California Museum Repatriates Remains and Artifacts

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History turned over to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians the partial remains of about 1,000 Chumash and pre-Chumash people who had lived throughout the South Coast over a time span of 13,000 years.

In addition, UCSB turned over the human remains of 400 individuals and nearly 4,000 funerary objects. Most of these were unearthed when the UCSB campus was first being built in 1950 and date back as far as 4,000 years. 

This historic transfer was done in accordance with the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a law requiring museums and institutions of higher learning to turn over such remains and artefacts to federally recognized Native American representatives upon request.

That request was issued in late October 2021 by the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. The last of the remains, as well as a large number of funerary artefacts, were transferred from the Museum of Natural History and UCSB to the Santa Ynez Band officials in late April. 

In a carefully crafted press release issued by both the Santa Ynez Band and the Museum of Natural History, Tribal Chairman Kenny Kahn stated, “These items have come home to our tribe, and it allows us to do the important work of repatriation and reburial.

We will continue to have a close working relationship with the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and consider it to be a collaborative partner in the community.”

Museum director Luke Swetland added, “The Museum has been honoured to care for this important cultural heritage for many years and finds it deeply satisfying that we can transfer custody back to the Chumash Community.”

The Museum’s Chumash and pre-Chumash collection, the most extensive in the world, included remains from 1,011 individuals and 36,943 associated funerary objects. With one notable exception, the bones in the museum collection date as far back as 7,000 BCE.

The exception is three femur bones found protruding from a creek channel on Santa Rosa Island in 1959 by Phil Orr, the museum’s then-director of anthropology.

Scientific analysis has proved those bones to be 13,000 years old, a discovery that makes them the oldest human remains found anywhere in North America.

The discovery adds considerable credence to a theory of human migration known as the “Kelp Superhighway Hypothesis,” which suggests that the first humans arrived in North America not by land, as has long been proposed, but by sea, following the coastline of the Pacific Rim of northeastern Asia and Beringia down to South America, where plentiful kelp beds provided sufficient food for the early explorers.

Most of the remains and artefacts transferred to the tribe show the technology and art developed by Chumash and pre-Chumash residents of the region, how they adorned themselves, what tools they had at their disposal, and what materials they used, and how they buried their dead. 

The collection of Native American remains and artefacts kept by museums and institutions of higher learning has long been a highly charged issue.

The Museum of Natural History first began amassing its collection in 1922 under the direction of museum anthropologists David Banks Rogers and John Peabody Harrington, who worked closely with Chumash people in the region recording their language and culture.

By the 1970s, the presence of Native American monitors emerged as a force for cultural preservation at any major construction sites located near what had once been tribal land.

In 1989, the museum created the California Indian Advisory Council, which included representatives from as many of the local Chumash bands as possible, not just those representing the Santa Ynez Band.

For the past 40 years, the museum ​— ​under the direction of John Johnson, the museum’s most recent anthropologist ​— ​collaborated with many academic researchers to study the museum’s collections consistent with the best practices established by the Society for American Archeology and the American Alliance of Museums.

In addition, Johnson has engaged closely with many Chumash individuals to study their cultural heritage, he said, “as a way to enlarge their understanding of themselves and their community.” 

An ancient skeleton with a prosthetic eye was discovered 15 years ago

Believe it or not, fake eyes have existed for thousands of years. Besides improving the physical appearance of the patient needing the artificial eye, fake eyes also prevent tissues in the eye socket from overgrowing and prevent foreign debris from entering the eye without a bandage or eyepatch.

Though prosthetics may seem like a more recent medical development, they actually have one of the oldest origins in medical history.

The world’s oldest prosthetic eye, for example, was discovered in Iran’s “Burnt City” in 2006. Archaeologists determined that this eye is from approximately 2900-2800 BC and was found still embedded in the eye socket of a woman’s skull.

The discovery of this eye reveals the ancient history of prosthetics including eyes, legs, and arms. The detailed craftsmanship of the eye also reveals early ideas regarding light, sight, and the purpose of prosthetics. By analyzing the structure, location, and purpose of the ancient prosthetic, we can infer more about the Burnt City itself as well as how this creation shaped medical advancement over time.

Iran’s Burnt City and the Oldest Ever Fake Eye

Shahr-e Sukhteh is the archaeological site of an ancient Bronze Age urban settlement in what is now southeastern Iran. This site is called “ the Burnt City ” because most of the city had been burnt by multiple fires starting around 3200 BC. Due to the age of the artefacts discovered at the site, archaeologists believe the city was abandoned around 2350 BC, though it is unclear if a fire was the ultimate reason for the city’s sudden abandonment.

Multiple excavations have been done in Burnt City since 1997. Famous discoveries from the site include an ancient dice table game, a skull displaying ancient brain surgery, a marble cup, and an adorned piece of leather from the Bronze Age.

The most interesting discovery, however, was the world’s oldest known fake eye in 2006. The eye was found in the remains of a woman estimated to be six feet tall, and physical evidence from the eye confirms it would have been worn during her life rather than inserted after her death. They estimated that the woman was between 25 to 30 years old at the time of her death.

Archaeologists who discovered the fake eye say that the prosthetic eye was made of a mixture of natural tar and animal fat, which likely kept it moist and durable during its use 4,800 years ago. Those studying the eye were fascinated by the detailed craftsmanship. The eye had individual capillaries drawn with golden wire less than half a millimeter thick.

A circular pupil was carved into the front with parallel lines drawn around it to form a diamond-shaped iris. Two holes with gold wire were found on either side of the artificial eyeball, which illustrated how the eye would have stayed inside its socket. This soft gold wire would have made insertion gentle while still providing the support needed to keep the eye from falling out. They would have also helped to let the eye move gently in its socket.

Those studying the eye inferred that it had been worn while the woman was still living because of preserved eyelid tissue that had been stuck to the eye. They also found evidence from this tissue and surrounding tissue on the woman’s skull that she may have developed an abscess on her eyelid due to its rubbing against the artificial eye while blinking.

Archaeologists found multiple clay vessels , ornamental beads, and jewelry pieces in the ancient woman’s gravesite. They also found a leather sack and a bronze mirror, both of which were still in excellent condition. These discoveries led archaeologists to believe that this woman was of high social status and was perhaps a member of the royal family.

Only individuals of significant social status would have had such ornate jewelry , clay, leather, and copper. This would also support her reason for having a fake eye. If she were in a position of power or high rank, she would have needed the eye to maintain her physical appearance and would have been one of few with the financial resources needed to customize an artificial eye that fitted her.

From Tar, To Gold, To Glass, To Acrylic

Details in the craftsmanship of the discovered fake eye show that the creator had a significant understanding of ocular anatomy. From the thin layer of gold to represent the iris to the tiniest blood vessels illustrated with gold wire, the eye was designed to be tasteful yet accurate for the wearer. In addition to these details, some bits of white colour was found on the white part of the eye, which suggests that the eye was once delicately painted to realistically illustrate an eye.

Other details about the eye lead archaeologists to conclude that the eye was handmade in Burnt City, rather than made elsewhere and imported. This tells us that at some point in Burnt City’s history, ocular health was studied by medical and craft professionals. This focus may have led to other medical advancements in treatment for ocular conditions such as infection or blindness in the city, though additional evidence of this has not been found.

The development of artificial eyes in other areas has been somewhat different from the eye discovered in Burnt City. In the 16th century France, surgeons made artificial eyes out of gold and silver to be worn either in front of or behind the eyelid.

Shakespeare referenced eyes made of glass in King Lear in 1606. In the 1800s, enamel artificial eyes were attractive but not durable, and advancements continued until today’s prosthetic eyes, which are made of hard acrylic, a type of durable plastic material.

Prosthetics have certainly come a long way since the time of the tar and animal fat eye found in the Burnt City. However, analysis of that eye still shows an impressive ancient understanding of ocular anatomy, which is fascinating to consider when thinking about ancient Iran. As medical knowledge advances, perhaps someday we may see even more durable and effective prosthetics for those who need them.

Ancient mystery in NC: Judaculla Rock holds 1,500-year-old petroglyphs

In the mountains of Jackson County in North Carolina lies a large mysterious rock covered in petroglyphs that have yet to be deciphered. For the Cherokee Indians, the rock and surrounding area is a sacred site where ceremonies used to take place. Indeed, Judaculla Rock is surrounded by rumours and legends, including strange sounds and UFO sightings during the night.

Judaculla and the Cherokee Indians

According to Cherokee oral tradition, in ancient times Judaculla was a slant-eyed giant with seven fingers who lived in the mountainous area, and the stone was his territorial marker. They believed the seven-digit claw marks are his handprints and a long, straight line drawn on the rock was a boundary: cross that, and they were impeding onto his hunting territory.

The name Judaculla means “he has them slanting” or the “slant-eyed giant,” and the Cherokee attributed him with superhuman strength and capabilities like flying or teleporting from mountaintop to mountaintop. Legend had it that Judaculla was even capable of controlling the wind, rain, thunder and lightning.

The Cherokee believed that Judaculla was able to take ordinary people to the spirit world and was able to communicate with people. It appears to be a similar type of god-like creature as the ones mentioned in all mythologies around the world.

The Petroglyph-Covered Judaculla Rock

Judaculla rock can be found just 6 miles (9.66 km) from Cullowhee, an anglicized form of Judaculla-whee, meaning “Judaculla’s Place.” The stone itself is a curvilinear-shaped outcrop of soapstone rock with more than 1,500 petroglyphs all over it. The symbols are tightly packed together and include many stick-like figures, two strange seven-digit hand/claw prints, thousands of cup marks, as well as many other carvings. It measures about 22 meters squared (240 sq ft).

The petroglyphs probably date back to between 2000 and 3000 BC and during digging around the stone, quarry tools were discovered. No other stones in the area were found with similar markings, making the stone even more mysterious. The site has been included on the National Register of Historic Places.

Deciphering the Petroglyphs of Judaculla Rock

Theories about the content of the petroglyphs on the rock are abundant. They span from maps to religious symbols with a secret message or just graffiti made by ancient people.

Rock art may represent animals or humans or other figures of importance. Recently a team of scientists used laser-guided equipment in order to create a detailed view of the Judaculla Rock for studying. Unfortunately, the weather has started corroding the rock and the symbols will gradually disappear since the rock is ­­open to the weather.

Medium reported that in 1945, the Cherokee Chief Blythe believed “the rock carvings to be a record of a peace treaty between the Cherokee and the Catawbas.” Other theories include the petroglyphs representing a “game conservation law,” picture map of a battle or even the record of a treaty. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous gaggle of pseudo-science sleuths is never far behind.

Rumours and Pseudo-Science Revolving Around Judaculla Rock

Many rumours and legends surround the mysterious rock including strange sounds and UFO appearances. Stories abound about ghost sounds around Judaculla Rock during the night, which Atlas Obscura claims are “made spookier by the location of a cemetery a few hundred feet away.”

Unfortunately, for the time being, the secret meanings of the Judaculla rock will remain locked. In the meantime, a silent battle is taking place to protect the site from over-tourism and to define the true meaning of the site. Some theories even claim that the site is surrounded by electromagnetic anomalies, adding to the enigma of Judaculla rock.

In fact, America Unearthed from the History Channel made a “documentary” about Judaculla Rock back in 2014, much to the dismay of local experts and custodians who opposed the access approved by the county, which has owned the site since the 1960s. “Already, some groups have placed online absurdities about Judaculla and the Rock, encouraging visits to the Rock by some weird or unstable folks,” wrote Keith Parker, whose family owned the Judaculla rock site for decades, in an email at the time to the county in protest at them being allowed to film at the ancient site, reported Smokey Mountain News.

Adding to the mystery, across the Atlantic, within the rolling green hills of Scotland, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of stones engraved with identical cup marks and cup and ring motifs as those evidenced on the Judaculla Rock. This has led some to wonder how it’s possible that somebody in the distant past carved the same motifs on separate continents?

These theories have angered the Cherokee population. “From the Cherokee perspective, Judaculla Rock is a cultural validation of who we are as a people,” wrote Dr Tom Belt, a Cherokee culture and language expert at Western Carolina University to the county in protest to filming by the History Channel, reported Smokey Mountain News. “Correct and conscientious stewardship of these gifts is a moral responsibility to those who have passed and to those yet to come.”

3-D Photogrammetry Reveals 1,000-Year-Old Etchings in Alabama

Deep in a damp cave in northern Alabama, archaeologists have made a giant discovery. On a subterranean ceiling just half a meter high, researchers have uncovered the largest cave art discovered in North America: intricate etchings of humanlike figures and a serpent, carved by Native Americans more than 1000 years ago.

“It’s exemplary and important work,” says Carla Klehm, an archaeologist at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (UAF).

Although the U.S. Southwest is famous for petroglyphs carved into canyons and cliff faces, much of the southeast’s rock art is hidden underground in caves. “Forty years ago, no one would have thought the southeast had much cave art,” says Thomas Pluckhahn, an archaeologist at the University of South Florida who wasn’t involved with the paper. But over the past few decades, archaeologists including the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Jan Simek have shown that’s not the case.

Simek first visited the 19th Unnamed Cave—called that in scientific papers so as to protect its precise location on private land—in the 1990s. In its cool, damp depths where no external light filters in, the flashlights of Simek and his colleagues revealed faint impressions on the ceiling depicting birds, snakes, wasps, and overlapping patterns of lines. The art resembled designs found on pottery in the southeast from the Woodland period, between 1000 B.C.E. and 1000 C.E.

The ceiling of the cave descends to just over half a meter high where the glyphs are located, so the researchers had to lie on their backs to see most of the images, Simek explains. There’s no place to stand and see the entire ceiling, he says.

To get a more complete picture of the art, Simek revisited the cave in 2017 with Stephen Alvarez, a photographer and founder of the nonprofit Ancient Art Archive, which documents ancient rock art around the world and shares it online via virtual reality. Alvarez wanted to use a new technique called 3D photogrammetry to create a realistic 3D model of the cave—and see whether they could uncover additional images that had gone unobserved in the tight space.

The researchers climbed down into the cave and used a tripod to start taking photos. Over a period of 2 months, they took nearly 16,000 overlappings, and high-resolution images. Next, they stitched the photos together, using computer software to align the images in 3D space; researchers could then manipulate the resulting model using virtual reality software, Alvarez explains. “We could light the space any way we wanted and drop the floor away” to virtually step back and see the entire ceiling, he says.

As the researchers manipulated their images to make the drawings more visible, five huge glyphs that were previously too large and faint to be seen came into relief. They included three humanlike beings dressed in regal garments, a swirling figure with a rattlesnake like tail, and a long serpent with scales.

The images measure between 0.93 meters and 3.37 meters long, making the biggest of them the largest cave art in North America, the researchers report today in Antiquity.

The images, likely made by etching into fresh mud on the damp ceiling, are undated. Charcoal fragments and wood smoke streaks on the cave walls, perhaps from the artists’ torches, date to the first millennium.

The Woodland Native Americans who lived in the area at that time resided in village settlements, built large earthen mounds for religious worship, and traded extensively across the south, east, and midwest. Their descendants remained in the region for centuries; but by the late 1800s, many had been forced west under the fledgling U.S. government’s policies of Native American removal.

The newly described figures share characteristics with other rock art formations in the southeast, like cliff drawings at Alabama’s Painted Bluff, and also in the Southwest, like the humanlike pictographs in Canyonlands National Park.

The figures are also similar to those found on Woodland-style pottery. Though the exact meaning of the glyphs is unclear, caves like the one in which they were found were often linked to the underworld, the researchers say.

While completing the work, the authors consulted with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose tribal homeland includes the area where the cave is located.

Creating the glyphs required “an extraordinary degree of artistic skill” says UAF George Sabo. But much about the artists remains a mystery. “Who were they in their communities?” he wonders.

Though the cave’s location is undisclosed to protect the art from vandals, the team created a video from its model so anyone can explore it virtually. Klehm is excited to see 3D photogrammetry continue to reveal hidden art at other sites—and make it accessible. “[This] can help us see things that we can’t see, to go beyond what the human eye is used to looking for,” she says.

Tanis: Fossil found of dinosaur killed in an asteroid strike, scientists claim

Scientists have presented a stunningly preserved leg of a dinosaur. The limb, complete with skin, is just one of a series of remarkable finds emerging from the Tanis fossil site in the US State of North Dakota. But it’s not just their exquisite condition that’s turning heads – it’s what these ancient specimens are purported to represent.

The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began. Very few dinosaur remains have been found in the rocks that record even the final few thousand years before the impact. To have a specimen from the cataclysm itself would be extraordinary.

The BBC has spent three years filming at Tanis for a show to be broadcast on 15 April, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. Sir David will review the discoveries, many of that will be getting their first public viewing. Along with that leg, there are fish that breathed in impact debris as it rained down from the sky.

We see a fossil turtle that was skewered by a wooden stake; the remains of small mammals and the burrows they made; skin from a horned triceratops; the embryo of a flying pterosaur inside its egg; and what appears to be a fragment from the asteroid impactor itself.

“We’ve got so many details with this site that tells us what happened moment by moment, it’s almost like watching it play out in the movies. You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day,” says Robert DePalma, the University of Manchester, UK, a graduate student who leads the Tanis dig.

It’s now widely accepted that a roughly 12km-wide space rock hit our planet to cause the last mass extinction. The impact site has been identified in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Yucatan Peninsula. That’s some 3,000km away from Tanis, but such was the energy imparted in the event, its devastation was felt far and wide.

The North Dakota fossil site is a chaotic jumble.

The remains of animals and plants seem to have been rolled together into a sediment dump by waves of river water set in train by unimaginable earth tremors. Aquatic organisms are mixed in with land-based creatures.

The sturgeon and paddlefish in this fossil tangle are key. They have small particles stuck in their gills. These are the spherules of molten rock kicked out from the impact that then fell back across the planet. The fish would have breathed in the particles as they entered the river.

The spherules have been linked chemically and by radiometric dating to the Mexican impact location, and in two of the particles recovered from preserved tree resin, there are also tiny inclusions that imply an extraterrestrial origin.

“When we noticed there were inclusions within these little glass spherules, we chemically analysed them at the Diamond X-ray synchrotron near Oxford,” explains Prof Phil Manning, who is Mr DePalma’s PhD supervisor at Manchester.

“We were able to pull apart the chemistry and identify the composition of that material. All the evidence, all of the chemical data, from that study suggests strongly that we’re looking at a piece of the impactor; of the asteroid that ended it for the dinosaurs.”

The existence of Tanis, and the claims made for it, first emerged in the public sphere in the New Yorker Magazine in 2019. This caused a furore at the time.

Science usually demands the initial presentation of new discoveries is made in the pages of a scholarly journal. A few peer-reviewed papers have now been published, and the dig team promises many more as it works through the meticulous process of extracting, preparing and describing the fossils.

To make its TV programme, the BBC called in outside consultants to examine a number of the finds. Prof Paul Barrett from London’s Natural History Museum looked at the leg. He’s an expert in ornithischian (mostly plant-eating) dinosaurs.

“It’s a Thescelosaurus. It’s from a group that we didn’t have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly like lizards. They weren’t feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries.

“This looks like an animal whose leg has simply been ripped off really quickly. There’s no evidence on the leg of disease, there are no obvious pathologies, there’s no trace of the leg being scavenged, such as bite marks or bits of it that are missing,” he tells me.

“So, the best idea that we have is that this is an animal that died more or less instantaneously.”

The big question is whether this dinosaur did actually die on the day the asteroid struck, as a direct result of the ensuing cataclysm. The Tanis team thinks it very likely did, given the limb’s position in the dig sediments.

If that is the case, it would be quite the discovery.

But Prof Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh says he’s sceptical – for the time being.

He’s acted as another of the BBC’s outside consultants. He wants to see the arguments presented in more peer-reviewed articles, and for some palaeo-scientists with very specific specialisms to go into the site to give their independent assessment. Prof Brusatte says it’s possible, for example, that animals that had died before the impact was exhumed by the violence on the day and then re-interred in a way that made their deaths appear concurrent.

“Those fish with the spherules in their gills, they’re an absolute calling card for the asteroid. But for some of the other claims – I’d say they have a lot of circumstantial evidence that hasn’t yet been presented to the jury,” he says.

“For some of these discoveries, though, does it even matter if they died on the day or years before? The pterosaur egg with a pterosaur baby inside is super-rare; there’s nothing else like it from North America. It doesn’t all have to be about the asteroid.”

There’s no doubting the pterosaur egg is special.

With modern X-ray technology, it’s possible to determine the chemistry and properties of the eggshell. It was likely leathery rather than hard, which may indicate the pterosaur mother buried the egg in sand or sediment like a turtle.

It’s also possible with X-ray tomography to extract virtually the bones of the pterosaur chick inside, print them and reconstruct what the animal would have looked like. Mr DePalma has done this. The baby pterosaur was probably a type of azhdarchid, a group of flying reptiles whose adult wings could reach more than 10m from tip to tip.

Mr DePalma gave a special lecture on the Tanis discoveries to an audience at the US space agency Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Wednesday. He and Prof Manning will also present their latest data to the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in May.

Possible 18th-Century Tavern Uncovered in Eastern Virginia

After three years of searching, archaeologists think they may have found the remnants of an 18th-century tavern.

“We found a substantial rubble deposit of handmade brick and oyster shell mortar with some evidence of burning [that may be chimney soot],” said Fairfield Foundation lead archaeologist Dan Brown. “We think it might be the Quarles Tavern.”

Although not much is known about the tavern other than what is recorded in historical documents, the tavern was owned at one time by a man named John Quarles.

Now that archaeologists have identified what they think is the tavern, Brown said they will conduct additional tests to “find the edge of the deposit, hoping it will confirm the width of the building’s foundation … and delineate the building’s outline and dimensions” to verify it is the tavern.

The King William Historical Society sponsored the project after Alonso Dill’s map of the historic courthouse area, based on old records, piqued the society’s interest. It soon joined forces with the Fairfield Foundation, an archaeological preservation organization based in Gloucester.

According to Brown, Dill’s map provided approximate locations of several buildings that no longer exist, including Hill’s Hotel (located across Courthouse Road in the green triangle lot), the Quarles Tavern (located east of the short brick wall area) and the brick stables (located in the asphalt overflow parking lot on Horse Landing Road).

Using Dill’s map and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) performed by Bob Chartrand, of Chartrand Geoarchaeological Solutions, LLC, in Williamsburg, they were able to search the entire courthouse area. GPR uses subsurface mapping of the earth using radio waves that create a picture.

“It saves us a lot of time and tells us where exactly to dig,” Brown said.

With GPR, Chartrand located many of the buildings’ foundations and even one not on Dill’s map, including a large brick building with a full cellar within the short-bricked wall area of the courthouse, just south of the King William Historical Society Museum, Brown said.

“That area was privately owned up until the early 20th century, and the building was destroyed around the time the county bought the property but, what was the building?” he asked. “We’re still trying to find that out.”

Although his team is at the preliminary stages of understanding what exactly the archaeology says about King William’s society in the 18th century, Brown said that he can confirm that “the tavern hosted a very high-class clientele, [as] seen in the variety of relatively rare and expensive ceramic fragments, personal items and other artefacts found to date.”

Brown has also deduced that the courthouse area was busy at that time. In fact, busier relative to today. Also, Brown said every part of society, from enslaved Africans and Indigenous people to wealthy individuals and families came to the courthouse area.

Although he has learned a lot about King William County through artefacts, Brown keeps digging up more questions.

“Did Indigenous people live here? When they built the courthouse, what other buildings were built alongside it and when and where? Over the 18th and 19th centuries, what government buildings came and went?”

Brown has a theory as to why business eventually slowed down in the King William courthouse area: urban development.

“There was an increase in state governments, development in West Point and more stores to choose from,” he said. “People had less of a need to go to the courthouse for things.”

Since the project is ongoing, the King William Society and Fairfield Foundation will continue to use GPR and dig around the courthouse area in hopes of finding new buildings and answering more questions.

According to Brown, the group also aims to “preserve the county’s precious cultural resources” by making them available for viewing in the King William Historical Society Museum and “sharing this process with the public.”

“Plans are in the works for us to host all 273 fourth and fifth graders in the county and that is a remarkable honour,” said Brown. “They would get to see the remarkable museum exhibits put together by the museum council, the architectural complexities and mysteries of our courthouse buildings, and get to dig too.”

Brown said he is also looking forward to hosting the public a few days every month to visit and participate in a dig.

East Bay’s mysterious rock walls: Paranormal? American Stonehenge? Theories abound

If walls could speak, what a tale these mysterious huge boulders would tell. Perched high atop the lonely, windswept ridges of the Diablo Range, chains of stacked stones stand sentry above East Bay cities — yet they delineate nothing.

Long the subject of intrigue — Who built them? Why? How? — the walls are now being mapped by a San Francisco State archaeologist who believes they hold important clues to early California history and deserve our attention and protection.

“They are historic sites,” said Jeffrey Fentress, who is measuring and mapping them for the East Bay Regional Park District, then submitting his findings to the California Office of Historic Preservation. “By recording the walls, they become a permanent part of the state archive and are protected — as well as they can be — from future development.”

There are no written or photographic records of their construction in a landscape that has been inhabited by humans for at least 7,000 years. So, like the fabled crop circles of England, the walls have inspired theories ranging from the paranormal to the historically bizarre.

“There is no definitive answer on its origins, which further delights the public, who can take it to new levels of speculation,” said Mark Hylkema, archaeologist for the Santa Cruz District of California State Parks.

New Age mystics have declared that their builders were creatures from a vanished Pacific island; amateur historians suggest that they were Mongols or West Africans. Some theorize that the walls offered defence from intruders; others believe they played a peaceful and spiritual or astronomical role, perhaps serving as a “solstice site” like Stonehenge.

Sections of walls are scattered atop Santa Clara County’s Ed Levin County Park, the Russian Ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, several parks within the East Bay Regional Park District and a few private ranches in the Livermore Valley. Some also can be seen in the Sierra foothills, along state Highway 50 past El Dorado Hills.

While well known to the region’s hikers, park officials are reluctant to disclose precise locations because they fear they will attract vandals. A large stone circle on Pleasanton Ridge was destroyed by real estate development in the 1990s.

Standing 3- to 4-feet high and wide, they’re sturdy yet unsecured by mortar. They seem too low to offer much protection, or confine horses. Some rocks are melon-size. The larger ones weigh up to a ton. Lifting them no doubt required the effort of several men.

“Some go in a straight line, others twist like a demented snake up a steep hillside, others come in a spiral two hundred feet wide and circle into a boulder,” amateur wall historian Russell Swanson wrote in 1997. Over 12 years, he visited more than 40 miles of the stone structures. The walls seem out of place in California’s wild golden hills, evoking instead memories of tidy New England fields memorialized by poet Robert Frost, or the rich green pastures of Ireland.

Why, in such a vast landscape, didn’t builders simply use barbed wire? Or wood? Instead, they’re built of coarse-grained sandstone, abundant in these hills, called graywacke.

Native Americans say they historically had little interest in erecting boundaries. “In general, our ancestors did not believe in scarring or altering Mother Earth,” said Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. In 1904, John Fryer, a UC Berkeley professor of Oriental languages and literature, asserted that they were “undoubtedly the work of Mongolians. … The Chinese would naturally wall themselves in.”

Several years later, ethnologist Henry C. Meyers agreed they were the product of strong and ancient civilizations: “Neither man nor men of the present day could possibly put large stones of these walls in place without appliances of some kind.”

Dr. Robert F. Fisher, the founder of the Mission Peak Heritage Foundation, told the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1984 that he was mystified: “They predate the Indians. They predate the Spaniards. It doesn’t fit in with any of the later histories.”

More recently, lichen analyses date the walls back to the 1850s to 1880s — the post-Gold Rush era, when California was swelling with newcomers anxious to lay their claim on acreage. While imperfect, the technique dates inanimate objects by measuring the diameter of growing lichens.

That evidence hasn’t stopped the internet from spawning its own theories, crediting mythical Lemurians — tall people who breathed through scaly aqua skin and sought refuge in California after the disappearance of the Pacific continent of Mu. Much more likely is an explanation put forth by a consensus of experts like Fentress; State Parks archaeologist Hylkema; and Beverly Ortiz, cultural services coordinator of the East Bay Regional Park District.

The walls were likely built to contain cattle by new European immigrants in the post-Gold Rush era, perhaps using unpaid or low-paid Native American, Chinese or Mexican labour, they believe. The stones stand as a legacy of our once-rural culture, poignant reminders of people long gone. Unlike the railroad or mining tycoons — the Crockers, Stanfords, Huntingtons and Floods — these early ranchers left no mansions, antiques or jewellery. Only rocks.

“The rock walls throughout the East Bay are neither ancient nor mysterious, even if the specific individuals who made them are unknown to us today,” Ortiz said. “They are associated with historic Euro-American ranching, dairy and dry farming activities.”

The historians note that cattle and sheep don’t need tall walls to be managed; they’re docile and don’t jump. The rocks, Fentress and Ortiz said, also could have been used to help catch or drain water or establish boundaries between ranches.

But which ethnic group built the walls?

The Portuguese were among the early ranchers, said Robert Burrill and Joseph Ehardt, of the Milpitas Historical Society. But other immigrants, such as Italians, Irish and Spaniards, may have brought wall-building skills from their homelands.

These post-Gold Rush settlers, who were not wealthy, likely built walls with their own hands, Fentress said. But they also may have enlisted low-cost labour from other ethnic groups, such as Mexicans — who had been displaced from their ranchos — and Chinese, who build the railroads and projects like Oakland’s Lake Chabot dam. Or perhaps they were built by Native Americans during an era that authorized the forced apprenticeship of native peoples, a practice not banned until the 1860s.

Archaeologists say the walls are a ghostly elegy of their builders.

“They are essentially the archaeology of the working class, the common people who came here and made a living,” Fentress said. “It is the only evidence we have of these people’s lives — and it is important to tell that story as well as we can.”

Remains of Ancient American Dogs Identified at Jamestown

Dogs first came to the Americas about 16,000 years ago, likely on the heels of ice age hunters crossing a bygone land bridge from Siberia. These indigenous canines remained on the continent for thousands of years as furry friends and hunting companions—until, suddenly, they were gone, replaced genetically by European breeds.

Now, a pair of jawbones pried from the earth beneath Virginia’s colonial Jamestown settlement may illuminate when these dogs vanished and the roles they may have played in the lives of both Native Americans and European colonists.

It’s a “pretty cool” study that provides a window into a period of time in which little is known about the continent’s first dogs, says Courtney Hofman, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who was not involved with the research. “A lot of work has focused on much older indigenous dogs, but less has been done on them in more recent times.”

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas in the 15th century, they brought with them large war dogs. Later European colonists brought over working dogs such as bloodhounds and greyhounds, as well as other hunting dogs.

Gradually, these European lineages almost completely replaced the indigenous dogs of the Americas. Today, only a few arctic breeds, such as Siberian huskies and Alaskan malamutes, are thought to retain a genetic connection to their ancient past.

How and when this dramatic genetic turnover happened remains unknown. So Ariane Thomas, a graduate student studying anthropology at the University of Iowa, turned to the remains of dogs uncovered at Jamestown between 2007 and 2010.

Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, founded largely by explorers with little farming experience.

Thomas managed to extract mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), inherited from the maternal line, from two canine jawbones, one found beneath a former bakery and the other inside a well thought to have belonged to Colonial Governor John Smith. Both structures date to the early 1600s.

Thomas compared the dogs’ mtDNA with that of modern and ancient dogs around the world. The Jamestown dogs’ maternal line was totally unrelated to European breeds, her team reported here last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. Instead, the animals were most closely related to other ancient dogs from Illinois and Ohio and were distantly related to several ancient arctic dogs, including the oldest known American dog, found in Alaska and thought to be about 10,000 years old.

Curiously, the dogs aren’t closely related to canines dated to about 1000 to 1400 C.E. found at another early Virginian colonial village known as Weyanoke, just 50 kilometres away.

“There’s a lot more diversity than maybe we initially thought,” Thomas says. That suggests European dogs may have replaced indigenous ones slowly, she says.

All the dog skull fragments recovered from Jamestown feature narrow, shallow cutmarks suggesting they were butchered, she says. The remains were also found amid food waste such as mussel shells and fish bones. The jawbone recovered from Smith’s well dates to a period known as the Starving Time, spanning the winter between 1609 and 1610 during which the Jamestown colonists nearly perished. “They were running low on supplies,” Thomas says, and “resorted to eating whatever was around.”

Some of the other dog bones were found in layers dating to at least 10 years later, suggesting eating dogs wasn’t uncommon when times got tough.

How exactly these indigenous dogs came to Jamestown remains a mystery, she says. Colonists wanted to maintain the prized lineages of European hunting dogs, so it’s unlikely they would have knowingly allowed native dogs to breed with their own, Thomas notes. Later, a law passed in 1629 expressly prohibited trading European dogs to Indigenous people.

The Jamestown dogs may also have had Indigenous owners. Thousands of mussel shell beads in various stages of construction found at the site suggest some Indigenous people—likely the local Powhatan—may have lived and worked at the settlement. If so, they may have brought their canine companions with them.

Next, Thomas hopes to sequence the nuclear DNA of the Jamestown dogs, which will reveal whether they were fully indigenous or hybrids of European-indigenous dogs.

The stories of these dogs highlight the “shared histories” of Indigenous people and colonial Europeans, says Raquel Fleskes, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. “It’s part of the story of Europeans learning from Indigenous societies, and [the dogs’ story] could shed light on their relationships and interactions.”