Ancient Americans made art deep within the dark zones of caves throughout the Southeast

A group of recreational cavers explored a small, muddy stream tunnel south of Knoxville, Tennessee, on a cold winter day in 1980. They navigated a slippery mud slope and a tight keyhole through the cave wall, trudged through the stream itself, ducked through another keyhole and climbed more mud. Eventually, they entered a high and relatively dry passage deep in the cave’s “dark zone” – beyond the reach of external light.

On the walls around them, they began to see lines and figures traced into remnant mud banks laid down long ago when the stream flowed at this higher level. No modern or historic graffiti marred the surfaces. They saw images of animals, people and transformational characters blending human characteristics with those of birds, and those of snakes with mammals.

Ancient cave art has long been one of the most compelling of all artefacts from the human past, fascinating both to scientists and to the public at large. Its visual expressions resonate across the ages as if the ancients speak to us from deep in time. And this group of cavers in 1980 had happened upon the first ancient cave art site in North America.

Since then archaeologists like me have discovered dozens more of these cave art sites in the Southeast. We’ve been able to learn details about when cave art first appeared in the region, when it was most frequently produced and what it might have been used for. We have also learned a great deal by working with the living descendants of the cave art makers, the present-day Native American peoples of the Southeast, about what cave art means and how important it was and is to Indigenous communities.

Cave art in America?

Few people think of North America when they think about ancient cave art. A century before the Tennessee cavers made their own discovery, the world’s first modern discovery of cave art was made in 1879, at Altamira in northern Spain. The scientific establishment of the day immediately denied the authenticity of the site.

Subsequent discoveries served to authenticate this and other ancient sites. As the earliest expressions of human creativity, some perhaps 40,000 years old, European palaeolithic cave art is now justifiably famous worldwide.

But similar cave art had never been found anywhere in North America, although Native American rock art outside of caves has been recorded since Europeans arrived. Artwork deep under the ground was unknown in 1980, and the Southeast was an unlikely place to find it given how much archaeology had been done there since the colonial period.

Nevertheless, the Tennessee cavers recognized that they were seeing something extraordinary and brought archaeologist Charles Faulkner to the cave. He initiated a research project there, naming the site Mud Glyph Cave. His archaeological work showed that the art was from the Mississippian culture, some 800 years old, and depicted imagery characteristic of ancient Native American religious beliefs. Many of those beliefs are still held by the descendants of Mississippian peoples: the modern Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Coushatta, Muscogee, Seminole and Yuchi, among others.

After the Mud Glyph Cave discovery, archaeologists here at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville initiated systematic cave surveys. Today, we have catalogued 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. There are also a few sites known in Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.

What did they depict?

There are three forms of southeastern cave art.

• Mud glyphs are drawings traced into pliable mud surfaces preserved in caves, like those from Mud Glyph Cave. 

• Petroglyphs are drawings incised directly into the limestone of the cave walls.

• Pictographs are paintings, usually made with charcoal-based pigments, placed onto the cave walls.

Sometimes, more than one technique is found in the same cave, and none of the methods seems to appear earlier or later in time than the others. Some southeastern cave art is quite ancient. The oldest cave art sites date to some 6,500 years ago, during the Archaic Period (10,000-1000 B.C.). These early sites are rare and seem to be clustered on the modern Kentucky-Tennessee state line. The imagery was simple and often abstract, although representational pictures do exist.

Cave art sites increase in number over time. The Woodland Period (1000 B.C. – A.D. 1000) saw more common and more widespread art production. Abstract art was still abundant and less worldly. Probably more spiritual subject matter was common. During the Woodland, conflations between humans and animals, like “bird-humans,” made their first appearance.

The Mississippian Period (A.D. 1000-1500) is the last precontact phase in the Southeast before Europeans arrived, and this was when much of the dark-zone cave art was produced. The subject matter is clearly religious and includes spirit people and animals that do not exist in the natural world. There is also strong evidence that Mississippian art caves were compositions, with images organized through the cave passages in systematic ways to suggest stories or narratives told though their locations and relations.

Cave art continued into the modern era

In recent years, researchers have realized that cave art has strong connections to the historic tribes that occupied the Southeast at the time of the European invasion. In several caves in Alabama and Tennessee, mid-19th-century inscriptions were written on cave walls in Cherokee Syllabary.

This writing system was invented by the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah between 1800 and 1824 and was quickly adopted as the tribe’s primary means of written expression.

Cherokee archaeologists, historians and language experts have joined forces with nonnative archaeologists like me to document and translate these cave writings. As it turns out, they refer to various important religious ceremonies and spiritual concepts that emphasize the sacred nature of caves, their isolation and their connection to powerful spirits. These texts reflect similar religious ideas to those represented by graphic images in earlier, precontact time periods.

Based on all the rediscoveries researchers have made since Mud Glyph Cave was first explored more than four decades ago, cave art in the Southeast was created over a long period of time.

These artists worked in ancient times when ancestral Native Americans lived by foraging in the rich natural landscapes of the Southeast all the way through to the historic period just before the Trail of Tears saw the forced removal of indigenous people east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.

As surveys continue, researchers uncover more dark cave sites every year – in fact, four new caves were found in the first half of 2021. With each new discovery, the tradition is beginning to approach the richness and diversity of the Paleolithic art of Europe, where 350 sites are currently known. That archaeologists were unaware of the dark-zone cave art of the American Southeast even 40 years ago demonstrates the kinds of new discoveries that can be made even in regions that have been explored for centuries.

Melting glacier reveals forest entombed by ice 1,300 years ago in southern Alaska

Remnants of a grand forest that vanished 1,300 years ago have begun to reappear in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park.

The ancient trees that populated the forest are tumbling from the receding Exit Glacier, and they’re showing up along the banks of Exit Creek.

A photo shared by park officials shows one such tree was recently found lodged in rocks, its bark and limbs scraped away by centuries locked in ice.

“The log pictured here might at first seem to be just another piece of driftwood coming down Exit Creek, but it tells a much more interesting story,” the park wrote in a Sept. 8 Facebook post.

“This section of wood was once part of an ancient forest that was entombed by Exit Glacier around 1300 years ago, sometime between AD 641-771. As the glacier has continued to melt back these pieces of wood are slowly being uncovered.”

Scientists refer to such debris as interstadial wood, from forests that “thrived prior to the last ice age.” The forests grew over decades-long periods “between glacial advances when local conditions were temporarily conducive to forest growth,” NPS officials say.  

The driftwood is often dismissed by tourists as recently fallen trees, but it offers “a unique opportunity to experience and understand the dynamic power of glaciers,” the park says.

Kenai Fjords National Park, created in 1980, describes itself as “a land where the ice age lingers.” “Nearly 40 glaciers flow from the Harding Icefield, Kenai Fjords’ crowning feature.

Wildlife thrives in icy waters and lush forests around this vast expanse of ice,” the park says. “Today, shrinking glaciers bear witness to the effects of our changing climate.” 

Exit Glacier has been receding since the 1800s at “roughly 3 feet a year, based on soil and tree-ring analysis,” according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor.

“Now the glacier is retreating faster, much faster, in winter and summer,” the site reported. The glacier is now receding nearly 300 feet annually, exposing sections of land that were covered for centuries, the NPS reports.

Researchers discover four dinosaurs in Montana

A team of palaeontologists from the University of Washington and its Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture excavated four dinosaurs in northeastern Montana this summer. All fossils will be brought back to the Burke Museum where the public can watch palaeontologists remove the surrounding rock in the fossil preparation laboratory.

The four dinosaur fossils are the ilium—or hip bones—of an ostrich-sized theropod, the group of meat-eating, two-legged dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and raptors; the hips and legs of a duck-billed dinosaur; a pelvis, toe claw and limbs from another theropod that could be a rare ostrich-mimic Anzu, or possibly a new species; and a Triceratops specimen consisting of its skull and other fossilized bones.

Three of the four dinosaurs were all found in close proximity on Bureau of Land Management land that is currently leased to a rancher.

In July 2021, a team of volunteers, palaeontology staff, K-12 educators who were part of the DIG Field School program and students from UW and other universities worked together to excavate these dinosaurs.

The fossils were found in the Hell Creek Formation, a geologic formation that dates from the latest portion of the Cretaceous Period, 66 to 68 million years ago. Typical paleontological digs involve excavating one known fossil.

However, the Hell Creek Project is an ongoing research collaboration of palaeontologists from around the world studying life right before, during and after the K-Pg mass extinction event that killed off all dinosaurs except birds.

The Hell Creek Project is unique in that it is sampling all plant and animal life found throughout the rock formation in an unbiased manner.

“Each fossil that we collect helps us sharpen our views of the last dinosaur-dominated ecosystems and the first mammal-dominated ecosystems,” said Gregory Wilson Mantilla, a UW professor of biology and curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Burke Museum. “With these, we can better understand the processes involved in the loss and origination of biodiversity and the fragility, collapse and assembly of ecosystems.”

All of the dinosaurs except the Triceratops will be prepared in the Burke Museum’s fossil preparation laboratory this fall and winter.

The Triceratops fossil remains on the site because the dig team continued to find more and more bones while excavating and needs an additional field season to excavate any further bones that may be connected to the surrounding rock. The team plans to finish excavation in the summer of 2022.

Called the “Flyby Trike” in honour of the rancher who first identified the dinosaur while he was flying his aeroplane over his ranch, the team has uncovered this dinosaur’s frill, horn bones, individual rib bones, lower jaw, teeth and occipital condyle bone—nicknamed the “trailer hitch,” which is the ball on the back of the skull that connects to the neck vertebrae.

The team estimates approximately 30% of this individual’s skull bones have been found to date, with more potential bones to be excavated next year.

The Flyby Trike was found in hardened mud, with the bones scattered on top of each other in ways that are different from the way the bones would be laid out in a living animal.

These clues indicate the dinosaur likely died on a flood plain and then got mixed together after its death by being moved around by a flood or river system, or possibly moved around by a scavenger like a T. rex, before fossilizing. In addition, the Flyby Trike is one of the last Triceratops living before the K-Pg mass extinction. Burke palaeontologists estimate it lived less than 300,000 years before the event.

“Previous to this year’s excavations, a portion of the Flyby Trike frill and a brow horn were collected and subsequently prepared by volunteer preparators in the fossil preparation lab.

The frill was collected in many pieces and puzzled together fantastically by volunteers. Upon puzzling the frill portion together, it was discovered that the specimen is likely an older ‘grandparent’ triceratops,” said Kelsie Abrams, the Burke Museum’s palaeontology preparation laboratory manager who also led this summer’s fieldwork.

“The triangular bones along the frill, called ‘epi occipitals,’ are completely fused and almost unrecognizable on the specimen, as compared to the sharp, noticeable triangular shape seen in younger individuals. In addition, the brow horn curves downwards as opposed to upwards, and this feature has been reported to be seen in older animals as well.”

Amber and seed pods were also found with the Flyby Trike. These finds allow paleobotanists to determine what plants were living alongside Triceratops, what the dinosaurs may have eaten, and what the overall ecosystem was like in Hell Creek leading up to the mass extinction event.

“Plant fossil remains from this time period are crucial for our understanding of the wider ecosystem. Not only can plant material tell us what these dinosaurs were perhaps eating, but plants can more broadly tell us what their environment looked like,” said Paige Wilson, a UW graduate student in Earth and space sciences. “Plants are the base of the food chain and a crucial part of the fossil record. It’s exciting to see this new material found so close to vertebrate fossils!”

Museum visitors can now see palaeontologists remove rock from the first of the four dinosaurs—the theropod hips—in Burke’s palaeontology preparation laboratory. Additional fossils will be prepared in the upcoming weeks. All four dinosaurs will be held in trust for the public on behalf of the Bureau of Land Management and become a part of the Burke Museum’s collections.