Smashed Pots

This is a tale about restitution. From a moral perspective, I think most of us would agree that we ought to return things that we'e stolen to their rightful owner. But what if the objects at issue have no aesthetic or economic value, and the people you took them from have been dead for several hundred years? Let me pose the question more precisely: Is it morally required to return pottery fragments that you'e taken from an ancient garbage heap? And if, in fact, such a duty exists, just how much effort does a good conscience require of us?

For 25 years, in the back of our bedroom closet, my wife, Anne, and I kept a cardboard box stuffed with shards of old pottery. We had stolen them in 1973 when we were living in Lower Greasewood, a Navajo settlement in northeastern Arizona, where I was a doctor at a U.S. Public Health Service clinic. Despite the undependability of our Jeep, we loved to spend weekends exploring the beautiful high desert and canyon country. We often spent our evenings poring over U.S. Geological Survey maps and planning our next trip. Ruins off the beaten track were among our most enticing destinations. One day we discovered that the abandoned Hopi village of Awatovi was very close to Lower Greasewood.

But to make any sense of this story, you need to know something about Hopi history. The Hopi and their ancestors have lived on the high steppe of the Colorado Plateau for more than 2000 years, while their Navajo neighbors arrived in the area only 100 or so years before the Spanish. Because their country lay far to the west of the Rio Grande River, the Hopi managed to avoid Spanish domination much longer than most of the other pueblo peoples. In …