We prepare a good torch light and pass around to the right of the pond of water on a ledge or table of rock, there we enter a hall way ten or twelve feet wide, we travel this for fifty or sixty feet, and the hall begins to expand … Here jutting from the walls are tables or shelves covered with skeletons of vast proportions belonging to some passed age of the world.
The burials are still in there, covered with sediment that got washed through the karst when farmers started clearing the uplands around 1800. UT excavators found them out on the ledges, right where the journals said, silted over. The archaeologists left them alone, once they saw the bones peeking through the mud. All their jewelry and other items for the afterworld had been stolen, probably—the little band of settlers had included a few eager looters. When they got done seeing the cave that day, they tore open the Indian mound two miles farther down the valley. The “party began in the center of the mound” and “secured many relics.”
At that time the bottoms of these coves were filled with stone-box graves. You can read about them in the little-known Travels of George Featherstonhaugh. He was a government geologist who rode right through there in the 1830s. He notes the mounds ransacked by the settlers’ party forty years before, and describes them as “almost obliterated by time.” Mostly, though, what he talks about is how the farmers were obsessed with the hundreds of stone-box graves in their fields. They competed to see who could open the most and find the best trinkets inside. Little coffins made of limestone slabs. None was over two feet long. So, the Indians were exposing and desiccating the bodies first, perhaps, then flexing them and burying them in a ritual way. The farmers were sure they represented an unknown pygmy race. Each burial had one pot, a single earthen pot, under its head. Featherstonhaugh decided to open a stone-box grave himself. He used his knife to pry off the limestone lid. Inside was the skeleton of a small Mississippian child. Lying next to it were a snail shell and a deer’s rib.
Tearing open mounds is what people did in America for the first few hundred years of white occupation. This makes it hard for us to imagine a landscape full of them. But the Eastern Native American societies had been building them for five millennia, beginning with the Poverty Point culture in Louisiana, which some think predates even the monumental architecture of South America. Then you had the Adena, the Woodland, and the Mississippian, all mound-building cultures. Some were straight burial mounds, dirt heaped over the corpse of someone important or beloved; others were symbolic, shaped like animals, such as the lovely and strikingly large bird- and snake-shaped mounds in Ohio and Kentucky. Finally, there were the giant flat-topped temple mounds of the Mississippian people, whose purpose remains a mystery. A mere fraction of these escaped the depredations of white looters.
The first thing the Pilgrims did was loot a mound. Myles Standish led a little group of them ashore. They followed a sand path. They saw a grave mound. It had a pot buried at one end and an object like “a mortar whelmed” (that is, upside down) on top. They discussed and decided to dig it. They pulled out a bow and some rotted arrows. Then they covered it up and moved on, “because we thought it would be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchers.”
Precious few of their descendants bothered with those scruples. On top of old-fashioned pioneer looting, such as the incident recounted in the journal, you had commercial mound-diggers in the nineteenth century (traveling on houseboats through the South, shoveling out pots and selling them in classified ads), followed by the preprofessional antiquarians who tore open untold mounds in the Midwest, leading to the Great Pyramid–level digs carried on under New Deal auspices in the thirties and forties. The sheer mass of material unearthed by those last excavations led to the first serious codification of Mississippian art and the birth of the Southern Cult as an idea. Two scholars, Antonio Waring and Preston Holder, noticed the profusion of certain images all over the South, and argued that these represented an evangelical movement, built on the worship of unknown gods.
* * *
Gate open, we switched on our headlamps. The same silty runoff made it harder now to get into the cave. We couldn’t simply “enter a hall way” like they did in the 1790s. Instead we squeezed through on our bellies. The mud had a melted Hershey’s quality. It oozed through the zipper in my dollar-store coveralls. The squeeze got tight enough that, as I wriggled on my stomach, the ceiling was scraping my back. Jan said they’d been forced to dig a couple of people out.
At last we came through and could stand, or stoop. I turned my head to move the beam up and down the wall: a light brown cave. Jan had a bigger, more powerful, battery-powered light. He flashed it around. “Stoke marks,” he said, nodding at a spot on the wall. His line of sight led to a cluster of black dots, like a swarm of black flies that had been smashed all at once into the stone. You could find them throughout the cave. They marked places, Simek said, where the ancient cavers had “ashed” their river-cane torches. The longer you went without doing that, the smokier it got.
He stopped and waited for me to catch up. He was facing the wall. “First image,” he said, tightening his beam. “Double woodpeckers.” Faint white lines etched into the limestone. The birds were instantly recognizable. One on top of the other. A conspicuous percentage of the caves, Simek said, had birds for their opening images.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” he said.
I learned that this was his default answer to the question What does it mean? He might then go on to give you a plausible and interesting theory, but only after saying, “We don’t know.” It wasn’t grumpiness—it was a theoretical stance.
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 e
xplicitly 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 as
ked 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.
Pulphead: Essays Page 20