Colorado developer sells parcels of the past : Buyers get lots containing Native American ruins and permission to dig. The project concerns some experts.

CORTEZ, Colo. —  Forget the snow-shrouded mountain peaks surrounding this high-desert burg in southwestern Colorado. Developer Archie Hanson guarantees spade-ready Native American ruins on each of the 35-acre lots he offers.

And the novel parcels, which go for up to $195,000, are selling briskly to people intrigued by living next to the stone walls, underground rooms and buried pottery left by a culture that mysteriously abandoned the region around the year 1300.

The hitch: While buyers are encouraged to excavate, they must hire professional archeologists to do the work. What’s more, unearthed artifacts must be returned to a planned private museum upon the owner’s death.

But the way Hanson figures it, being able to display those artifacts at home is ample “reward.”

“You can display them and fondle them and enjoy them,” cooed Hanson, a 69-year-old developer who created the gated Southern California communities of Rolling Hills and Hidden Hills.

Here, Hanson is designing his own stone home to overlook an excavation site that yielded the remains of at least two Native Americans who may have been burned to death. Hanson’s home will be custom-built to include windows, spotlights and even a catwalk for close-up views. There will also be a remote-control board that will provide, with the flip of a switch, a recorded lecture about what it all means.

He has already dubbed the dig the “Hanson site” and encourages potential buyers to also name their excavations after themselves.

The whole thing is giving archeologists and Native American leaders the jitters.

Never mind that Hanson promises that he and his customers will “become world renowned for our contributions to the knowledge about the people who lived here.”

For Ricardo Elia, director of the graduate program in archeological heritage management and ethics at Boston University, the business venture “smacks of the kind of private collecting that is causing the destruction of the world’s archeological sites by looters.”

The way Elia figures, “whenever possible, sites should be left undisturbed for the future, when techniques and research questions will be better.”

“Run-out-there-and-dig-it-up is the old style of archeology,” he said, a style that harks back to a time when “archeologists were little more than treasure hunters.”

Elia, along with many museum curators, doubts whether private individuals have the expertise, facilities and funds to adequately protect delicate artifacts in their homes, let alone the means and dedication needed to maintain a quality museum.

Some archeologists, however, disagree and laud Hanson for insisting that scientists conduct the excavations at his development. His approach, they say, is an improvement over the pillaging by pothunters--who sometimes scatter ruins with backhoes and bulldozers, easing up only to grab potentially valuable jewelry and intact pots often found in graves.

The desecration of graves--even by archeologists--is deeply offensive to some tribes. The Pueblo people of Arizona and New Mexico, whose ancestors are buried here, believe that disturbing those remains unsettles the spirits of the dead.

The Pueblo people contend that moving the bones of the ancestors who built the structures that now make Hanson’s lots so desirable may even disrupt the very harmony of nature.

Complicating matters, Hanson has not consulted Native American representatives about his diggings, even though the two sites excavated so far have turned up skeletal remains of seven Anasazi people.

Jerry Fetterman, an archeologist working for Hanson, argued that none of those remains were in graves, but rather were found in conditions that suggest some form of traumatic death. A formal burial site was accidentally destroyed by a trench-digging machine used to prepare a lot for electrical service. Those remains were reburied nearby.

That does not satisfy Dalton Taylor, a Hopi elder who performs reburial ceremonies for remains unearthed by archeologists. Taylor said there is even more at stake than ethics and sensitivity toward Native American concerns.

“These landowners might have curses coming in,” Taylor warned. “What are they going to do then?”

Linda S. Cordell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a internationally recognized expert on the Anasazi, said more courtesy should be shown before digging into ruins.

“I believe that it’s important to involve the Native American community as early as possible in any archeological research,” she said. “A lot of decisions about a site should be reached through dialogue. Ultimately, it comes down to an individual’s ethical concerns.”

Hanson uses his ties to a nearby private, nonprofit archeological education center to find prospective buyers.

But officials at Crow Canyon Archeological Center are uneasy that Hanson sits on their board by virtue of his financial contributions.

“I feel a bit exploited,” said Ricky Lightfoot, director of Crow Canyon programs. “Archie uses his connections with Crow Canyon to meet people who have the means to buy his property.”

“We can’t control what our contributors do,” Lightfoot said. “I just hope some of what we have taught him has rubbed off.”