Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
I once visited an archaeologist in Kentucky, a tall, laid-back, deceptively sharp guy named Tom Des Jean, who’s the cultural resource specialist (“I go by that instead of archaeologist,” he said, “’cause when they’re slicing jobs it makes you harder to fire”) at the Big South Fork state park, which straddles Tennessee and Kentucky, on the plateau. Des Jean actually got to know some looters, through his constant confrontations with them on park land. When they realized he didn’t want to prosecute them, just discourage them, a few invited him home to view their collections. He was repeatedly stunned by what he saw—pieces that, even robbed of provenance and context, impinged on the story of plateau archaeology purely by their existence. He realized that he had to establish a kind of détente with the looters; there was too much to be lost through snobbery. “You’ve got all these people who are finding all this amazing stuff,” he said. “And they’re scared to tell anybody about it, because they don’t want to get busted. But who’s the loser?” Des Jean started writing about their collections, bringing them in on the digs as consultants. Possibly as a result, digging is down in the park, and more sites are being reported. He gave me an interesting paper that a colleague had written on how to extract site information from looted artifacts, using soil analysis.
Des Jean explained to me that a whole folk culture of rock-shelter digging existed in the caves on either side of the park. They called it sifting (there was a place called Sifter’s Hill by the check-in area, he said). He had put together that it was related to hunting. “The game eat a lot in the morning,” he said. “They’ll be out foraging, and then they’ll be sated, and won’t come out again till dusk, so during that time, you’re out in the woods. What do you do? You go dig for airyheads.” He told me about a family who liked to dig together at night, hooking up lights to the battery in their army Jeep (the influx of Jeeps into the country after the war spurred looting, according to Des Jean). The son of this family, the most zealous digger among them, once remarked to Des Jean that in his opinion, the ringing of dirt in a sifting box was as sweet as music. Des Jean actually took me to meet this man at his home. On the road he told me the tale of Walnut Rockhouse, the family’s favored site. They had looted it pretty regularly for a decade. “If they’d only left it alone,” Des Jean said, “people would be studying it in grad school.” They got into some ancient layers, unusually intact, Early Archaic, almost Paleo-Indian. One burial they removed, Des Jean said, looked to be at least eight thousand years old, possibly older, based on what he was able to gather deductively through the son’s collection.
The son met us at the door of a modest wooden house on a piece of marginal rural property. He introduced us to his mules and to his all-but-mule-size dog. He was hale and hearty. He had gray hair but a sort of boyish haircut. He wore glasses and spoke very loudly. He talked all the time. Sort of talked over you but not in a rude way, more like he was hard of hearing. In the older photographs of him that I saw, he had a beard, including in one photograph in which he stood plunged into the water of a pond, twenty below, with his motorcycle parked next to him on the ice. “I couldn’t even get anybody to come with me and take the picture,” he said. “I had to take it myself.” He wasn’t so wild and crazy now; he’d hurt his back in a motorcycle accident—sold off a lot of artifacts, in fact, to pay the bills on that—but he still seemed happy and proud to open his giant gun safe for us and show us some things he hadn’t been able to part with. Des Jean had assured him that I didn’t intend to use his name, so he immediately started talking about burials—that was what excited him. Des Jean had said earlier that within the culture of Appalachian looting there’s a smaller culture of prehistoric bone fetish. He told me the story of a man in nearby Huntsville, Tennessee, who had lain down, Des Jean said, “next to a fully rearticulated skeleton of a woman estimated to be about twenty-four years of age—she’s a Late Woodland burial, which makes her about twelve hundred years old, thereabouts—and his wife took pictures of him with the skeleton, and they were handing them out to people. Someone filed a complaint with the sheriff. As the guy was being put into the back of the car in cuffs, he was yelling, ‘Do I get back my bones?’”
“I pulled this off a burial,” the son said, peeking at my eyes in readiness for my reaction. “There was an infant and two grown-ups.” He put it into my hand, a necklace of conch beads. Each was taken from the inside of a conch shell, where the spiral is thick enough to make a bead. “You can see where the body’s corroded ’em,” he said. His mother had the muscle-shell burial necklaces at her place.
As I sat in his living room, on the couch, he jogged in suddenly and rolled a chunkey stone at me across the carpet. It was gorgeous. (Chunkey was a game—a little like a running version of curling, in which people sometimes got killed—played all over the prehistoric and even historic Southeast; it had ritual aspects; it was connected to war.)
“They would play with that,” the son said.
He put another weird-looking dark rock in my hand. “Now look at that,” he said. “I found that in a burial. That’s a meteorite. You can’t cut it with a hacksaw.”
He showed me a paper-thin ceremonial point. “Can you believe he could get it that thin?” he says. At one point he was pulling points out of an underwear drawer while Des Jean and I stood there in his unfinished guest bedroom listening. He said that on one day, “my greatest day,” he’d pulled out fifty-seven pieces “in a single day of sifting. And I don’t consider something that’s broken or cracked a piece.”
He said, “Once you hit that ash it’s easier than digging sand.”
He said, “My
former
nephew by marriage broke into my house, took the points he wanted off of a display mount, and traded ’em for dope.” We were looking at the remnants of what the man had dug in his time.
The whole time we were talking, there was a very conspicuous thing on top of the TV; it was covered in a big sheet of green tissue paper. The son kept eyeing it, daring me to ask about it. Finally I did. He brought it over—a female skull that he believed to be twelve thousand years old. (It was the one Des Jean thought dated closer to eight or nine thousand.) He presented it to me. He showed me where her teeth are ground almost to nothing “from chewing hides.”
He talked about local people who were “buying and selling.” He added, “I’d never sell my collection for any price. I didn’t dig it to sell.”
He talked about a “fella who has a mechanic shop, who’ll do service for you, and you can pay him in relics. You need new brake shoes and you don’t have any money? Lay out some points, some relics. He’ll give you your brake shoes.”
I asked if he was still digging. Sometimes, he said. Not as fast and effectively as before. He liked to go out and “collect” around ten or eleven at night. I asked why. He said, “’Cause I work. ’Cause I’m not on welfare. I oughta go on welfare. Then I could dig all the time.” He talked about people jumping his claims. Said that at night when he’s done he empties out the trench and casts it all into the woods. A lot of times the next day he’ll come back and the trench is full. Somebody’s come in and dug behind him.
He said that of all the people in his family, only his father, who was a quarter Cherokee, wanted nothing to do with sifting. “What do I wanna be scratching around in some cave for?” the old man had asked.
On the way out he showed us a letter he got from Ronald Reagan, saying how interested Reagan had been to learn about his passion for artifact collecting.
* * *
We entered the twilight zone; the sunlit world was now a gaping hole at our backs. Jan switched on the magic wand. He was different in this cave; he didn’t talk much. When I asked him about it later, he said he’d made more mistakes in that cave than anywhere he’d ever worked, because for the first hour and a half he was totally freaked out. I let my eyes adjust to the wand light. I had been in four or five Unnamed Caves by then and was learning to look at cave walls differently, more patiently. I never got very good at it, but I could see what others had found.
It was easy to see what had so impressed Simek about this place. You could look through any number of coffee-table books on prehistoric Native American art from the Southeast and see absolutely nothing that looked like these pictures. We saw birds, yes, but this seemed to be a sort of box bird—its square body was feathered. Now there were more of them.
A sun glyph, just as the sunlight disappeared.
Moving in, the creatures were changing. These weren’t birds, but they were related to the birds; they seemed to emerge out of them; they were other box beings of some kind.
Now we saw box persons in juxtaposition to more natural-looking humans. Once again the glyphs were exchanging imagery, echoing and rhyming with one another.
The tunnels got lower, narrower. Our faces were inches from the cave walls. We encountered weird paddle-handed creatures with long wavy arms.
I began to feel that I was inside a hallucination, not that I was hallucinating myself—I was working very hard, in that cramped space, to write down Jan’s few cryptic remarks—but that I was experiencing someone else’s dream, which had been engineered for me, or rather not for me but for some other, very different people to progress through. It may have been shamanic. There’s a spring in that cave, Simek said, that can start to sound like voices, after you’ve been in there for a while.
“It’s composed like a mural,” he said. He thought it might be an origin myth, or a way of indoctrinating the young into the religion of the tribe. I looked at him. For once he seemed as overwhelmed as I generally felt in the Unnamed Caves. He was still saying, “We don’t know,” but now it was coming at the end rather than the beginning of his riffs.
At one place in the tunnel, there was a birthing scene. “A triptych,” Simek said. Box person on the left, with a square head and long alien arms. She has concentric circles in her belly. Distended labia. Appearing to deliver a tiny human being. She’s holding hands with a more conventional anthropomorphic figure.
Not far off the floor, in a close tunnel, a dancing man with some kind of head regalia and a huge erect penis.
And now we arrived at the panel of birds. Tiny birds, each about the size of a silver dollar. Turkey. Hawk. At least one small songbird. Very finely etched into the limestone with a flint tool. Another cave that began and ended in birds.
Back outside and resting before the hike back to the truck, Simek said, “Think about it. What was there none of in that cave?”
I had no answer. Hadn’t there been everything in that cave?
“Out of more than three hundred images, there wasn’t a single weapon anywhere,” he said. “We have here an early Mississippian art in which there are no images of violence, where the birds are pure birds, not linked to war—they’re in flight. Even the human figures are not obviously warriors.”
Also there had been women and sex in that cave. I thought about it. No women and sex in any of the other caves.
“The old-time religion,” Jan said.
Since I stopped following Simek and the CART crew, they’ve found several more sites on or next to the plateau that seem to contain imagery from this previously unknown tradition. Some of them are even further out, stylistically. One is full of those little naturalistic birds, hundreds of petroglyphs, turkey-cocks flying everywhere. In another cave they found, carved into a ceiling, a humanlike figure. His torso is a bent rectangle with Xs inside. His arms are scarecrowy and come off at ninety-degree angles. He has a round head with rabbit ears sticking out of it. His feet have long flowy toes, vaguely reminiscent of the paddle hands back at Twelfth Unnamed. The sun is coming out of his belly. “That’s the most succinct way to say it,” Jan told me. “The sun is coming out of his belly.”
As years went by, Jan’s statements about the artwork’s possible meaning began to change. So many sites had come to light, so to speak—there were so many data points now—that some speculative stabs could be made. He wasn’t going all the way out into SECC Working Group territory. Anyway that wasn’t an option. There are no extant myths for those Woodland people, not even indirect sources. We will never know the names or characters of their gods. But what Jan and his colleagues were seeing was something deeper, something antecedent to myth, namely a spiritualized vision of the landscape. Both the caves and the aboveground sites “identified places of power, where they tied themselves spiritually to the land,” and the sites were connected. In this discovery, Simek unexpectedly overlapped with one of the very first observers of Tennessee antiquities, Judge John Haywood, who had written, in his 1823
Natural and Aboriginal History
, of a “connexion between the mounds, the charcoal and ashes, the paintings, and the caves.”
One night on the phone Jan said they’d found a site—it was just outside Knoxville, not far from his house—with a hunting scene in it, a charcoal dark-zone pictograph of a man hunting a deer. They extracted a microflake of carbon. The date came back: six thousand years old. They didn’t believe it. Sometimes the organic material left over in the limestone, the proof of its biological origins (limestone is essentially prehistoric shell), will leach out and contaminate the samples. They tested the stone. No such material.
The weapon the man in the picture is holding may be a spear. But when you throw a spear, you keep your nonthrowing arm in the air. This person has his off-arm down at his side. That’s what you do when you throw an atlatl, the spear-flinging weapon that preceded the bow and arrow.