DESERT ARTIFACTS DISAPPEARING.

Byline: Clint Williams The Arizona Republic

The origins of giant earthen figures scattered across the deserts of Arizona and California are lost in time, but their future seems certain.

And bleak.

"I think they'll all disappear eventually," said Boma Johnson, an archeologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Yuma.

The sprawling sculptures scraped into the desert flanking the Colorado River are being erased by development, off-road vehicles, wild burros, ground squirrels and academic indifference.

Although many are thousands of years old, the earthen figures were largely undiscovered until this century. The first-known discovery was in 1932, when an airplane pilot spotted the huge figure of a man just north of Blythe, Calif.

Because of the medium and the size, the geoglyphs generally are simple and characterized by irregular lines and proportions.

But the figures, messages to the gods and ancestors, weren't intended for viewing by critical mortals.

"I can't think of a single one where you can stand on a hill and look at it," Johnson said.

Intaglios are hard to see. Even an observant hiker can walk blithely past one, and that has proved their best protection. It's hard to destroy something you don't know is there.

But some geoglyphs have inadvertently been damaged by off-road vehicle drivers, including World War II tank drivers preparing for the invasion of North Africa. Other figures have been damaged or destroyed by erosion, construction, vandals, the hooves of wild burros and the tunneling of ground squirrels.

"Ground squirrels have been doing more damage than people lately," Johnson said.

Despite the assault on so many fronts, little is being done to protect the intaglios.

"We need to develop more sound protective measures," said Jay von Werlhof, a retired instructor at Imperial Valley College in El Centro, Calif., who has studied the geoglyphs for 20 years.

Most of the earthen figures, maybe 70 percent, are on BLM land, von Werlhof said, but "the BLM has always cried poor."

"They don't have the money to patrol, they don't have the money to put up fences," he said. "The very people who are supposed to be protecting them by law are saying they can't do the job."

But Johnson said there isn't much his agency can do.

"The only thing we can do is fence them, and that isn't practical," he said, adding that in 1975, motorcycle riders lifted their bikes over a barrier at one remote site and marred the figures.

The only way to preserve the intaglios is to educate people "with a sense of respect for things of other cultures and other times," Johnson said, adding, "I don't think that is ever going to happen in this world."

Meanwhile, recording and deciphering the ancient artworks is left to Johnson, who is eight years from retirement, and von Werlhof, now 73. Few other archeologists take any notice of the strange scratchings in the desert.

"There is a serious lack of attention to the entire field of rock art in American archeology," said Ron Dorn, a geography professor at Arizona State University who has developed a method for dating the intaglios.

Dorn said archeologists in the United States focus more on buried sites, sites that are protected by the earth that covers them. Meanwhile, the earthen figures and other rock art are exposed to vandals, erosion and development.

"The rock-art sites in the Western United States are disappearing," Dorn said, "and archeologists should have their buns out there recording and studying them."