. At that time I identified all but a few pieces as authentic (there is an immense amount of fakery in the precolumbian arts "business" and the dealers are generally as ignorant as the collectors, so of course there were fakes in the shipment). I noted that the genuine precolumbian pieces were covered by our Memorandum of Agreement with El Salvador, there was no way that the shipper could have sent them to the US legally. The next step then was that Customs had to consult their legal department and decide what to do. They decided to seize the items preparatory to repatriating them to El Salvador and so I was needed again, to produce a detailed inventory of the collection of stolen ceramics and stone work.
Kit arrived on time and we proceeded to go through a great deal of security (immigration offices are in one of the Customs buildings and there is the ever-present street person problem) and up an elevator to officially sign into a secure and cavernous room where the cases were sitting, sealed with yellow US Customs tape, on a table. Kit and I first set up our computers, borrowing immense red extension cords so that we could keep the computers near where we were to work.
