Spending two months and 10,000 miles traveling throughout the American West to visit and make work in response to contemporary and pre-contact land art is to engage the fundamental difference between learning from artifacts directly and learning from the mediated interpretations of words and images. Recent discussions of potential restoration of projects like the Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1970) and Double Negative (Michael Heizer, 1969) demonstrate a gap in the relationship between intent embodied in material (artifact) and the acculturated meaning of such works. This paper will present the experience of a new academic program in relation to the question of contemporary and pre-contact restoration in order to outline a method of reasoning directly with artifacts.