Grave robbers almost destroyed one of the most important archaeological sites in Oklahoma

A miner’s pickaxe punched a hole through a wall of hard-packed soil 18 inches thick by drilling into a mound of earth on the banks of the Arkansas River in far eastern Oklahoma. The air hissed as it rushed to fill a hollow chamber below. And a foul odor escaped.

In the night, the miners quickly lowered a lamp, unveiling one of the most impressive archaeological finds in the history of the world, a burial chamber containing the greatest collection of Native American artifacts ever discovered in the United States. The Kansas City Star, in a headline published Dec. 15, 1935, described it as “A ‘King Tut’ Tomb in the Arkansas Valley.”

And the miners were there to rob it.

They had originally come to the now-famous Spiro Mounds looking for gold in 1933, the depths of the Great Depression. Six men called themselves the Pocola Mining Co. and pitched in $50 each to lease the site from the property owner, who needed the money to pay his mortgage and to treat a grandson’s tuberculosis, according to historian David La Vere’s 2007 book, “Looting Spiro Mounds.”

Instead of gold, at first, they found only small relics and skeletons. But collectors and souvenir hunters were willing to pay for the artifacts, so the miners kept digging.

Forrest Clements, an anthropology professor at the University of Oklahoma, seems to have been the first to realize what the miners were destroying.

Built over the course of several centuries, at least a dozen mounds stood near a vast central plaza, a seat of power for Caddoan-speaking tribes that once stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Virginia coast.

More than 1,100 tribal leaders are thought to have been buried there along with ceremonial relics, including elaborate jewelry, weapons, blankets, beads, and effigy pipes. All of it was being looted and sold off piecemeal, with no effort to document or preserve the site.

Professor Clements tried to buy out the lease, but the miners were still hoping to find gold buried under the mounds. So Clements persuaded the state Legislature to pass an antiquities act, one of the first laws of its kind in the United States to protect archaeological sites.

A sheriff’s deputy forced the digging to stop. But the miners sneaked back later and redoubled their efforts to reach the center of one of the largest mounds. And that’s where they found Oklahoma’s version of King Tut’s tomb.

“What followed was a feeding frenzy,” according to a 2013 article in 405 Magazine. “There was neither time nor inclination for photographs or sketches to be made of the layout or holdings in the central tomb.

Witnesses tell of beads, pearls and arrowheads spilled across the site, feather capes and elaborate weavings trampled, ancient cedar poles burned as firewood and human bones piled at the edge of the camp, where they soon crumbled to dust.”

The miners stole what they could, then packed the burial chamber with black powder and blew it up. Historians consider it one of the worst examples of looting and archaeological vandalism in U.S. history. But not all was lost.

Opening Feb. 12 at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, a new temporary exhibit will bring together 175 relics from Spiro, borrowed from various collections across the country. It will be the first time, and possibly the last, for these priceless artifacts to be reunited since they were taken from the mounds.

Closing May 9 in Oklahoma City, the exhibit will travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art in October and to the Dallas Museum of Art in April 2022.

“Our staff has worked for years to create a world-class, exciting and collaborative presentation of a people who have been overlooked for too long,” said Natalie Shirley, the Oklahoma City museum’s president, and CEO.

Oldest North American Rock Art May Be 14,800 Years Old

A rock engraved with ancient marks discovered on a dried-up lakebed in Nevada carries dated as of the oldest known petroglyphs in North America, at least 10,000 years old.

The petroglyphs found on limestone boulders near Pyramid Lake in northern Nevada’s high desert are similar in design to etchings found at a lake in Oregon that is believed to be at least 7,600 years old.

Unlike later drawings that sometimes depict a spear or antelope, the carvings are abstract with tightly clustered geometric designs – some are diamond patterns, others have short parallel lines on top of a long line.

Scientists can’t tell for sure who carved them, but they were found on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe’s reservation land.

“We initially thought people 12,000 or 10,000 years ago were primitive, but their artistic expressions and technological expertise associated with these paints a much different picture,” said Eugene Hattori, the curator of anthropology at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City who co-authored a paper on the findings earlier this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The petroglyphs could be as much as 14,800 years old, said Larry Benson, a geochemist who used radiocarbon testing to date the etchings and co-wrote the paper.

Radiocarbon testing dated the carbonate layer underlying the petroglyphs to roughly 14,800 years ago. Geochemical data and sediment and rock samples from adjacent Pyramid Lake show they were exposed to air from 13,200 to 14,800 years ago, and again from 10,500 to 11,300 years ago.

“Whether they turn out to be as old as 14,800 years ago or as recent as 10,500 years ago, they are still the oldest petroglyphs that have been dated in North America,” said Benson, a national research scientist emeritus for the U.S. Geological Survey and curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Natural History Museum in Boulder.

Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist with the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History, called it a significant discovery. He led recent excavations of obsidian spear points near Paisley, Ore., that he dated back 13,200 years, and noted that the bigger challenge is identifying who created the petroglyphs.

“When you get back into this time period, if you speak with Native Americans they will tell you they were made (created) there and that is obviously their people and their artwork,” Jenkins said. “But approaching it from a scientific point of view – what we can prove – at this point, it is impossible to connect these to any tribal group.”

William Cannon, a longtime archaeologist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who discovered the petroglyphs at Long Lake in Oregon, brought the Nevada site to Hattori’s attention years ago. He said they bore similarities to petroglyphs at nearby Winnemucca Lake, and Hattori began connecting the dots.

The etchings in Nevada and Oregon have relatively deep, carved lines dominated by linear, curved and circular geometrical designs. Some feature “tree-form designs” with a series of evenly spaced, vertically oriented V shapes bisected by a vertical line.

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Researchers have suggested the etchings represent various meteorological symbols, such as clouds and lightning, perhaps the Milky Way.

“But we really have nothing to go on for these particular petroglyphs that go back 10,000 or more years,” Hattori said.

Benson has no idea what they mean.

“When I looked at it, I said, ‘These things are incredibly beautiful.’ We have so much beautiful, old Native American stuff in the United States, but this shows it didn’t necessarily get more interesting or more pretty with time,” he said.

Ben Aleck, a co-author of the study who is the collection manager at the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe’s Museum and Visitor Center in Nixon, said he could not comment without permission from tribal leaders.

The Nine Mile Canyon in the Utah desert is the world’s longest & oldest ‘art gallery’

Situated in the desert of eastern Utah, The Nine Mile Canyon is the world’s longest art gallery. This canyon is home to tens of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs over a 40-mile stretch.

The canyon’s art was created by the culture of Fremont and the people of Ute and depicts everything from local wildlife to cultural displays and beliefs.

This site of over 10,000 pictures, as you can imagine, is a treasure trove of information for archaeologists and an opportunity for visitors to step back in time a thousand years ago. In the 1880s, this canyon was used to transport goods through the eastern Utah mountains.

A road was constructed through the canyon in 1886 to connect Fort Duchesne to the railroad line located in Price, Utah. However, today the canyon is primarily visited by tourists interested in learning more about the Ute and Fremont people.

The area is currently being appraised for the natural gas that lies within the Tavaputs Plateau. Development of this natural gas resource could impact local art, causing ongoing debates on how best to proceed.

The canyon formed from the small Nine Mile Creek, a tributary of the larger Green River which empties into Desolation Canyon. Although the creek is not a major body of water, it is one of the few year-round and reliable sources of water in an otherwise desert climate.

The Nine Mile Canyon consists of interbedded sandstone, mudstone and shallow water limestone. The changes in rock type record changes in the expansion and contraction of the ancient Lake Uinta.

The Green River Formation, which sits higher than the sandstone units used for petroglyphs is an Eocene sedimentary group. The formation is located in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah in the location of Nine Mile Canyon.

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The Green River Formation is the largest oil shale in the world with an estimated reserve of up to 3 trillion barrels of oil. This is larger than the entire oil resource in Saudi Arabia and holds a significant portion of the United States oil resources.

Why, then, have you likely never heard of the Green River Formation and oil and gas development therein? The hydrocarbons in the Green River Formation are in a solid form (as opposed to liquid or gaseous for most hydrocarbon development), which poses significant issues with development.

In order to unlock the oil one must heat the shale and essentially “cook” out the hydrocarbons, an incredibly expensive process.

In total, there are 10,000 individual images within Nine Mile Canyon located at over 1,000 archaeological sites. Many of the depictions were produced by the Fremont from 950 to 1250 AD.

The Fremont, advanced for their time, practised established agriculture, growing crops of corn and squash in the canyon floor. The Fremont build irrigation ditches along the canyon edges as a way to divert water to crop areas.

As we step forward to the 16th century the Utes dominated the region and added to the rock art that was previously created by the Fremont.

Several hundred years later in the late 19th century, there is the first mention of the Nine Mile Canyon in journals of American fur traders.

The petroglyphs and pictographs are carved and painted on an easily weathered sandstone, making the depictions vulnerable to destruction. The walls of the canyon are adorned with hunting scenes and a wide array of animals including birds, sheep, bison and lizards.

In 2004 the Nine Mile Canyon included on the National Trust for Historic Preservation list of America’s Most Endangered Places. This was largely due to increased natural gas development in the area and tourist activity.

Man who died of constipation 1,000 years ago ate grasshoppers for months

One of the worst instances of constipation in the annals of medicine was a native American living in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas between 1,000 and 1,400 years ago. The man’s intestine swelled to six times its usual size due to an inflammation, which made it impossible to digest normal food properly.

Eventually, this horrible illness, known as ‘megacolon‘, caused the man to die. Centuries later,  his remains, mummified by the arid conditions, were found in a rock shelter close to the junction between the Rio Grande and Pecos Rivers in South Texas.

Yet there is a positive side to this tale as well. Scientists also discovered that, after examining the mummy, during the last two or three months of his life, the man ate a diet of grasshoppers whose legs had been removed.

Since his condition must have made it almost impossible to walk and procure food for himself, it’s likely that the man was fed by somebody else, perhaps family or other members of his community. It’s one of the earliest bits of evidence of hospice care.

“They were taking off the legs,” said Karl Reinhard, a professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. “So they were giving him mostly the fluid-rich body — the squishable part of the grasshopper.

In addition to being high in protein, it was pretty high in moisture. So it would have been easier for him to eat in the early stages of his megacolon experience.”

The Skiles mummy from Texas, named after Guy Skiles, the person who first discovered it in 1937, had been stored in various private and public museums.

More recently, in 2003, Reinhard and colleagues published a study in which they reported that the mummy contained 1,2 kilograms (2.6 pounds) of faeces in its huge colon, along with a large quantity of unprocessed food.

This led the researchers to conclude that the unfortunate man was infected with the parasite-borne Chagas disease and suffered from severe malnourishment due to the fact that his body was unable to process food.

In their new study, Reinhard’s team revisited the Skiles mummy, this time using scanning electron microscopy, which offered new clues about the man’s diet during his twilight days.

The researchers examined phytoliths, tiny plant tissue structures that remain intact even after the rest of the plant decays and which are so robust they normally survive the rough, bumpy ride through the human intestinal tract. But in the case of this mummy, the researchers were astonished by the phytoliths found inside it.

“The phytoliths were split open, crushed. And that means there was incredible pressure that was exerted on a microscopic level in this guy’s intestinal system, which highlights, even more, the pathology that was exhibited here,” Reinhard said. “I think this is unique in the annals of pathology — this level of intestinal blockage and the pressure that’s associated with it.”

This most recent analysis of the Skiles mummy will appear in a forthcoming chapter of “The Handbook of Mummy Studies,” which also includes best practices for preparing and analyzing the contents of mummified intestines.

In the same handbook, Reinhard also described two other mummies who also received special care during their last days.

One of the mummies belongs to a 5 to a 6-year-old child who was buried between 500 and 1,000 years ago in Arizona’s Ventana Cave by the Hohokam people. The third mummy, of an even younger child, was buried roughly 750 years ago in southern Utah.

Mysterious message in a bottle found 126 years later hidden inside the wall of Boston building

A bottle containing a mysterious 126-year-old note was recently found hidden away inside the wall of a building in Boston.

A person living in the Back Bay near Commonwealth Avenue found the bottle tucked into a space between their fireplace flue and an interior wall, according to the Boston Archaeology Program.

Photos shared on Facebook showed a rolled-up piece of paper stuffed inside an old “N. Simons” rye whiskey bottle. The label read, “Importer and Wholesale Liquor Dealer” and had the address “31 & 33 Castle St., Boston” printed on it.

The note inside the bottle had the name “Tom Ford” scrawled on it, along with the phrase “6 on Shea.”

It was dated Sept. 23, 1894.

“We have a mystery for the hive mind this week! A Boston resident found this amazing message in a bottle tucked into the space between their fireplace flue and an interior wall, presumably placed there by past builders,” the social media post read. “Anybody have any ideas about N. Simons, Tom Ford, or “6 on Shea?”

One Facebook user suggested that the note was evidence of secretive “drinking and gambling.”

Another user commented, “There was a (very short-lived) professional football/soccer league in 1894- one of the captains was Dennis Shea.”

As of Wednesday, the origin and meaning behind the note were unclear.