SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Twenty years after a major federal sting in the Four Corners region that led to indictments by a Salt Lake City grand jury in 2009, and the preservation and identification of about 101,000 Native American objects forfeited to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and FBI, the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) and BLM Utah State Office (BLM Utah) received the “Award for Excellence in Curation and Collections Management” from the Society for American Archaeology for their outstanding and ongoing work on the Cerberus Collection.
Starting in 2006, Operation Cerberus Action was a major federal sting spanning Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, including undercover operations in which undercover agents and informants purchased illegally obtained Indigenous artifacts for more than $335,000.
In June 2009, search warrants were served in Blanding, Utah, and other Four Corners communities where a number of individuals were arrested for violations of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). When the operation concluded, work on the recovered items commenced…