207-year-old whaling ship discovered in the Gulf of Mexico
The wreck of a 19th-century whaling ship has been identified on the sea bottom in the Gulf of Mexico. Its discovery was announced Wednesday (March 23) in a statement released by representatives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and their partners in the expedition.
This image of the try-works was taken from the shipwreck site of the whaler Industry by an NOAA ROV. The try-works was a cast-iron stove with two deep kettles that were used to render whale blubber into oil.
Researchers onboard NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer spotted the wreck on Feb. 25 at a depth of 6,000 feet (1,800 meters).
They used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to explore a seafloor location where the shipwreck had previously been glimpsed, but not investigated, in 2011 and 2017, and their search received additional guidance via satellite communication with a scientific team onshore, according to the statement.
A team of experts then confirmed that the vessel was the Industry, which sank May 26, 1836, while the crew was hunting sperm whales. It was built in 1815, and for 20 years, the 64-foot-long (19.5 meters) ship had pursued whales across the Gulf, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean, until a storm breached its hull and snapped its masts.
Though 214 whaling voyages crisscrossed the Gulf from the 1780s until the 1870s, this is the only known shipwreck in the region, NOAA representatives said.
The crew list for Industry’s last voyage was lost at sea, but past ship records show that among Industry’s essential crew were Native American people and free Black descendants of enslaved African people.
The discovery of the wreck could offer important clues about the role that Black and Native American sailors played in America’s maritime industry at the time, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves said in the statement.
“This 19th-century whaling ship will help us learn about the lives of the Black and Native American mariners and their communities, as well as the immense challenges they faced on land and at sea,” Graves said.
Life on a whaling ship would certainly have been challenging, with long hours, hard physical labour and poor food that was likely to be infested with vermin, according to the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.
Living conditions could also be extremely unpleasant; a whaler’s account from 1846 described the crew’s quarters, known as the forecastle, as “black and slimy with filth, very small and hot as an oven,” J. Ross Browne wrote in the book “Etchings of a Whaling Cruise,” according to the museum.
“It was filled with a compound of foul air, smoke, sea-chests, soap-kegs, greasy pans, [and] tainted meat,” Browne wrote.
This image of an anchor was taken from the 1836 shipwreck site of the whaler Industry in the Gulf of Mexico by the NOAA ROV deployed from NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, on Feb. 25, 2022.
A deep dive
NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer collects data on unknown or little-explored seafloor regions of the deep ocean, mapping seamounts and discovering mysterious forms of elusive marine life at depths from 820 to 19,700 feet (250 to 6,000 m), according to NOAA.
Past expeditions have revealed “mud monsters” in the Mariana Trench, the “most bizarre squid” an NOAA zoologist had ever seen, and a real-life SpongeBob and Patrick living side by side on the seafloor, Live Science previously reported.
Video from the ROV combined with Industry records enabled the scientists to confirm that they had discovered the long-lost whaling brig.
A mosaic of images from the NOAA video of the brig Industry wreck site shows the outline in sediment and debris of the hull of the 64-foot by 20-foot whaling brig.
Another clue that helped experts to identify Industry was that there was little onboard evidence of its whaling activities; when the ship was sinking, another whaling vessel visited the foundering Industry and salvaged its equipment, removing 230 barrels of whale oil, as well as parts of the rigging and one of the ship’s four anchors, according to the NOAA statement.
“We knew it was salvaged before it sank,” Scott Sorset, a marine archaeologist for the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and a member of the expedition’s shore team, said in the statement. “That there were so few artefacts on board was another big piece of evidence it was Industry.”
New research has also shed light on what happened to Industry’s crew on that final voyage.
Robin Winters, a librarian at the Westport Free Public Library in Massachusetts, unearthed an 1836 article from The Inquirer and Mirror (a Nantucket weekly newspaper) reporting that Industry’s crew was rescued by another whaling ship and brought to Westport.
That was a lucky turn of events for Industry’s Black whalers in particular, who could have been jailed under local laws had they reached shore with no proof of identity, said expedition researcher James Delgado, a senior vice president at the archaeology firm SEARCH.
“And if they could not pay for their keep while in prison, they would have been sold into slavery,” Delgado said in the statement.
Burnt seeds show people used tobacco 12,000 years ago
Four charred tobacco plant seeds found in an ancient Utah fireplace suggest early Americans may have been using the plant 12,300 years ago. The finding makes the first known use of tobacco some 9,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists found the seeds in the Great Salt Lake Desert
Researchers believe hunter-gatherers in the Great Salt Lake Desert may have sucked or smoked wads of the plant.
Until now, the earliest evidence of tobacco use was a 3,300-year-old smoking pipe discovered in Alabama.
Archaeologists discovered the millimetre-wide seeds at the Wishbone site, an ancient camp in the desert in what is now northern Utah.
There, they found the remnants of an ancient hearth that was surrounded by bone and stone artefacts. These included duck bones, stone tools, and a spear-tip bearing the remains of blood from a mammoth or an early form of an elephant.
The charred remains of one of the tobacco plant seeds
The tobacco plant is native to the Americas and contains the psychoactive addictive substance nicotine.
Tobacco was widely cultivated and dispersed around the world following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas at the end of the 15th Century.
“The tobacco seeds were a big surprise. They are incredibly small and rare to be preserved,” Daron Duke of the Far Western Anthropological Research Group told the New Scientist.
“This suggests that people learned the intoxicant properties of tobacco relatively early in their time here rather than only with domestication and agriculture thousands of years later.”
Today, the Great Salt Lake Desert is a large dry lake. But 12,300 years ago, the camp would have been on a vast marshland.
“We know very little about their culture,” Mr Duke said of the hunter-gatherers. “The thing that intrigues me the most about this find is the social window it gives to a simple activity in an undocumented past. My imagination runs wild.”
The largest Aztec temple was decorated with over 100 starfish
Aztec priests at Tenochtitlán offered a whole galaxy of starfish to the war god Huitzilopochtli 700 years ago, along with a trove of other objects from the distant edges of the Aztec Empire. Archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) recently unearthed the offering on the site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, in what is now Mexico City.
This imprint preserves details of the internal structure of the starfish, as well as its overall shape. It’s one of 164 starfish recently unearthed at the Templo Mayor site in Mexico City.
Ahuizotl, coast to coast
The offering included 164 starfish from a species called Nidorella armata, known less formally as the chocolate chip starfish because it’s mostly the colour of cookie dough, but it has dark spots. (It shares the nickname with the other chocolate chip sea star, Protoreaster nodosus, which provides an excellent argument in favour of scientific names.) Nidorella armata lives along the Pacific coastline from Mexico south to Peru, where it hangs out on shallow-water reefs of rock and coral.
For Tenochtitlán, the nearest source of chocolate chip starfish would have been nearly 300 kilometres away from the Aztec capital. Chunks of coral found in the same offering came from about the same distance away but in roughly the opposite direction—the western end of the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, these items came from the farthest eastern and western edges of the Aztec Empire, places that the Aztec ruler Ahuizotl had only recently conquered.
Ahuizotl took the throne in 1486, and he jumped straight into two major projects: renovating the capital, including the Templo Mayor, and expanding the borders of his empire. His campaigns nearly doubled the size of the Aztec Empire, stretching Aztec rule west to the Pacific coast of Mexico and southeast to Guatemala. All that conquest meant that the Aztecs could easily bring starfish from the Pacific and corals from the Gulf of Mexico, along with an assortment of marine shells (and even pufferfish) to Tenochtitlán to lay before their gods.
Conquistadors ruin everything
Back in the capital, Ahuizotl ordered the reconstruction of large parts of the city. His efforts included expanding the Templo Mayor, which in Aztec terms meant building a new, bigger outer layer over the top of the previous temple. (The prior construction was often ritually “killed” before the new one could be consecrated.) That’s convenient for modern archaeologists, who can date each layer of construction at the Templo Mayor.
The oldest part of the temple dates to around 1325, when a group of people called the Mexica migrated into the area surrounding what is now Mexico City. There, according to Mexica lore, their leaders saw an eagle perched on a prickly pear and eating a snake; it was the sign their priests had told them to expect from Huitzilopochtli, and it’s an image you might recognize from the modern Mexican flag. At the site, the Mexica built a city called Tenochtitlán, and from there, they ruled the Aztec Empire.
Huitzilopochtli shared the Templo Mayor with the rain and farming god Tlaloc; each god had his own shrine at the top of the pyramid, reached by separate staircases. Ahuizotl’s expansion, where archaeologists found the starfish offering, is the sixth layer of the Templo Mayor. Only one more layer would be added before the temple’s destruction.
Ahuizotl was the eighth ruler of the Aztec Empire and the last to rule before the Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernán Cortés, arrived and changed everything. Cortés arrived during the reign of Ahuizotl’s nephew, Moctezuma II, who died fighting the invaders. Moctezuma’s brother, who took the throne next, died of smallpox, a disease brought by the Spaniards. The throne passed to Ahuizotl’s son, Cuauhtémoc, who surrendered to Cortés in 1521, only to be tortured for the whereabouts of mostly nonexistent gold and silver. Cortés had Cuauhtémoc, the last ruler of the Aztec Empire, executed in 1525.
Seashells for the war god
By the time Ahuizotl’s son died, Cortés had already destroyed the Templo Mayor and had begun building a Christian cathedral in its place. Archaeologists rediscovered the buried remains of the temple in the 20th century, and they soon found that most of the seventh and final layer was too demolished to learn much from. The last well-preserved layer of the temple was the one Ahuizotl ordered built-in 1487. And that’s where archaeologists discovered the galaxy of starfish that the Aztec priests had once offered to Huitzilopochtli.
The offering had been placed in a round building called the Cuauhxicalco, which might have been where the remains of rulers like Ahuizotl were cremated. It’s in a part of the temple usually associated with Huitzilopochtli, based on historical descriptions and other archaeological finds, so archaeologists suggest that the starfish and other items were probably offerings to the war god.
Along with the starfish, seashells, and pufferfish, the offering included a resin figurine and a female jaguar holding an atlatl (a type of spear-thrower) in one claw.
This find is not the first time archaeologists working at the Templo Mayor site have found starfish among the offerings, but it’s the largest collection unearthed so far. And many of the starfish are larger than their modern descendants because global warming and centuries of harvesting by humans have caused the species to evolve toward a smaller body size.
One starfish, in particular, left behind a fossil-like imprint of not only its shape but its internal structures.
“It was, perhaps, one of the first stars that the Mexica priests placed in the offering, so when receiving the weight of the jaguar and all the elements, it sank into what is believed to be a layer of fibre below it, preserving the mark of its internal structure,” explained INAH in a press release. “This situation is unusual since the remains of the other 163 stars are scattered, due to the natural loss of their organic matter.”
Side note: What’s in a name?
If the name Ahuizotl sounds familiar to you and you’re not a student of Aztec history, you’re probably a My Little Pony fan or a tabletop RPG player. The Aztec ruler took his name from the name of a mythical creature that lived near lakes and in swamps. Reportedly, the creature looked a bit like a dog, except with monkey-like hands (including one at the end of its tail) and spiky fur. It also reportedly killed one of Cortés’ soldiers.
Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder both feature swamp-dwelling creatures called Ahuizotl, which bear a passing resemblance to the creature of Mexica legend. And a recurring villain in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was a dog-like, spiky-furred character named Ahuizotl. Now you know.
Ancient Mysteries Of Chicago: Is The Puzzling Waubansee Stone A Neglected Pre-Columbian Artifact?
One of the most fascinating and obscure artefacts in North America is tucked away in a Chicago museum. The Waubansee Stone is a huge glacial erratic granite boulder with a larger-than-life head sculpted upon its upper surface. The expertly fashioned relief carving shows the face of a man with a chin beard, depicted with his mouth open and eyes closed. On the top of the stone, just above the head, is a large drop-shaped bowl that once emptied through the head and out of the mout xxx , xxx vea,,00h, over the lower lip, to another drainage spout below the man’s goatee. There are also two connecting holes on either side of the boulder, presumably used as a line anchorage for a sea vessel.
The mysterious Waubansee Stone is a glacial rock that has first mentions in records from the first Fort Dearborn (1803-1812). This carved rock is speculated to predate European settlers to the Americas or could have been carved by a soldier at the fort.
All holes and drainage spouts are currently plugged with putty or other additions, suggesting there is no interest in a modern restoration. The mysterious face carving and associated cavities have given rise to speculation about its origins, including one theory that the stone was carved by prehistoric Mediterranean seafarers who used the 3,000-pound boulder as a mooring stone.
A closer view of the face carved on the Waubansee Stone shows the hole in the mouth where the liquid was designed to flow from the bowl on top.
Originally standing around 8 feet in height, the Waubansee Stone has mentioned in the first Fort Dearborn accounts as being located just beyond the stockade walls, along the shore of the Chicago River. Chicagoua (or Chicagou) was a local Indian word for the native garlic plant Allium Tricoccum, not an onion plant, that grew profusely along the banks of the Chicago River.
When the first fort was built in 1803, the Potawatomi Indians of southern Lake Michigan had been trading with white people for well over a century but were becoming increasingly hostile to the number of new settlers coming into the region and staking a claim on their land. President Jefferson, who was very interested in the Indiana Territory (the Indiana Territory included Illinois lands from 1800-1809), was anxious about its security.
He felt that an American military outpost should be established to protect the new frontier. He selected the mouth of the Chicago River as the site for a new fort. At that time there were several fur traders and their Indian wives living in the region. The fort was named after General Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War. It was built on the south side of the Chicago River where Michigan Avenue now crosses at Wacker Drive.
Skirmishes with the Potawatomi were on the rise, reaching a crescendo in 1812 when settlers and soldiers were massacred at the first Fort Dearborn (1803-1812) was burned to the ground by the enraged Indians.
The second Fort Dearborn was rebuilt in 1816-1817 and the Waubansee Stone was presumably reduced in size to be dragged into the fort’s parade grounds where it remained until the fort was dismantled. After that, the stone passed from collector to collector until it found a permanent home at the Fort Dearborn exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society.
The Waubansee Stone is on display in the Fort Dearborn exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society.
Historian Henry H. Hurlbut (1813-1890) developed the generally accepted theory about the stone’s origin in 1881, unsupported by any records or documentation. His belief, admittedly based on no evidence, has the stone being carved in the early 1800s by an unnamed soldier stationed at the original Fort Dearborn. Its face was supposedly fashioned after a friendly Native American Potawatomi Chieftain named Wabansee [1], and this appointed name stuck.
Hurlbut had only hearsay on which to base his observations, including the presumption that the Indians used the upper recess as a mortar to grind their corn. This accepted explanation has come under fire from several angles. For starters, the recess was intentionally plugged after the Indians supposedly used it, so it would have been an ineffective mortar because the corn would have drained through the mouth. Also, why would a frontier soldier, who was probably suspicious of the Potawatomi in the first place, spend many months to carve the likeness of their tribal leader? Aside from the fact that granite is one of the hardest stones to sculpt, the face is clearly the work of a master stone-cutter who must have devoted a considerable amount of time and labour to the job—hardly in keeping with the strenuous daily tasks of a common frontier soldier. Finally, Native Americans were not known to have grown goatees, nor did they ever carve in granite. But if not Hurlbut’s anonymous soldier or an Indian sculptor, then who crafted the mysterious features on the Waubansee Stone?
With more source material than Hurlbut had at his disposal, yet with an uncertain date and a possible grisly usage, fragments of evidence can be pieced together using various historians to arrive near the truth.
An article in the Chicago Tribune dated September 22nd, 1903 clearly illustrates the two opposing viewpoints clashing over the stone’s origin:
“The second school of historians and antiquarians is convinced that the so-called Waubansee Stone dates back hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years before even Father Marquette first visited the site of Chicago in 1673. They see in the tall boulder, with its deeply top, a sacrificial altar on which perhaps the mound builders of prehistoric America offered even human sacrifices, and they are ready to believe that the face carved on one side of the stone is a representation of an ancient idol—one of the far off gods to whom that mythical people poured libations and offered the sacrificial blood of animals. However that may be, there is no question of doubt that in the early days of Fort Dearborn, as far back as we have any record, that identical stone, practically the same as it is today, lay near the stockade of old Fort Dearborn.”
The diffusionist theory of the Waubansee Stone describes it as a sacrificial altar for ancient Celtic and Phoenician traders in the millennium before Christ.
All historians agree that the Mississippian Culture performed animal and human sacrifices high atop their platform mounds, but where this practice originated is unknown. The Aztec or Toltec people from Mexico may have influenced them, or perhaps an earlier seafaring people notorious for infant sacrifices were responsible. It is well known that the Phoenicians (and their Celtic allies) travelled across the ocean to “the Farthest Land” known as Antilla. The precise location of Antilla was a closely guarded secret because it contained the most valuable commodity to the Bronze Age people—copper.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the richest natural deposit of pure copper in the world. It may seem a long way to go for metal, but in the Bronze Age, copper was more prized than gold or silver since it was the primary alloy used in weapon and tool production. With profit as a clear motive for their journey, it makes sense that the Phoenicians would travel very far to export copper. It also makes sense that the Phoenicians would spread their religious practices with their voyages. An integral element of the Phoenician religion was infant sacrifice to appease pagan gods and win favour for whatever activity was at hand. At the height of Phoenician power—lasting a thousand years from 1,200 BCE until the Second Punic War—babies were taken to an outdoor sacred site, called a Tophet, where a young child was placed in a carved depression on an altar and had its’ throat slit.
Both the Celts and Phoenicians were known to sacrifice infant children of their enemies or barter with their trading partners to acquire a baby for this heinous ritual. In the case of the Waubansee Stone, the sacrificial blood would flow through the sculpture into the Chicago River as an offering to the water gods, thus ensuring a safe passage. The stone’s hideous purpose is evident in the closed eyes, an unusual style elsewhere, but recurring in surviving Phoenician art used for infant sacrifices. Moreover, the face depicts a chin beard, a personal grooming style of male Phoenicians.
The mouth of the Chicago River was a necessary transition stop before entering the narrow river network leading into the Mississippi and then down to the Gulf of Mexico. Ships would need to be reconfigured from open water safety to narrow river defense. Oars and shields would replace conspicuous sails. After arriving at the mouth of the Chicago River, the ancient explorers may have settled for a brief time, sailed onward, been killed off, or possibly assimilated with the native population. There was likely a small Tophet temple at this strategic crossroad of lake and river, which thousands of years later would grow up to be the third-largest city in the United States.
Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.
[1] Waubonsie, {Wah-bahn-see} a Potawatomi Chief.
Chief Waubansee Portrait: 1848
Waubonsie (1760-1848) was a leader of the Potawatomi Native American people. His name has been spelled in a variety of ways, including Waubansee, Wah-bahn-se, Waubonsee, Waabaanizii in the contemporary Ojibwe language, and Wabanzi in the contemporary Potawatomi language (meaning “He Causes Paleness” in both languages)
Waubansee was a chief who supported the British in the War of 1812. In 1814 he signed the Treaty of Greenville by which Potawatomi allegiance was transferred to the United States. In a series of treaties signed by Waubansee, Potawatomi lands around Lake Michigan were sold.
In 1835 Waubansee visited Washington, D.C., to sign the treaty which sold the last of the tribal lands and to accept land west of the Mississippi River. During this visit, his portrait was painted by Charles Bird King (1785-1862). The Potawatomi Nation moved to Kansas in the 1840s and settled in what is now Waubansee County, just east of Topeka. Waubansee’s portrait illustrates the Native American attraction to military costume. Coats,hats, and swords were often presented as gifts to prominent chiefs. Additionally, Waubansee wears a Presidential Peace Medal and large trade silver earrings.
460-Year-Old Hunting Bow Discovered Underwater in Alaska’s Lake Clark National Park
National Park Service employees made an unlikely discovery in the backcountry of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska this past September: a 54-inch wooden hunting bow that was found under 2 feet of water, but still intact.
NPS archaeologist Jason Rogers and Alaska State archaeologist Rich VanderHoek carefully inspect the bow.
Scientists and archaeologists are analyzing the hunting bow in an attempt to learn more about its origin and history. According to radiocarbon dating conducted by the NPS, the bow is estimated to be 460 years old, ranging in origin between 1506 and 1660. The real mystery lies not in how old the bow is, but where it came from.
Park officials found the antique weapon on Dena’ina lands, an Athabascan indigenous people whose ancestral lands cover much of South-Central Alaska, including a large portion of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve.
However, preliminary research suggests that the handcrafted bow might not be of Dena’ina origin. After consulting with Elders and comparing the bow with similar artefacts from that time period, experts believe the artefact has more in common with a Yup’ik or Alutiq style bow.
Lake Clark National Park and Preserve are located on Dena’ina lands in south-central Alaska.
The homeland of the Dena’ina, which comprises roughly 41,000 square miles along the coast of the Cook Inlet, is called the Denaʼina Ełnena, and it includes lands where present-day Anchorage is located. Dena’ina lands also cover much of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, including the lake itself, which is traditionally known as “Qizhjeh Vena”.
The Dena’ina culture, which prioritizes a connection to nature and respect for the wilderness, has a rich history in the Athabascan region.
“We call this ‘K’etniyi’ meaning ‘it’s saying something,” writes Karen Evanhoff, a cultural anthropologist for Lake Clark National Park and Preserve.
Anthropologists have also learned that the Dena’ina regularly interacted with indigenous peoples from neighbouring regions, including the Yup’ik who live in the coastal region of southwestern Alaska, from Bristol Bay along the Bering coast and up to Norton Sound.
This intercultural history would help explain how a Yup’ik bow might end up on Dena’ina homelands in the first place.
“For the Dena’ina people, trading and sharing knowledge with their Yup’ik neighbours as well as other groups such as the Tanana, Tlingit, Ahtna, Deg Hit’an and coastal residents of Prince William Sound and Kodiak was common,” the NPS explains.
Experts are still working to piece together the clues, however, and the cultural history of the bow is just one part of the puzzle.
Dr. Priscilla Morris takes a closer look at the bow with a hand lens.
Soon after it was discovered, the bow was transported to the Park Service’s Regional Curatorial Center in Anchorage, where experts have inspected the artefact and analyzed its natural origins. As part of this analysis, the NPS brought in Dr. Priscilla Morris, a wood identification consultant with the U.S. Forest Service.
“After inspecting the artefact, I am leaning towards spruce,” Morris told the NPS after taking a closer look at the bow. “Birch is also a suspected species, but I did not see any anatomical characteristics that lead me to believe birch over spruce.”
Morris explained that her hypothesis was based solely on what she could see underneath a hand lens and that a concrete identification would require looking at a cut-up sample underneath a microscope.
This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, however, as the NPS wants to preserve the bow and keep it intact for the time being. As NPS archaeologist Jason Rogers explained, these discoveries are rare in Alaska, especially when compared to Europe and other more developed parts of the world.
“In Alaska, we just don’t have that kind of development so it’s very rare,” Rogers told the local news earlier this week. “It’s very rare for us to come across material like this.”
Carved stone pillar found on B.C. beach identified as an Indigenous artifact
A carved stone pillar found at low tide on a beach in Victoria last summer is an Indigenous cultural treasure, the Royal B.C. Museum has confirmed.
The stone could be the same one mentioned by Lekwungen elders to German-American anthropologist Franz Boas in the late 1800s.
The museum is working with the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations to determine the most suitable home for the pillar carved with the features of a face, Songhees Chief Ron Sam said in an interview on Wednesday.
Over the years, many artefacts have been unearthed in the area, he said, but nothing has matched the 100-kilogram stone pillar.
“I can’t wait to find out more information from our elders,” said Sam, noting interactions with elders are limited now because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said Songhees and Esquimalt elders will guide the decision-making around whether and how the stone pillar may be displayed publicly.
A local resident, Bernhard Spalteholz, received a tip about the carved stone found along the beach below Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park last July and shared photos with the museum, said the museum’s archaeology curator Grant Keddie.
“I right away realized, my gosh, this is exciting,” Keddie said of the find.
Spalteholz did the right thing by contacting the museum to ensure it would be properly cared for, said both Keddie and Sam.
A local resident, Bernhard Spalteholz, received a tip about the carved stone found along the beach below Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park last July and shared photos with the museum, said the museum’s archaeology curator Grant Keddie.
Pillar may have stood at the edge of a cliff
Conservationists worked to protect the integrity of the stone, which was covered in algae after being submerged in seawater, said Keddie.
He speculates the pillar once stood near the edge of a cliff above the beach where it was found until parts of the cliff came down in a landslide.
“I think possibly some storm had turned [the stone] up,” he said. “It may have been buried further out to sea covered with seaweed and maybe only in recent years was shifted up onto this beach and then exposed.”
Radiocarbon dating is effective only on organic items such as bone and wood, but written and oral histories can provide insight into the stone’s significance, said Keddie.
It’s very likely a special stone that was used in rituals and ceremonies, he said, explaining that Coast Salish peoples had “weather specialists.”
They were believed to have “special powers to draw the salmon in when they were late, or you could undertake rituals [with] certain stones to change the weather to make it good for fishing, to make it worse for your enemies,” he said.
The stone could be the same one mentioned by Lekwungen elders to German-American anthropologist Franz Boas in the late 1800s, said Keddie.
“Indigenous elders told this very brief little one-liner about these stone figures down near Finlayson Point, right where this thing was found.”
The location of the discovery matches Boas’ description of that figure as being “not far” from the military gun batteries once found nearby, he said.
“I always wonder, are there more of them out there?” Keddie added.
Ancient Coast Salish war club discovered in Vancouver Island man’s backyard
Mark Lake found a little piece of history in his backyard while cleaning up after a storm last April.
Mark Lake found the Indigenous artefact on his property while cleaning up after a storm, and brought it to the K’omoks First Nation.
Lake, of Gartley Point near the seaside village of Royston in Vancouver Island, came across an interesting piece of wood sticking out from under his maple tree — which turned out to be an ancient Coast Salish war club.
After friends saw pictures of it, they directed Lake to the K’omoks First Nation.
Chief Nicole Rempel of the K’omoks First Nation says it was pretty exciting.
“I’ve worked with various people repatriating artefacts since 2013 for our nation and I hadn’t seen a piece like this, completely intact,” she said.
From left, Mark Lake, Chief Nicole Rempel and Mark’s wife Katie Lake. Rempel says the K’omoks First Nation is working with an archaeologist to learn more about the club, which she’s holding in this photo.
Rempel says the club is quite significant to the nation’s culture and that it’s always exciting when something can be returned to its “rightful place.”
“It helps us understand more about our ancestors in the way that we live, the tools that we created,” she said.
Mark and Katie Lake with Chief Nicole Rempel (right). Rempel says the artefact will help the K’omoks First Nation better understand its ancestors and history.
“It truly must have been a labour of love to have made something so intricate, and with so little tools, back in those times, so it really gives us a bit more information about who we were, who our ancestors were in the past,” she said.
Lake says he’s just as excited about returning the artefact and learning more about it from the nation.
“They’ve been very open with exchanging any information they have gleaned on it as to its history and where it may have come from and so that’s reward enough for us and we really enjoyed being part of the process,” he said on CBC’s All Points West.
Rempel says they are working with an archaeologist to determine more about the artefact.
“We can do some geotechnical testing on the club, or geochemistry, which would figure out what kind of stone it was made of and what region it came from or whether it was traded,” she said.
Rempel says what Lake did was commendable, as many people who find things like this don’t always bring them forward.
“I just really encourage everyone that finds an artefact or ancestral remains for that matter to reach out to the local Indigenous communities because it’s really just building our database of knowledge and identifying who we are and who we were,” she said.
Archaeologists stunned by ancient ‘death mask’ found in Mexican temple
Palenque is set amid lush forest and dense foliage in a slice of southern Mexico. It is not the largest Mayan city by any stretch, but it has been described as one of the most stunning. Its architecture and the accompanying carvings and sculptures are some of the finest surviving pieces of Mayan history, in a region where the civilisation once thrived.
Compared to other Maya settlements in Mexico, Palenque was technically advanced.
A sophisticated aqua-duct system provided its inhabitants with abundant spring water — just one of the many perks of living there.
In the seventh century AD, the city was ruled by the powerful king, Pacal the Great.
He had one of the longest reigns of any Maya monarch, taking the throne in 615 at the age of just 12, and ruled until his death aged 80.
Archaeology: Researchers were stunned on finding the ancient ‘death mask’
Maya: The Maya were an ancient civilisation that resided in Mexico
While in power he oversaw the construction of some of Palenque’s jaw-dropping sacred sites like the huge Central Palace.
Perhaps most importantly, he commissioned the construction of the now-iconic Temple of the Inscriptions.
The temple and the work archaeologists have carried out in and around it was explored during the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, ‘Sacred sites: Maya’.
In the mid-20th century, researchers discovered a relic that would give a “new insight” into what the Maya believed about the afterlife, according to the documentary’s narrator.
Palenque: While not the largest, Palenque is one of the best-preserved Maya cities
Excavating the temple floor, they uncovered a passage to a chamber deep within the pyramid.
It contained a sarcophagus covered by a stone lid — inside, lay the remains of an elite Mayan wearing a Jade “death mask”.
Hieroglyphs on the sarcophagus soon confirmed that the remains belonged to King Pacal, much to the surprise of the researchers.
This is because it meant that the temple housed the tomb of the great king himself. The narrator noted that while it is a place of burial, it is also “intended as a place of resurrection.”
Ancient history: Perfectly preserved carvings adorn many of the city’s walls and buildings
Pacal the Great: One of the Maya’s great kings left behind his intricately designed death mask
On the sarcophagus lid, the images illustrate a central Mayan belief that the Universe is made up of three levels: the Earth, the underworld and the heavens. Leaving this world, Pascal emerges from the underworld and is reborn into eternal life in the heavens in the engravings.
The narrator said: “This is the essence of Mayan religion.”
Later on, in 2018, archaeologists made yet another groundbreaking discovery at the site when they came across an ancient stucco mask unlike any other, thought to have been cast from Pacal’s face.
Unlike other artefacts found, however, it showed the king in old age, his wrinkles and other facial details clearly visible.
The 20-centimetre (7.8 inch) mask was found by a team with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) during an investigation of the temple’s ancient drainage system.
Diego Prieto, director of the institute, said: “Palenque continues to astonish us with everything it has to offer archaeological, anthropological, and historical research.”
Ancient tomb: Pacal’s tomb was found deep inside a chamber within the temple
Ceramic figures were also found alongside the mask, as well as decorated bones and the remains of several animals.
Experts believe these were most likely offerings made for the completion of the building’s reconstruction. Palenque eventually perished in the eight century AD, and became consumed by the jungle of cedar, mahogany, and sapodilla trees.
