Category Archives: NORTH AMERICA

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Ancient Maya Worshipped ‘Batman God’ 2,500 Years Ago

Ancient Maya Worshipped ‘Batman God’ 2,500 Years Ago

A peculiar religious cult grew up among the Zapotec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico in 100 A.D.

The dangerous cave-dwelling bat creature – which the Zapotecs believed represented night, death, and sacrifice – was eventually adopted into the pantheon of the K’iche’, a Mayan tribe inhabiting modern-day Guatemala and Honduras. The legends of the bat god were later recorded in Popol Vuh, a Mayan sacred book.

Camazotz, which translates to ‘death bat‘ (K’iche’ word ‘kame‘ means “death”, while ‘sotz’ means “bat”), originated deep in Mesoamerican mythology as a dangerous cave-dwelling bat creature.

The K’iche’ identified the bat-deity with their god Zotzilaha Chamalcan, the god of fire. Camazotz, which inhabited Xibalbá, is also commonly depicted holding a sacrificial knife in one hand and a human heart or sacrificial victim in the other.

Templo Mayor, located in downtown Mexico City, has an adjacent museum that displays artifacts and renditions of items from the Mesoamerican civilizations. The top floor of this museum contains a recreated statue of Camazotz.

One of the most prominent and commonly mentioned features of the Camazotz is “a nose the shape of a flint knife”, which could be an exaggerated interpretation of the nose-leaf possessed by members of the Phyllostomidae or leaf-nosed bats.

Maya sculpture that depicts the vampire bat god, Camazotz.

Traces

In 1988, a fossil of a giant vampire bat was discovered in the Mongas province of Venezuela. The bat was larger than the modern vampire bat by 25% and was dubbed D. Draculae.  Its recent age and large range suggest that the bat could have co-existed with the K’iche’, giving rise to the legends of the Camazotz.

In 2000, a tooth from D. Draculae was found in Argentina – much farther south of the modern range of the Desmodus genus. The latest age found for a D. Draculae site is circa 1650 AD. These dates make it very possible that D. Draculae coexisted with humans in South America and Central America.

The common vampire bat, D. Rotundus, has an eight-inch wingspan. Since D. Draculae was 25% larger, it would have required more blood and probably would have attacked larger animals – and possibly even humans. It is undoubtable that an attack by a rare giant bat would give rise to legends of supernatural monsters.

In 2014, Warner Brothers gathered as many as 30 artists to reinterpret Batman on the occasion of its 75th anniversary. Christian Pacheco, one of the artists, recalled that Batman is not the first reference of an enigmatic anthropomorphic being with a man’s body and a bat’s head. It is was indeed the feared Camazotz.

Pacheco’s Yucatán [Mexico]-based design firm Kimbal made a replica of the bust with which Bruce Wayne disguises the character and molded it with Maya motifs and references to the ancient Camazotz.

The designed gave a heads up to many people that the very first batman can be traced back to the ancient Maya, more than 2,500 years ago.

Maya style Batman suit recreated by Christian Pacheco

In the Popol Vuh, Camazotz was a common name making reference to the bat-like monsters that the Mayan twin heroes Hunahpú and Ixbalanque stumbled across, during their trials in Xibalbá, the Mayan underworld.

Camazotz was said to attack victims by the neck and decapitate them. In the Popol Vuh, it is recorded that the deity decapitated Hunahpú and is also one of the four animal demons responsible for wiping out mankind during the age of the first sun.

National Geographic Writes:

“The Maya hero twins were placed inside a bat house—a cave filled with death bats, called Camazotz by the Maya.

The bats had snouts like blades, which they used to kill people and animals. To escape, the twins crawled inside their blowguns, and all night long the bats terrorized them. Toward dawn, one of the twins said he would check to see if it was safe to leave. He raised his head out of his gun—and promptly had it cut off by a Camazotz.”

In 2018, it was reported that two species of carnivorous bats were found from southern Mexico to Bolivia and Brazil – the woolly bat (the toothy, hungry bats with long bunny-like ears and a lance-shaped nose leaf found in a Maya temple) and the spectral bat.  According to biologist Rodrigo Medellín, woolly and spectral bats are likely the bats described in the Popol Vuh:

“These bats do the same thing. They stalk their prey, land on them with half-spread wings, locking them with the thumb claws, and deliver a death bite to the back or top of the head. Camazotz was not an invention.”

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

The Forgotten Culture That Built America’s “Pyramids” of Dirt

The Forgotten Culture That Built America’s “Pyramids” of Dirt

American history students know of the ancient Egyptians,  the Incas of Peru, and of the Aztecs of Mexico, but less know a major civilization that extends through the eastern United States from around 800 to 1600 CE. Meet the Mississippians.

Years before the European immigrants planted the seeds of modern civilization in North America, the Mississippi culture spread from the Florida Panhandle all the way to southern Minnesota.

Defining the dozens of discovered settlements are distinct earthwork mounds that resemble pyramids of dirt. Various structures were regularly constructed atop these mounds. Chiefs presided over individual settlements and were thought to regulate trade, particularly of maize, which archaeologists believe was the primary staple crop.

The rise of centralized agriculture is the most agreed-upon explanation for the evolution of the Mississippian culture. Settlements were set up near rivers to take advantage of fertile farmland. Food was grown and shared under the altruistic watch of the settlement chief.

With a reliable source of food, the Mississippians could undertake other pastimes. Metalworkers fashioned stone tools for farming and etched ornate copper plates for adornment.

Three examples of Mississippian culture avian themed repousse copper plates. The righthand figure is from the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. The left-hand figure Wulfing plate A, one of Wulfing cache from Malden, Missouri. The middle plate is Rogan plate 1, from Etowah Mounds in Georgia. Examples of this type of artwork have been found as artifacts in several states in the Midwest and Southeast.

Artists crafted necklaces and pottery out of riverine shells. Spectators watched athletes compete in a game known as chunkey, in which players tried to hurl a spear closest to a thrown disc-shaped stone.

Chunkey was often played in immense arenas. The largest was in the Mississippian capital of Cahokia, situated in southern Illinois just across the Mississippi River from modern-day St. Louis. At its peak around 1100 CE, the city was home to as many as 20,000 people.

Most residents lived in humble, thatched-roof dwellings near the outskirts of the sprawling city, but they would regularly venture to the heart of the settlement to visit markets set up in the four open plazas or to view religious ceremonies.

Cahokia featured at least 109 raised mounds, the largest of which had a base almost as expansive as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Atop these mounds were grand structures. Some may have been temples, places of politics,  or finer dwellings for higher-status residents.

An artist’s re-creation of Cahokia with the great Monk’s Mound in the distance.

The Mississippians thrived through the 13th century, but started declining thereafter. Floods associated with the Little Ice Age may have swamped their signature mounds. Other climatic events may have threatened the foundational maize agriculture that maintained their flourishing society.

Cahokia was abandoned in the later half of the fourteenth century, sending migrants roaming across the land to seek new starts at other settlements.

The diaspora brought with it political turmoil and warfare. By the time Europeans began actively colonizing North America in the 16th century, the Mississippian culture was torn, ragged, and disconnected, a shadow of its former self.

While there has been no shortage of beautiful artifacts recovered from Cahokia and other Mississippian settlements, there’s been a complete absence of any form of writing. It seems the Mississippians lacked a writing system.

This critical dearth of information helps explain why the Mississippians rarely make it into textbooks of American history, and why only 2,600 words are written about them on Wikipedia compared to 13,000 for Ancient Egypt.  

And so, we’re left wondering about the Mississippians… What were their names? What were their stories? What did they believe in? We may never know for sure.

CANADA, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Village in Canada: 8,000 years‘older than Egyptian pyramids’

Village in Canada: 8,000 years‘older than Egyptian pyramids’

Archaeologists on British Columbia’s Triquet Island have excavated an ancient settlement dating back some 14,000 years, to the last ice age.

Archaeologists working with the support of the Hakai Institute began excavations on Triquet Island last summer.

Since then, they have uncovered a number of artifacts linked to an ancient human settlement on the island, including fish hooks, a hand drill used to ignite fires, and a wooden device used to launch projectiles, called an atlatl.

Buried some 2.5 meters underground, beneath layers of soil and peat, they discovered something even more intriguing.

From the charred remains of an ancient hearth, the scientists used tweezers to painstakingly extract a few tiny flakes of charcoal.

In November, carbon dating of the flakes revealed the hearth was some 14,000 years old—thousands of years older than ancient Rome or the Egyptian pyramids. In fact, the Triquet Island village dates back to the period of the last ice age, making it one of the oldest settlements ever discovered in North America.

Alisha Gauvreau displays one of the artifacts from the site.
Researchers from the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria, with local First Nations members, unearthed revealing artifacts on Triquet Island, around 310 miles northwest of Victoria, Canada. They’ve found fish hooks, spears, and tools to ignite fires. Thanks to the discovery of the ancient village last year, researchers now think a massive human migration may have happened along British Columbia’s coastline.

The newly discovered settlement is about as old as the spear tip found in a mastodon skeleton on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in 1977. That notable discovery pushed back estimates of the earliest human occupation on the western coast of North America to around 13,800 years ago (about 800 years earlier than previously thought).

Discovery of the settlement may well impact our understanding of ancient human migration patterns, as it challenges the traditional story of how the first humans arrived in the Americas.

That theory argues that the earliest arrivals came to the region by crossing a land bridge connecting modern-day Siberia to Alaska some 13,000 years ago.

But according to more recent research, the land bridge route may not have offered enough resources to support the earliest migrants during their crossing. Instead, humans may have traveled via boat, and entered North America along the coast.

The find fits right in with the oral history of a First Nations government in British Columbia, the Heiltsuk Nation.

Alisha Gavreau, a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia and a researcher with the Hakai Institute, told the CBC that the Triquet Island settlement “really adds additional evidence” to the coastal entrance theory. “Archaeologists had long thought that…the coast would have been completely uninhabitable and impassible when that is very clearly not the case,” she notes.

Evidence from the site also shows the people who settled there were “rather adept sea mammal hunters.”

Gavreau presented her team’s findings at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some 3,000 scientists from around the world attended the five-day conference, held in Vancouver.

In addition to its impact on current thinking regarding human migration to North America, the discovery of the settlement is a key development for the Heiltsuk Nation.

“This find is very important because it reaffirms a lot of the history that our people have been talking about for thousands of years,” said William Housty, a member of Heiltsuk Nation.

Such an affirmation will likely help the community going forward, as it negotiates with the Canadian government about territorial rights.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Three 17th-Century Ships Found buried underneath in Old Town Alexandria Tell a Story of Colonial-Era Virginia

Three 17th-Century Ships Found buried underneath in Old Town Alexandria Tell a Story of Colonial-Era Virginia

Back in December 2015, a 300-year-old ship buried in Old Town Alexandria was first detected at a construction site for a new hotel.

Local archaeologists suspected that it may have originally been used to truck heavy cargo or was built for military purposes, the Washington Post’s Patricia Sullivan reported at the time.

Later research revealed that the ship had been built in Massachusetts sometime after 1741 and made its way to Virginia in the latter half of the century, where it was used as a landfill to create new real estate of the 17th-century shoreline.

Archaeologists in Alexandria, Virginia, have unearthed three 17th-century ships that were buried to extend the city’s land.

All three ships are believed to have been built in the mid-to-late 1700s and buried before 1798. A similar ship was discovered nearby at the Hotel Indigo site in late 2015.

“The combination of Revolutionary War-era ships, early building foundations, and thousands of other artifacts makes Robinson Landing one of the most archaeologically significant sites in Virginia,” said Eleanor Breen, acting City Archaeologist.

“The discoveries at this site have gained international attention, and the City is working with EYA to identify and preserve these important pieces of Alexandria’s history.”

Archaeologists were on hand to provide information and answer questions. The active construction site was not open to the public during the viewing, but many notable elements of the site were visible, including the most recent — and largest — ship discovery. The ships were covered before and after the viewing, in order to protect the wood from exposure.  

“Working in Alexandria for more than 20 years, we recognize and respect the rich history of the city and the importance of preserving discoveries of this kind,” said Evan Goldman, EYA LLC Vice President of Acquisition and Development.

“We’re committed to this unprecedented effort to protect the archaeological history of Old Town.  The results have gone well beyond what we expected, and we are thrilled by the significance of the findings and their unique ability to preserve the legacy of the city for years to come.”

The Alexandria Archaeological Protection Code requires developers to have archaeologists on-site to monitor all phases of ground disturbance.

This ensures that any historic features encountered during demolition and construction are dealt with properly so that Alexandria’s history is enriched through archaeological study.

As the development of the Alexandria waterfront continues, excavations have the potential to continue to unearth additional evidence of early wharves and piers, maritime vessels, early industries, and commercial and domestic activities.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

1,000-year-old ‘lost’ pyramid city in the heart of Mexico was as densely built as Manhattan

1,000-year-old ‘lost’ pyramid city in the heart of Mexico was as densely built as Manhattan

Archaeology might evoke thoughts of intrepid explorers and painstaking digging, but in fact, researchers say it is a high-tech laser mapping technique that is rewriting the textbooks at an unprecedented rate.

An ancient city as densely built up as Manhattan has been discovered in the heart of Mexico, thanks to pioneering imaging techniques. Experts used lasers to send beams of light from an aircraft to the ground below, measuring the reflected pulses to build up a map of the region (pictured)

The approach, known as light detection and ranging scanning (lidar) involves directing a rapid succession of laser pulses at the ground from an aircraft. The time and wavelength of the pulses reflected by the surface are combined with GPS and other data to produce a precise, three-dimensional map of the landscape. Crucially, the technique probes beneath foliage – useful for areas where vegetation is dense.

Earlier this month researchers revealed it had been used to discover an ancient Mayan city within the dense jungles of Guatemala, while it has also helped archaeologists to map the city of Caracol – another Mayan metropolis.

Now, researchers have used the technique to reveal the full extent of an ancient city in western Mexico, about a half an hour’s drive from Morelia, built by rivals to the Aztecs.

“To think that this massive city existed in the heartland of Mexico for all this time and nobody knew it was there is kind of amazing,” said Chris Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University who is presenting the latest findings from the study at the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin.

While less well known than the Aztecs, the Purépecha were a major civilisation in central Mexico in the early 16th century, before Europeans arrived and wreaked havoc through war and disease. Purépecha cities included an imperial capital called Tzintzuntzan that lies on the edge of Lake Pátzcuaro in western Mexico, an area in which modern Purépecha communities still live.

Using lidar, researchers have found that the recently-discovered city, known as Angamuco, was more than double the size of Tzintzuntzan – although probably not as densely populated – extending over 26 km2 of ground that was covered by a lava flow thousands of years ago.

Imaging revealed that Angamuco was laid out in an unusual configuration, with monuments like pyramids and plazas dotted around (left) eight zones on the edges of the city rather than concentrated as a focal point in the centre. Researchers found that the city (right) was more than double the size of Tzintzuntzan, the culture’s capital, at 10 square miles (26 sq km)

“That is a huge area with a lot of people and a lot of architectural foundations that are represented,” said Fisher. “If you do the maths, all of a sudden you are talking about 40,000 building foundations up there, which is [about] the same number of building foundations that are on the island of Manhattan.”

The team also found that Angamuco has an unusual layout. Monuments such as pyramids and open plazas are largely concentrated in eight zones around the city’s edges, rather being located in one large city centre. According to Fisher, more than 100,000 people are thought to have lived in Angamuco in its heyday between about 1000AD to 1350AD. “[Its size] would make it the biggest city that we know of right now in western Mexico during this period,” said Fisher.

First found by researchers in 2007, archaeologists initially attempted to explore Angamuco using a traditional “boots on the ground” approach, resulting in the discovery of about 1,500 architectural features over each square kilometre surveyed. But the team soon realised the rugged terrain meant it would take at least a decade to map the whole area.

Instead, since 2011 the lidar technique has been used to map a 35km2 area, revealing an astonishing array of features at high resolution, from pyramids and temples to road systems, garden areas for growing food and even ball courts.

So far more than 7,000 architectural features over a 4km2 area seen using lidar have been verified by the team on the ground, with excavations undertaken at seven locations to shed further light on the site.

The earliest evidence from the city, including ceramic fragments and radiocarbon dating of remnants from offerings, dates to about 900AD, with the city believed to have undergone two waves of development and one of collapse before the arrival of the Spanish.

Lidar has been used before by archaeologists to unearth hidden cities in the Americas. Earlier this month images were released by researchers from Brown University showing an ancient Mayan ‘megalopolis’ in Guatemala, which now lies buried beneath the jungle foliage

Fisher adds that lidar is likely to lead to further developments. “Everywhere you point the lidar instrument you find new stuff, and that is because we know so little about the archaeological universe in the Americas right now,” he said. “Right now every textbook has to be rewritten, and two years from now[they’re] going to have to be rewritten again.”

Fisher has also used lidar to explore a remote area of the Mosquitia region of north-eastern Honduras, shedding light on what is now known as the City of the Jaguar. This settlement, the team found, had terraces, water control features such as canals, and boasted about 10 plaza complexes, with the whole city stretching over three square kilometres.

“Many of these areas of the Americas that we see today that we think that we would classify as pristine tropical forests are really abandoned gardens,” says Fisher.

However, previous coverage of the work has proved controversial, with some saying claims of a “lost city” smack of colonialist rhetoric. Elizabeth Graham, professor of mesoamerican archaeology at University College London who was not involved in the projects, said the team’s work was impressive, and that lidar was backing up long-held suspicions about the size of archaeological settlements.

“Once it shows all traces of the land surface, we can interpret those, because you can tell what is natural and what is not,” she added. “It’ll show you terracing, where houses are – or at least structures of some sort – agricultural features, manipulated land – all of that.”

But, she said, while lidar can help to direct expeditions and digs, traditional techniques were still needed to unearth the details. “Ultimately we still have to get on the ground and then excavate,” she said.

CANADA, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

This Canadian Lake Hides an Underwater Ghost Town

This Canadian Lake Hides an Underwater Ghost Town

The Prairies are home to tons of hidden treasures, some of which are hiding right under our noses. Even though this lake is super popular and is located in a huge national park, few could ever guess a ghost town lies just beneath the waters.

The sunken city under Lake Minnewanka is a hidden treasure that few have seen and it’s waiting to be discovered.

Deep below the surface of the lake’s pristine waters is the sunken resort town of Minnewanka Landing. While it used to bustle with tourism and life, according to Parks Canada, its only residents are now trout and the occasional scuba diver.

Beneath the surface of Lake Minnewanka, located in Alberta, Canada, rests the remains of a former resort town.

The village was built way back in 1888 when the water levels were much lower. Soon, cottages sprung up, restaurants and hotels were built, and even a boat tour started ferrying travellers around the scenic lake. For a little while, life was great at Minnewanka Landing.

Over the years the town grew to include four avenues, three streets, dozens of cottages, numerous hotels and restaurants, and multiple sailing outfits that would take guests on boat excursions around the (much smaller) original lake.

It wouldn’t be until 1912 that the area’s landscape would start to evolve with the construction of a new dam—part of a Calgary Power Co. hydroelectric plant operation being set up downriver—resulting in the flooding of a good portion of Minnewanka Landing.

But while the town continued to thrive over the next two decades (42 lots were built to make way for additional cabin sites), it would finally meet its fate in 1941 with the building of a new dam, which raised the reservoir’s waters by 98 feet, engulfing everything in its wake.

“It was during the Second World War and everyone was hungry for power,” Bill Perry, an archeologist with Parks Canada, tells Smithsonian.com. “Calgary and the surrounding area were growing substantially during that point in time and required more power, so Lake Minnewanka was seen as an easy end.”

Today the reservoir hides a secret that many people will never get the chance to experience—unless they’re scuba divers, that is. Thanks to Lake Minnewanka’s glacier-fed, ice-cold waters, many structures of the former resort town still remain intact, including house and hotel foundations, wharves, an oven, a chimney, a cellar, bridge pilings, and sidewalks. (A full list of sites is available here.) Even the footings from the town’s original dam, built by the federal government in 1895, along with the footings from the dam built in 1912, remain visible.

Another notable site nearby is a native campsite that dates back thousands of years.

In recent years, archaeologists have uncovered spear points, arrowheads, ancient weapons known as atlatls, stone tools, and other implements used by indigenous tribes who once lived there.

“What is particularly interesting about that for me is looking at the whole area as a cultural landscape,” Perry says. “The area’s 13,000 years of continuous use absolutely fascinates me.”  

And Perry isn’t alone. He estimates that approximately 8,000 divers descend into the lake each year to explore its hidden past.

“Because of the cold, clear water, wood actually survives quite well down there,” he says. “That’s why it has become such a popular diving place for local scuba diving clubs. There’s just so much left to see.” 

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

15-year-old boy discovers lost ancient Mayan city

15-year-old boy discovers lost ancient Mayan city

A 15-year-old school student from Quebec, Canada, William Gadoury discovered something that archaeologists have been covering for centuries-a nearly abandoned Mayan civilization settlement, hidden deep within the Yucatan jungle of Southeastern Mexico.

Gadoury has named the newly discovered Mayan metropolis K’aak Chi, after reading about their 2012 apocalypse prediction.

He didn’t do it by hiring a bunch of expensive equipment, hopping on a plane, and slaving away on an excavation site – he discovered the incredible ruins from the comfort of his own home, by figuring out that the ancient cities were built in alignment with the stars above.

“I did not understand why the Maya built their cities away from rivers, on marginal lands and in the mountains,” Gadoury told French-Canadian magazine, Journal de Montréal.

“They had to have another reason, and as they worshipped the stars, the idea came to me to verify my hypothesis. I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities.”

Gadoury had been studying 22 Maya constellations for years before releasing that he could line up the positions of 117 Maya cities on the ground with maps of stars and constellations above –  something that no one had pieced together before. 

With this in mind, he located a 23rd constellation, which included just three stars. According to his sky map, he could only link up two cities with the three stars, so suspected that a third city remained undetected in that spot.  

Satellite images compared with Google Earth show potentially man-made structures beneath the jungle canopy.

Unfortunately, the location on the ground that matched up with the third star wasn’t exactly somewhere that Gadoury could just go visit – it’s right in the heart of the jungle, in the inaccessible and remote region of Mexico’s southern Yucatán Peninsula.

Not that stopped Gadoury – he knew that a fire had stripped much of the forest in the area back in 2005, which meant that from above, you might have an easier time spotting ancient ruins than if the canopy had been thriving for the past couple of thousand years.

All he needed to do was access satellite imagery of the area from the Canadian Space Agency, which he mapped onto Google Earth images to see if there were any signs of his lost city.

Further analyses from satellites belonging to NASA and the Japanese Space Agency revealed what looks like a pyramid and 30 buildings at the location mapped by the star, Yucatan Expat Life reports. 

William Gadoury, 15, explains his theory of the existence of a Mayan city still unknown in Mexico before scientists at the Canadian Space Agency.

As Daniel De Lisle from the Canadian Space Agency told Samuel Osborne at The Independent, the satellite images revealed certain linear features on the forest floor that looked anything but natural. “There are enough items to suggest it could be a man-made structure,” he said. 

Gadoury has tentatively named the lost city K’àak’ Chi’, meaning “fire mouth”, and will be working with researchers from the Canadian Space Agency to get his discovery published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Now, we don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble here, but while things look promising from those satellite images, nothing can be confirmed until experts can access the site and see the remains up close.

A team of archaeologists is now figuring out how to make that happen, and one of the researchers involved in the project, Armand LaRocque from the University of New Brunswick, told the Journal de Montréal that if they can get the funds to organise an excavation, they’ll be taking Gadoury along for sure. 

“It would be the culmination of my three years of work and the dream of my life,” said Gadoury, and suddenly we feel incredibly inadequate that the best thing we did at 15 was hand in most of our assignments on time.

Update: In a strange development, a scientist familiar with the Mexican region where the odd, city-like features have been discovered says at least one of them is either an abandoned cornfield – or a covert marijuana operation.

“We’ve visited them, and my grad students know them quite well,” anthropologist Geoffrey E. Braswell from the University of California San Diego’s Mesoamerican Archaeology Laboratory told George Dvorsky at Gizmodo. “They’re not Maya pyramids.”

No word yet on what this means for Armand LaRocque’s planned expedition to the site, but things aren’t looking good for Gadoury’s science fair entry at this stage. But Braswell has praised his curiosity and told The Washinton Post he hopes he ends up at his university to study.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Early 20th-Century Trolley Tracks Found in Washington State

Early 20th-Century Trolley Tracks Found in Washington State

Contractors dug up history last week when rails from Walla Walla’s trolley system dating back to 1906 were removed from Whitman Street between First and Second avenues.

The tracks once connected Walla Walla residents to downtown, Pioneer Park, the Walla Walla County Fairgrounds, cemetery, and many other key stops before automobiles became the common transportation mode.

For 5 cents, Walla Wallan’s could take a trip around the city’s central portion, and as far as Pleasant Street or Prospects Heights. Stops included colleges, local businesses and an opera house.

About 450 linear feet of those trolley tracks were dug up to replace the sewer main underneath them as part of the Third and Maple Infrastructure Repair and Replacement Plan Project, including water, sewer and road improvements expected to be complete in October, city officials said Tuesday.

The removal of trolley tracks is permitted because of measures taken to mitigate the impact of the loss of the tracks. These efforts included hiring Fort Walla Walla Musem to conduct an archeological survey, research and report on the trolley system in 2011 when a different project called for the removal of the tracks.

Other efforts included interpretative signage placed along the former trolley line near Sharpstein School and at modern bus stops on the former trolley line, a Powerpoint presentation on the trolley system used for public education purposes and a publication of an article.

When part of the rail was removed in 2011, archeologists took a piece of it. The rail had a date on it and listed the manufacturer, confirming the research, said Mike Laughery, the city’s capital programs engineer.

That piece is at Fort Walla Walla Museum and if needed, can be curated, made part of the museum, and put on display.

With these steps, the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation continue to grant permission for removal of the tracks for each infrastructure project the city plans, so far, Laughery said.

Another step in honoring the history could be incorporating a segment of railroad tracks into the design, Laughery said. That would mean removing the original tracks, rebuilding the utilities, and then setting the new tracks back in the roadway, so they are still visibly present, he said.

That idea has not yet been required, he said.

According to the 2011 report, exposed trolley tracks create safety hazards for pedestrians and cyclists. Leaving tracks beneath asphalt leads to premature failure of that street surface, and pavement failure associated with the tracks was discovered in various locations where buried rails exist.

Some of the trolley tracks remained much longer than they were in use, and portions can still be seen on Whitman Street between Howard and Division streets, near the intersection of Clinton and Boyer streets and along North Sixth Avenue to Cherry Street. The trolley only operated 20 years before the automobile became so common that the line had to close down in 1926.

“I don’t know what the financial investment was back then but it had to have been substantial,” Laughery said. “I don’t know if they just didn’t foresee the development of the automobile or how that played out.”

Trolley cars would hold 28 to 72 passengers and were equipped with onboard electric motors. Overhead wires supplied electricity to the cars through metal rods extending from the roof, according to an article published by Maury Mule of the Fort Walla Walla Museum.

The trolley cars had two-piece windows allowing for air during hot summer days and maintaining heat in the colder months with an onboard coal-fired stove providing heat to the car, the article stated.

The trolley operated in conjunction with an interurban line, which closed in 1931 and ran about 13 miles south to the Oregon cities of Milton and Freewater, the article stated. Spur lines and connections to national rail networks would appear.

No other discoveries were reported when the contractors removed the tracks, Laughery said. Project contractor Total Site Services now owns the tracks, and if no one wants them, they will probably be scrapped, according to city staff.

For further information, call the city’s Engineering Division at 509-527-4537.