An aging American Indian with rotting teeth and arthritic joints sat down and died in the Utah desert outside Escalante with a musket, ammunition and a bucket. Blowing sand covered his corpse for more than a century before a hiker stumbled across it last year.
This is the likely scenario of how a nearly complete skeleton, dubbed "Escalante Man" in BLM documents, came to be buried a few hundred paces off Highway 12 in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. What remains a mystery is why a dozen FBI agents excluded archaeologists from its April 16 excavation, treating the site as a crime scene rather than the historic site many believe it clearly was. "It's an ongoing investigation.
Odd that. Doesn't seem like anything terribly mysterious about the remains or the artifacts. I worked with Matovich in Egypt one season and she's good at what she does. I'm-a-gonna see if she has any further info. . . .
UPDATE: Jeanette reports. . .basically nothing since it's an ongoing criminal investigation. She did, however, forward a link to the SLT comments page on the story. Nothing terribly interesting in the comments though.