Pulphead: Essays (27 page)

Woodpeckers could be related to war, he said. In other Native American myths they carry the souls of the dead to the afterworld.

We advanced. There were pips—a small brown kind of bat—hanging on the wall, wrapped in themselves. Condensation droplets on their wings shone in our lights and made the little creatures look jewel-encrusted. Jan, kneeling down to peer at something lower on the wall, got one on his back. He asked me to brush it off. I took my helmet and tried to suggest it away—the bat detached and flew into the darkness.

Jan went a few yards and then lay down on his back on a sort of embankment in the cave. I did likewise. We were both looking up. He scanned his light along a series of pictures. It felt instinctively correct to call it a panel—it had sequence, it was telling some kind of story. There was an ax or a tomahawk with a human face and a crested topknot, like a Mohawk (the same topknot we’d just seen on the woodpeckers). Next to the ax perched a warrior eagle, with its wings spread, brandishing swords. And last a picture of a crown mace, a thing shaped like an elongated bishop in chess, meant to represent a symbolic weapon, possibly held by the chiefly elite during public rituals. It’s a “type artifact” of the Mississippian sphere, meaning that, wherever you find it, you have the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, or, as it used to be called (and still is by archaeologists when they think no one’s listening), the Southern Death Cult. In this case the object appeared to be morphing into a bird of prey. What did it mean?

“We don’t know,” Simek said. “What it is clearly about is transformation.”

Everything in it was turning into everything else.

*   *   *

When it comes to meaning, not everyone is as skeptical as Simek. Over the past decade a group of scholars, organized by the anthropologist F. Kent Reilly in Texas, have been using a combination of historical records—nineteenth-century ethnography, mainly—to work their way back into the Mississippian worldview, with its macabre warrior gods and monsters and belief in a three-part cosmos: the Upper World, This World, the Lower World. The SECC Working Group, as they are called, argues that more of the Mississippian culture survived into the historic period than has been allowed (Europeans met them, after all: the embers of Mississippian society weren’t extinguished until the French sold the last Great Sun, chief of the Natchez, into slavery in 1731). Reilly and his colleagues have modeled the group explicitly on the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University of Texas, an epigraphers’ seminar that helped decipher the Mayan glyphs, and so opened Mayan society (slightly) to our comprehension.

In the North American case, however, we have no language to crack. Our most technically advanced Native American society, the High Mississippian—a culture that built mounds nearly equal in grandeur to the stone ruins in Mexico, but of earth, so they faded—left us nothing to read. That has always driven scholars of North American prehistory a little bit crazy. More than one crackpot “Mound Builder” theory revolved around a mysterious writing tablet that surfaced in an Indian mound, covered in Hebrew or Phoenician letters. There’s even one nineteenth-century thinker, the cracked Kentucky genius Constantine Rafinesque, who made real and universally recognized strides toward decoding the Mayan language
and
forged an otherwise nonexistent North American written language, the Lenape.

I met Kent Reilly in Chicago several years ago. He gave me a tour of the “Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand” exhibit at the Art Institute. It was the first truly representative display of Eastern Native American art ever staged. It included the major pieces—large statuary, mica cutouts, human face pots from Arkansas—but even someone knowledgeable in the field might have been stunned by some of the lesser-known artifacts: the effigy of a human thumb, taken from a two-thousand-year-old Hopewell site, or the so-called Frog Vessel, a red Mississippian bowl that is crawling with little naturalistic green frogs. How many Middle Americans knew that the societies under their feet had reached these levels of expression?

Reilly described some of the group’s achievements. Using intense motif analysis, two of its members identified an exotic-looking geometrical shape, which appears on various Mississippian objects, as a butterfly. They matched the number of segmented dots on its uncoiling body—which you can see if you stare—to an actual species. Reexamining gorgets from the Etowah mound in Georgia, they noticed that the head on a certain human-headed serpent appeared to be the same head that a falcon-warrior was holding on another gorget. “We think we may have identified a new deity complex—based purely on artwork,” Reilly said.

Simek doesn’t go in for that talk. He likes data. He likes “two hundred meters into the cave we found a pictograph of a dog, charcoal, oriented vertically,” and so forth. He doesn’t want to talk about whether the dog was leading dead souls along the spirit path—although dogs did that in more than one Southeastern religion. He doesn’t like the “maybe” place where that leaves you. The societies investigated by those ethnographers had undergone immense shocks and disruptions since the Mississippian period, most obviously with the European Encounter, but even before that. High Mississippian culture fell apart just
before
the Spanish reached Florida, not just after as you’d expect, given the diseases and the massacres—it’s a riddle of American archaeology. Simek simply didn’t feel we could get back through the static of all that with anything like a scientific certainty.

“Corn, beans, and squash,” said Reilly, when I ran Simek’s criticisms by him. He was referring to the tedium of anthropology-lab dry data. Meaning, as I took it: if they want to stick to the boring stuff, let them.

This was not boring, though, whatever we were seeing. I lay there just staring at the panel, in the cave’s cool atmosphere, which you hold in your skin as a physical memory if you grew up in karst country like I did, southern Indiana, childhood trips to Wyandotte Cave, when they’d cut out the lights—“That is total darkness, kids”—and have you put your hand in front of your face, to make you see that you couldn’t see it.

“My colleagues argue about, ‘What is the SECC? What does it mean?’” Simek said. “I bring them here. I mean, look at these things. This is the Southern Cult.”

*   *   *

We moved forward. The next pictograph, Simek said, was an image that appears in several of the Unnamed Caves: the gruesome Toothy Mouth. A round, severed head with gore spilling out of the neck. Weeping eyes. A big pumpkin grin, probably meant to suggest the receded gums of decomposition. Simek said they tend to see these wherever there are burials. They had found one even in a Woodland cave—that’s the period, preceding the Mississippian, about which we know even less. But for at least a couple of thousand years, this picture on a cave wall in this country meant “bodies buried here.”

Simek had one graduate student who was Cherokee. A good archaeologist, Russ Townsend—he’s now the “tribal historic preservation officer” for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Townsend has worked with Jan on plenty of projects, but he has never gone into the caves. I asked him about it. “The Cherokee interpretation is that caves are not to be entered into lightly,” he said, “that these must have been bad people to go that deep. That’s where they took bad people to leave them. So they can lie on rock and not on the ground. It makes a lot of Cherokee uneasy. The lower world is where everything is mixed up and chaotic and bad. You wouldn’t want to go to that place, where the connection between our world and the otherworld is that tenuous.”

*   *   *

We entered a large hall. The ceiling was very tall, it looked a hundred feet high. It was smooth and pale gray. Simek shone his lamp up and arced it around slowly. “What do you see?” he said.

“Are those mud dauber nests?” I asked. That’s what they looked like to me.

“The ceiling,” he said, “is studded with three hundred globs of clay.”

I stared up with open mouth. I didn’t have a good question for that one.

“We said the same thing,” he said. “What were they doing?” So a researcher had climbed up and removed one of the globs and taken it back to the lab at UT. They sliced it open. Inside was the charred nubbin of a piece of river cane, like a cigarette filter. “We got a piece of cane about that big,” Jan said, indicating his little finger. The Indians had jammed burning stalks of river cane into balls of clay and hurled them at the ceiling. “They lit up this place like a birthday cake, man!” he said.

“Was it some kind of ceremony or something?”

“Who knows!” he said. “Maybe they were hunting bats.”

“What were they doing here?” I asked, as if asking no one.

“Minimally,” he said, “making art, burying their dead, lighting it up like a Christmas tree. Maybe hunting bats.”

At the back of the cave we ascended a mud slope. There were two bare footprints side by side. Simek said they had shown casts of these to an orthopedic surgeon, without telling him what they were. The doctor said, “That person didn’t wear shoes.” The toes were splayed.

At the top of the mud bank we saw a final image, the same as the first, but only one woodpecker this time. A charcoal pictograph covered in a transparent flowstone veneer, as if laminated. That was how old these things were. The stone had flowed over the bird, encasing it. This woodpecker was upright, as if working on a tree. Woodpeckers at the beginning, and a woodpecker here. What did it mean?

“End of book,” he said.

*   *   *

Jan didn’t come along personally on the next cave trip he arranged for me—a long, wet, difficult cave. He’d done it enough times already. It was to see one of the oldest sites, from the late Archaic, about four thousand years old.

I’d come to know some of the other people involved with the Unnamed Caves, a squad of high-level cave freaks formed by Simek in the nineties under the moniker CART (Cave Archaeological Research Team). There’s a cave-burials expert, there’s a
National Geographic
cave photographer, there’s a scholar of historic cave use (saltpeter mining and “cave dancing”).

The hero of CART is Alan Cressler, a tall, thin, bald guy who works for the U.S. Geological Survey in Georgia, superfit despite many injuries. His arms and legs are hairless—did he shave himself, to move through the caves more easily? It seems to have happened evolutionarily. He’s an “exploration” caver, as opposed to a “sport” caver. He likes finding virgin passages, pushing leads. He’s also known to be an expert on Southeastern ferns. When I asked him about this, he said, “I’ve always had the ability to train myself to find stuff. For a long time, I was mainly into ferns. I’d be driving down the highway going fifty miles an hour, past this wall of green stuff, typing ferns as I went. I can see an arrowhead in a whole sea of gravel.”

Once Cressler joined CART the rate of discovery soared. He is personally responsible for finding more than a third of the seventy-some Unnamed Caves. He can’t explore as aggressively anymore, so he goes after the art and photographs it. There are a couple of sites that Jan has never seen and may never see—the caving is too difficult. Cressler brings back pictures.

That day we followed one of Jan’s former graduate students, Jay Franklin, and a few of Franklin’s undergrads. Everybody had on a big poncho but was getting soaked anyway. Franklin spoke in a slow, considered way as we walked, loud enough for the group to hear. His research focus is on the archaeology of the plateau. He explained that for a long time there had been a misconception among Southern archaeologists that the plateau was a no-man’s-land. This was because the Native Americans didn’t tend to establish permanent villages there. They didn’t leave behind any of the good artifacts, “the stuff you can send off to the Smithsonian.” What Franklin had learned, however, was that they used the plateau extensively, traveling up and down it, getting resources from it, exploring its caves.

Jan had said there even existed evidence that the plateau itself was a sacred space to the Southeastern people, a pilgrimage site. A colleague had found in the lab and analyzed an old ceramic assemblage, collected in the 1970s at an open-air rock-art site, “a little shelter at the very top of the plateau, facing the setting sun to the west.” The pottery styles, they noticed, were strangely diverse. “It came from all over the place.” Meanwhile, at the hunting camps, the pottery came up fairly homogenous. “The rock-art sites,” Jan said, “were clearly getting visited according to a different plan.” And the plateau was covered in them.

The mouth of Third Unnamed hung open maybe thirty feet above the river, which was angry, brown, and already rising up the trunks of the closest trees (mere hours, it turned out, from breaking its banks). But we’d be safe. You could squat in the mouth of the cave, dry and comfortable, and by turning your head look up and down the river, remaining unseen. There was something about the little vestibule, the density of the dirt in the floor, the contour of it, I want to say, that let you sense how long people had been crouching here.

Franklin started into the cave and we fell in behind. The entrance narrowed quickly. We passed a waterfall, a wildly twisting rope of white water in the middle of the cave, plummeting into who knew what hidden levels. This was a wild cave, no stairs or handrails; you could touch the icy water.

We halted. Franklin turned to address us. We had reached the tricky spot, he said, a place where the tunnel floor fell away. We needed to watch him; he would show us how to get across. He worked his body up off the ground and positioned it horizontally between the walls of the cave—sideways—with his feet against one wall and his shoulders against the other, thrusting his muscles to fix himself there. Once you were pressure-set in the passage like that, you started sidling your body to the right. That’s how you’d pass over the sixty-foot drop in the floor. It was called a chimneyed traverse. The students were doing it easily, giggling about it. And it wasn’t a hard thing to do, technically speaking. Franklin had explained the physics. Your legs are so much stronger than what was required to keep you flexed between those surfaces. In order to fall, you’d have to do an insane thing and let them go slack. Even so, my legs were quivering when I hit the other side. I stepped on a loose rock, and it made a machine gun sound.