Two southwestern Colorado senior citizens have been sentenced to short jail terms for disturbing a grave at an Anasazi burial site on the Canyon of the Ancients land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

One of them was sentenced to 10 days in jail for digging out a visible human skull and holding it up for the others on an organized hike to view. The other man was sentenced to 3 days in jail for organizing these hikes. Both men will be on supervised release for one year, during which time they are prohibited from being on BLM land except to travel across using roads.

"On at least three occasions, Drake and Hance led seniors on a four- or five-hour hike to view archaeological sites that culminated with a visit to a shallow grave where a skull was exposed.

An undercover officer with the BLM attended the hike in May 2011 and asked to see the skull.

Drake laid on the ground and dug up the skull using his hands and a stick and showed it to the group of four people, according to an arrest affidavit.

Drake said he would pick up the skull and show it to the group while discussing the ancient culture. He didn’t realize that by touching it and picking it up, it was considered excavating and removing under federal law, said his lawyer, Anthony Edwards of Silverton.

He never damaged or stole anything from the site, Edwards said."

In the course of their trial, each of the men was asked how they would feel if people were digging up their own mother's skull and displaying it to tourists. And both answered they would be very upset, and hadn't thought of it that way.

Upon sentencing, both were led directly from the courtroom to jail. A BLM spokesman said this illustrates how seriously the BLM takes its job to protect natural resources including cultural artifacts.

Their lawyer pointed out that in a much more egregious case where a gang of grave robbers systematically dug up ancient burial sites and sold the loot, the leader was sentenced to three years' probation, not jail time.

These two guys just let their life-long curiosity about nature, science, and archaeology get the better of them, and they never carried any of their finds off the site. But the judge said he doesn't care what goes on in courts other than his own.

Here's the full article in the Cortez Journal: Grave Diggers Get Jail Time