Utah Officials Offer $3,000 Reward After Human Skull Removed From Ancient Burial Site

State officials have announced a $3,000 reward as they investigate the theft of a human skull from a protected ancient burial site east of Kanab in southern Utah.

The probe began in January when archaeologists were alerted to a Facebook photo showing a person posing with human remains. The image was circulated among multiple agencies to determine the location and jurisdiction. Experts ultimately confirmed the remains were on land managed by the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) in Kane County, said Joel Boomgarden, the trust’s lead archaeologist.

When SITLA staff visited the site, they found the skull had been removed from the remains. It is not yet clear whether other skeletal elements or artifacts were taken; the location was first documented as an ancient burial site in the 1990s.

The trust publicly announced the theft and the reward on Monday, urging anyone with information that could lead to an arrest and conviction to come forward.

“(Land vandalism cases) come up from time to time. Sometimes it’s malicious; sometimes it’s just people loving the site to death — they start visiting the site and things just start to deteriorate. But this one clearly seems to have malicious intent,” Boomgarden told KSL. “I don’t understand what causes a person to do this sort of thing. It’s beyond me.”

Officials declined to release photographs or give precise coordinates, saying they want to prevent additional disturbance or damage to the site. Boomgarden’s team is preparing a formal redocumentation of the site in the wake of the theft. While the age of the remains has not been established, Boomgarden noted that the Kanab area contains many Basketmaker-era sites that date back thousands of years.

“It’s an important site. I mean, all these sites are important,” Boomgarden said. “Any time you have human remains, it’s a sensitive site.”

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Utah Attorney General’s Office at 801-538-5113 or email aginvestcomplaints@agutah.gov. The office says it will honor requests to remain anonymous.

The incident follows another high-profile vandalism case in Kane County last year, in which a Washington County woman was arrested for defacing an ancient petroglyph near the confluence of Wire Pass and Buckskin Gulch. She was ordered to pay nearly $15,000 in fines and restitution and required to write apology letters to relevant stakeholder tribes after pleading guilty.

“It takes away that tangible connection for people to realize that Southern Paiute people have been on this landscape for eons. It’s an erasure of us,” Autumn Gillard, cultural resource manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, said last year.

State and tribal officials say the case highlights the ongoing problem of vandalism and disturbance at sacred Native American sites and stress the importance of protecting and respecting these places.