A ceramic pot and a 1,000-year-old ladle looted from El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico are among the stolen artifacts identified in a five-year federal investigation into the smuggling and sale of Asian and American Indian antiquities.

Late last month, dozens of federal agents raided a Los Angeles gallery and four museums in Southern California — including the prominent Los Angeles County Museum of Art — searching for artifacts taken from protected archaeological sites in Thailand, Myanmar, China and New Mexico.

The raids are the latest in a series of embarrassments for some of the leading cultural institutions in the United States that have been forced to return art from their collections that had been stolen and smuggled into the country.

One of the targets of the latest investigation is a dealer named Robert E. Olson, 79.

According to the warrant to search his Cerritos, Calif., residence, Olson told an unnamed National Park Service agent in 2003 that he had removed archaeological resources from public lands administered by the National Park Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and had arranged for buyers to contribute some of these artifacts to museums to claim fraudulent tax deductions.

The agent, who was posing as an eager collector of Indian art, purchased archaeological resources from Olson 22 times, according to the warrant.

Olson told the agent he had the largest collection of Native American ladles in the world — at one point, he owned 73. He sold half for $10,000 to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., and donated the other half to the museum. Seven of the ladles were reportedly from Chaco Canyon, a major center of Puebloan culture between AD 850 and 1250, and now the site of Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Olson, who apparently never lived in New Mexico, told the park service agent he met a museum owner in the state who regularly looted Anasazi sites. This man took him to look for antiquities on BLM land, "where you had to watch out for the BLM rangers," the warrant says.

In a small valley within El Malpais National Monument near Grants, they found a large olla, or ceramic storage jar. The next day, Olson said he returned to the site and noticed something white in a crack in the cliff. He told the agent he reached in and pulled out a ladle that was 1,200 years old.

The museum owner sold the olla to a Chicago collector for $5,000 the following week. The ladle ended up in the Bowers Museum.

Removing archaeological resources from public lands without a permit is a violation of the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act.

It is not clear whether Olson was familiar to federal agents who enforce this law in New Mexico, but it is clear that looting is widespread.

"There's no question there is a problem," said Eric Blinman, head of the Museum of New Mexico's Office of Archaeological Studies.

"There is so much public land, and there are so few enforcement officials in any of the federal agencies. People can get away with looting, at least for the short term," he said.

The United States is one of few countries in the world where antiquities can be privately owned, Blinman pointed out, and private ownership laws are deeply imbedded in our culture. "People have a finder's-keepers attitude toward any neat stuff. Archaeological stuff qualifies," he said.

Phil Young, a former federal enforcement agent, said the Olson story didn't surprise him.

The location of "ruins" are even marked on old U.S. Geological Survey maps that were widely available. "The word gets out as far as where archaeological resources and artifacts can be found. And it only takes one bad actor to destroy the contextual and scientific information for everyone else," he said.

There's not a single unlotted site in the Silver City area, said Tim Maxwell, an archaeologist who formerly headed the Museum of New Mexico's archaeology office. "People see Mimbres pots in art catalogs. They see the prices. That certainly gets people motivated economically," he said.

Kayci Cook Collins, the superintendent at El Malpais, said the monument, which covers nearly 115,000 acres, has thousands of archaeological sites ranging from the archaic period to Spanish colonial contact. "It's hard to throw a stick and not end up in a site of some sort," she said, pointing out that Acoma Pueblo is to the east and Zuni to the southwest.

Her staff gets some help from volunteers with the state Historic Preservation Division's site watch program, but "It's hard to be everywhere at once," she added.

Just a few weeks ago, an El Malpais volunteer reported a petroglyph panel, with animal motifs, spirals and bird figures, had been vandalized. Someone had taken white chalk and filled in the grooves, apparently to make the images more visible in the red sandstone. Later, an unknown person covered the chalk markings with a mud mixture.

There are other places on the monument, Cook Collins said, where evidence indicates digging with heavy equipment occurred, even in the 20 years since the monument was established.

She also mentioned the importance of not removing antiquities from their context. "There's nothing wrong with being delighted at seeing a potsherd on the ground. But how much better it is to put it down so the next person will be delighted in the same way," she said.

The sad reality today is that places like El Malpais have to be more obscure about where ruins are located to preserve them. Yet withholding information from the public is "unsettling," Cook Collins said, explaining, "I'd like to take people to those places and point out why they are so special, why (the objects there) are worthy to preserve in place. It's the context that tells the story and makes the magic."

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.