Harvard called them artifacts. The Hopis called them ritual objects - and wanted them back. By John Yemma, Boston Globe Imagine the thrill that Alfred Kidder and Samuel Guernsey felt when they shoveled through debris in a cave in central Arizona and uncovered a cache of wooden sunflowers. The sunflowers appeared to be from the Pueblo I period, dating to as early as AD 750.
Every adventurer lives for such a moment.
And, it being 1915, Kidder and Guernsey gave little thought to possible ownership of the sunflowers by the modern Hopi people living nearby. The artifacts were more than 1,000 years old, after all, and they were only sunflowers, not caskets or chalices. This was a clear case of finders, keepers. The Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, which had sponsored the expedition, placed the cache in its collection, where for 80 years it remained. But the Hopi people and other native cultures have deep tribal memories, a trait few people in our mobile, media- saturated society can even fathom.