Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
There were the by-now-familiar stoke marks all around us, those constellations of black daubs that were like pixelated shadows of the Indians’ movement through the tunnels. And in this cave you could really feel them with you physically, just in front of you. Thick smoke of their torches flowing along the ceiling. Caving in these prehistorically rich contexts has that effect. It’s something about the focused containment of the space, its physical tightness—you’re constantly finding yourself doing things in just the way they would have done it. You know they had to slide their backs along the rock like this. They had to step there; they had to crouch down here.
Franklin stopped again. We piled up behind him. We were in the last chamber of the cave, where the art is: a long, low-ceilinged room with a bunch of dark dormers along the edges, places resistant to your lamp.
Franklin led us around like a docent with his fluorescent wand, showing us the various petroglyphs. A geometric diamond pattern. A thing that was possibly some kind of eye, with one set of long lashes. A creature with a pointy head and pointy ears, its tail hanging down, arms and legs extended. They called it “Possum Boy.” There was a sun symbol. A friend of Patty Jo Watson’s—Watson is the most prominent cave archaeologist in the East; if you’ve ever seen a woman on cable talking about dissecting paleo-feces in Kentucky, you’ve seen Patty Jo Watson—had been lying on her back in this room, examining the ceiling with her headlamp, when she shouted, “The sun! The sun!” Everyone thought she’d found another opening and got excited, thinking now they wouldn’t have to hike back out.
Franklin progressed through the art quickly. It wasn’t his interest. He was a lithics person—stone tools. When he’d checked off all the glyphs, he led us into a corner, where he got down on his knees. We gathered behind him in a semicircle and shone our lights onto the ground in front of him. Big blobs of black chert lay all around—chert is a pure form of flint, the gray glassy stone from which most arrowheads are made. Both flint and chert occur by a chemical process inside limestone. The rock had extruded these balls of first-rate chert onto the ground. They may have been the reason why the ancient miners had come this far into the cave, had risked their lives—to get this stuff for their weapons and tools. And yet Franklin said there was equally good flint available on the surface. A riddle of the place was why they were coming in here at all.
Franklin grew more alive, showing us how they’d broken open these rock balls to get at the good chert inside. It was remarkable to watch his hands as he reconstructed the nodules, running nimbly through the “reduction sequence” in reverse; where the Indians had cracked it apart, he put it back together. All the pieces were lying there for him as they’d been dropped four thousand years ago—it was like watching one of those kids who can solve a Rubik’s Cube very fast. And suddenly Franklin was holding the complete ostrich egg of dark stone in his hand, as though he had healed it.
The Indians had known they were on the clock, he told us. They had to plan these trips: They built fires in the cave, which meant bringing in wood on their backs. They carried hammer stones to pound with. “They couldn’t get trapped back here,” Franklin said. The way he could tell was how they had moved so quickly through the chert, discarding even some good pieces. They’d break one open. When they didn’t immediately like the quality, they cast it aside and started another one. And yet they’d found time to draw those pictures.
Before we left the “Glyph Chamber”—Franklin called it the “Work Chamber”—he took us down to the far end of it, where he let us gawk at some four-thousand-year-old footprints. Left, right, left—a little fossilized sequence of movements. You half expected to get to the last one and find the heel of the foot leaving it with a sucking sound. Each toe mark was distinct. This footprint had been here for three thousand years already when the other one I’d seen—the one with the splayed toes—was left in the mud. There is, of course, nothing new about the New World. The Indians had their own prehistory. They used to pick up spearheads ten thousand years old and reshape them; a few of those have been found in graves. They had their own theories on who built the mounds.
* * *
In Simek’s office one day, he brought down a couple of matching brown nineteenth-century-looking volumes. This was Garrick Mallery’s
Picture Writing of the American Indians
, first edition, a treasure of his rock-art library. He turned to a particular run of pages. Mallery didn’t pay all that much attention to the East. None of the early writers on American rock art did. They liked the huge vivid panels out in the Western canyons. The cliff cities, in their ideal desert conditions, are there; you can visit them. Our cities are invisible.
There were, however, a few famous Eastern sites. The Dighton Rock was the best-known. Cotton Mather wrote about it; Bishop Berkeley went to see it. It’s a big whale-shaped boulder from the Taunton River near Berkley, Massachusetts, covered in twisty Native American petroglyphs. Jan showed me the pages in Mallery’s book—I’d seen them in my paperback reprint, but these plates were glossy with rich blacks—on which the author had quite ingeniously reproduced more than two hundred years of renderings of this rock. He cropped them all, so that they were the same length and width, and then ran them down the pages in a row, chronologically. It was a historical portal; you could slip into it and get behind the eyes of the American mind for a minute. You could watch it change: in the beginning, the various artists had been trying to make the markings look like “hieroglyphic” writing they knew—Egyptian, Norse, or whatever it was. Or they turned them into anachronistic modern things, a sailboat or a pilgrim. Only as the decades and centuries flip-book by do the lines untangle themselves, and you start to see human shapes, quadrupeds. Still we are far from any meaning. In fact, that’s what has taken place. The eye lets go of the desire for meaning; the pictures emerge. Simek was showing me Mallery’s pages by way of saying, It’s dangerous to read something when you can’t really read it. And we can’t.
Try to see it. That’s hard enough.
* * *
We went west from Knoxville, toward the plateau. The fields in middle Tennessee in October were chilly and green, as if under frosted glass. We ate fast-food biscuits while Simek talked about our destination, Twelfth Unnamed Cave. “This one’s really splendid,” he said. There were more than three hundred images, some so tiny you had to squint.
It wasn’t just this site. There were a handful of caves (now there are more) in that area—Twelfth was one—that appear similar to one another in style but unlike anything else the researchers had seen in the caves. Unlike anything anyone had seen. They were neither Woodland nor Mississippian in any recognizable way, though their dates (from around 1160, in this case) put them right at the Woodland/Mississippian threshold. Jan suspected these particular caves were survivals of some localized, regional Woodland culture, from before it had been swept away or absorbed by the spread of the Death Cult.
We drove bumping through a gate and straight onto another farm, another site that had been protected by discreet landowners. We geared up and walked across a stubbled field, adjusting our steps to miss clusters of cattle crap and white mushrooms. After a few hundred yards we started to trend downward, gently but noticeably. We were entering an ancient “sink,” a place where a chamber in the limestone had broken through and left a depression. At the center of this green bowl was a more severe pit, like a crater. Trees grew around it. We clambered down over rubble.
Jan saw muddy footprints. “Whose are these?” he asked in surprise.
A floor cavity just inside the cave mouth: “That’s fresh,” he said. “That’s pot-diggers.”
There was a cola can on a rock above the pits. It was still warm. Jan picked it up and sniffed it, said, “Kerosene.” They had heard his truck. They’d just run off.
There’s a remarkable FBI wiretap transcript that was obtained in the 1990s. I got a copy of it from a former assistant U.S. attorney in East Tennessee, Guy Blackwell, who described the case as the strangest he’d ever worked. Some good old boys saw steam coming out of a hole in a hillside one morning (new caves are often discovered this way). They crawled inside and found what Quentin Bass, the Forest Service archaeologist for that area, described (on the basis of having seen it only after it had been destroyed) as “the closest thing to an actual secret Indian treasure cave you could ever want to see.” Lake Hole Cave: people who work on Southeastern prehistory know about it. It was a perfectly intact late-Woodland burial cave. There were well over a hundred skeletons in it, generations. The entryways into the mortuary passages had been deliberately blocked with huge stones, like “Jesus Christ’s tomb or something,” said one of the looters who helped pry them loose. They spent weeks in there; they had a whole bucket system for moving the stuff outside. One of them was a fairly prominent local person, a rich guy with an artifact addiction. (Diggers, if they’re good, usually end up working for “a rich guy”—“What can you tell me about him?” you’ll say; “He’s rich as hell,” they’ll say.)
The Feds had just busted another person from the same county, a tall half-Cherokee named Bob, for possession of looted artifacts (hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth, it was rumored). They convinced Bob to wear a wire on the Lake Hole case, getting one of the diggers to talk in exchange for a recommendation of leniency—the locals all knew Bob was into this stuff and would trust him.
He drove to the house of a man named Newell, and they sat in the living room together. Mostly what you pick up on is Newell’s awe at what they had found, and what they had seen. He’d spent many nights in that cave, stoned (the Feds found a fat sack next to one of the pits), unearthing two-thousand-year-old relics that he’d been dreaming of finding since boyhood. It’s moving—and at the same time terrible, given that all or most of these objects were lost, thrown into the river when the diggers got wind of an impending bust—to read the little dialogue from the sofa, artifacts spread out on the coffee table:
BOB:
I was going to see you and see if [the rich guy] wanted to sell that pipe.
NEWELL:
He might.
BOB:
I was wanting to look at it.
NEWELL:
I know one thing, it’s nothing that I’ve seen before. It’s nothing like I’ve seen before.
BOB:
But what’s it look like, can you draw or describe it …
NEWELL:
She’s a, I ain’t artist … OK we’ll start here. Now she’s got a long up here, up here she going up like ’at. Cross like ’at, back down here. And she’s got a great big stem, comes back just like this right here …
BOB:
So it’s, it’s—
NEWELL:
It’s got wings here, but it’s made out of the same material. The damn stuff is strange.
BOB:
What is it?
NEWELL:
We don’t know. It’s clay, but it’s got something that has been ground and put on the outside of it …
BOB:
Shit.
NEWELL:
… I say hell I’ve hunted all my life and seen stuff in Hopewell Mountains and Ohio Valley for seventeen long years, they’re the biggest museums in Columbus and ah, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, all of them but I have never seen material like to coal black …
In another place they talk about a turtle—that’s all they say, “that turtle … that turtle,” Bob didn’t want to spend all his tax-return money now, and meanwhile somebody else buys that turtle. Newell showed him a shell gorget, with an elaborate rattlesnake design:
BOB:
Whew.
NEWELL:
It’s southern cult, Death Cult.
BOB:
Yeah, I’d like to see one of those wood peckers …
NEWELL:
It’d be rare.
That’s what I mean about the
level
of erasure. There have been countless Lake Hole Caves. And it comes in waves. The Depression was bad. At the same time those giant New Deal excavations were happening, local people who’d noticed all the interest started pot-digging like mad. The 1970s were bad. Hippie-fueled interest in Native American culture drove up the prices for artifacts (there’s a place in the Lake Hole wiretap where Bob says, “I’d like to see some of that stuff like what they used to find in the seventies”). That decade marks the moment when pot-digging and recreational caving intersected culturally. Places were reached that hadn’t been accessible before. Markets expanded in Germany and Japan, where many people are fanatical about Native American history.
A lot of major sites we know about only because of looter leads and accounts. The Spiro Mound, in Oklahoma, for instance, at the western edge of the Death Cult sphere. Spiro has provided probably more material and iconographic grist to the mill of the SECC working group than any other site, and there are major components of those mounds that we know about exclusively from interviews with the looters. It wasn’t even an anthropologist who interviewed them, it was a banker from Missouri, Henry Hamilton. He visited the site and sussed out what was going on there. Six local men had actually incorporated themselves—they declared themselves a mining company—and were just going at this mound complex night and day, bringing out the material in wheelbarrows. No notes, no photographs. They found an agent, who moved the pieces all over the country. Many, it was said, were sold in France. Hamilton realized, from listening to the men, that they had seen remarkable things, which if physically irrecoverable could at least be described. He got four of the diggers to talk to him. They told how they had tunneled into the center of the largest mound, and there found an inner chamber, constructed of logs. The logs the men took outside and burned for fuel. But the chamber had been empty and dry. Cool air rushed into their faces when they breached it. Inside there were altars, with beads and female effigies on them. Conch shells lay in a pattern on the floor along the walls. That little room, a late Mississippian mortuary tomb, is a unique picture, given to us by looters, by the men who destroyed it. They invited Hamilton to crawl through the tunnel himself and see what was left, but when he saw it wasn’t supported in any way, he declined.