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Anti-nuclear demonstrators gather for the March 12, 1988, rally near Peace Camp, across from the Nevada Test Site. More than 1,100 people were arrested for trespassing, including activist Daniel Ellsberg, actor Robert Blake and disc jockey Casey Kasem. REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO Archaeologists John Schofield, front, and Harold Drollinger show graffiti left by demonstrators in a tunnel at Peace Camp. Photo by Gary Thompson. Archaeologists Colleen Beck, left, John Schofield and Harold Drollinger examine a star made of white rocks at Peace Camp. Photo by Gary Thompson. Click on the image for an enlargement.

Sunday, March 24, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Pleading for Peace

Archaeologists studying camp where anti-nuclear activists staged protests

Like the towers and craters from 41 years of nuclear weapons testing that dot the landscape of the Nevada Test Site, a patch of ground on the other side of the highway has attracted archaeologists charting the last years of the Cold War.

It's known as Peace Camp, the location where anti-nuclear activists from around the world staged some of the largest civil disobedience actions in America.

Last week, Desert Research Institute archaeologists Colleen Beck, Harold Drollinger and their British colleague, John Schofield, set out to record Peace Camp's rock-art and graffiti even though the site still is used by tribes, environmentalists and faith-based groups to protest continued U.S. nuclear weapons research.

Beck said a report about their project will be submitted to the Bureau of Land Management and Western Shoshones. In addition, they intend to publish articles about it and make presentations.

Schofield describes the work as "the archaeology of opposition," or "how the anti-nuclear movement will be represented in the record."

"If we don't record it now, it will all be gone and no one will know how the anti-nuclear activists left their mark on the landscape," he said last week when snow covered many of the more than 90 features the team has logged at Peace Camp, located across from the entrance to the government town of Mercury.

They believe the site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, could in another 35 years become a historic place. To be eligible for inclusion in the national registry, sites must be at least 50 years old.

Beck has charted historical places at the test site, and Schofield, a military archaeologist, has recorded Greenham Common, site of the Women's Peace Camp and anti-nuclear protests west of London, from 1981 to 2000. Realizing their work converged, they began planning the project after discussions three years ago at the World Archaeology Congress in Cape Town, South Africa.

"We thought it was important," Beck said. "People think (anti-nuclear activists) just take down their tents and leave. I don't think they realize how much they used the landscape to express their views."

She said logging the site marks the first time she's been involved in an archaeological recording of a place that's in continued use.

The camp and its sweat lodges are expected to be used later this month for the annual Desert Lenten Experience and Western Shoshone gatherings.

"Certainly this camp is very important. It's the other side of the picture of the testing program," Beck said.

Besides using a variety of rocks found in the Mojave Desert to shape peace symbols, doves, stars and walkways to tent sites, activists painted graffiti and pictographs inside culvert tunnels that channel runoff under U.S. Highway 95. One script across a tunnel wall reads, "U cannot kill everything with your nuclear grey paint cover-up because real eyes realize real lies."

Beck said she thought a lot about the aspect of including graffiti spray-painted by peaceniks in their research and concluded that "there are places where modern-day graffiti are important," such as the wall around Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion in Tennessee.

"It's the idea of people putting something out there for all the people to read and try to understand their feelings," she said.

Peace Camp, as it became known around 1986, was a mecca for downwinders, atomic veterans, Japanese bombing survivors, former Soviet anti-nuclear activists, religious groups, American Indians and native people from the South Pacific and other parts of the world where nuclear weapons have been tested.

Communal lifestyle prevailed at the camp where drummers pounding monotonic rhythms provided the backdrop for rallies. The atmosphere was a mix of Woodstock and nonviolent civil disobedience actions.

Celebrities such as actors Martin Sheen and Ed Asner and Daniel Ellsberg of the "Pentagon Papers" fame joined in the protests. It was home base for the American Peace Test, the nation's largest anti-nuclear group.

Across the road, from 1951 until 1992, the Rhode Island-size Nevada Test Site was the continental proving grounds where 100 atmospheric atomic bombs and 828 underground nuclear devices were detonated.

Two dozen of the tests were conducted jointly by the United States and the United Kingdom. Full-scale detonations stopped in September 1992 when the U.S. began a moratorium that's still in effect today.

From 1986 through April 1994, government records document 536 American Peace Test demonstrations near the test site involving 37,488 participants and 15,740 arrests.

The arrests usually were for trespassing or blocking roads. Sometimes, to avoid multiple arrests, test site and Nye County authorities would cite trespassers, drive them 140 miles northwest to Tonopah, then release them.

The largest American Peace Test demonstration occurred from March 12 through March 20, 1988. The Energy Department estimates there were as many as 8,800 total participants. Some 2,067 arrests were made.

Dubbed the "Reclaim the Test Site" demonstration, the event cost American Peace Test $130,000 to pay cooks, printers, bus drivers, portable toilet companies and ambulance medics. Disc jockey Casey Kasem used his limousine to give activists a ride from jail.

In compiling a thesis, Hugh Gusterson, associate professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said despite the large number of arrests, which was nearly four times the number of people arrested during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the demonstrations "remained almost unknown to most Americans since television stations tend not to be interested in stories in the middle of the desert."

Established in 1985, American Peace Test disbanded in 1994 after tax-deductible contributions had dwindled from $100,000 during the peak years of the 1980s to $15,000 in 1993.

Schofield's assessment of the anti-nuclear movement's role in ending nuclear testing: "I think it had an influence. I don't think I'd go as far as to say it brought an end to nuclear testing."

Stephanie Fraser, a former American Peace Test staff member who now lives in New York, said she is amazed and excited that archaeologists are interested in Peace Camp.

"I would love to be out there walking around, showing them what I know," she said.

As for symbols left by the hordes of anti-nuclear activists who came to Peace Camp, Fraser said, "The artwork was an expression of emotion they felt ultimately standing at the gates of hell.

"It's a tribute, a rightful inclusion of this perspective in the history of the nuclear era," she said.

Las Vegan Anthony Bondi, who served as archivist for American Peace Test, noted that finding any remnants from the demonstration heydays will be a challenging task because the aim of Peace Camp participants "was not to leave anything behind" after rallies.

"In the long time ahead, people may look back and say, how was it that so many residents of Nevada were indifferent, or ignorant of the public challenge of Yucca Mountain and how it relates to the Nevada Test Site," he said about the government's plans to bury nuclear waste in the mountain on the southwestern edge of the test site.

"Had there been a great deal more embrace of Peace Camp, perhaps Yucca Mountain" would not be on track for consideration in Congress this year.

"There were people who were making as much noise as they could to alert the public of what was ahead," Bondi said. "Peace Camp sort of tried to wake up the state."