What does an ancient artifact say about our society? It turns out, it says volumes
The first thing that showed up, 3 feet down in dust-dry soil of Arnold Research cave, was a barrier of sandstone chunks to keep out wolves. Archaeologist J. Mett Shippee dug his way through it only to encounter a second barrier, a fibrous mat of juniper bark. After that came coarse cloth woven of fibers from ancient cannabis plants.
And then the Native American baby carefully wrapped in the hempen fabric, settled into a nest of soft grasses, and buried a thousand years before by a grieving family.
As a young Star reporter in the 1960s, I saw the cave dig, almost overlooking the Missouri River in Callaway County. The fragile infant face was well preserved simply by dryness, much like the mummies from Ancient Egypt. I have long loved history for its knack of telling us humans how we become what we are.
Shippee taught me how archaeology extends that wisdom far back beyond the dawn of written records, broadening it to cover an infinity of human life stories.
Shippee graduated from Kansas City’s Manual High School but never from college. He was a field man through the 1930s for expeditions by the Smithsonian Institution and later for MU. He was the precise equivalent of a character portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the movie, “The Dig”, in which a field man unearthed the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon ship in England. There he recovered a 1,400-year-old chief’s burial and a load of treasure.
When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492, he lagged as much as 35,000 years behind the first Americans. During an era of low sea levels, most of those people followed an arctic land bridge from Asia to Alaska, many along the shoreline in watercraft built of driftwood and hides. They swarmed down the West Coast, thriving on the ocean’s bounty of kelp seaweed, crustaceans and fish. They reached Chile at least 15,000 years ago, meanwhile pressing inland to inhabit both Americas.
Years ago, I found two flint artifacts on our Shawnee house lot — crude things that perhaps started as scrapers but broke badly. Then one day I watched a plucky kid stroll across and find a perfect lance point fashioned of gorgeous flint.
Had I shouted, “Give you ten bucks for that,” he probably would have handed it over. Stupid me, I let it get away, this remnant maybe of the Mississippian culture, 900 years old, or Hopewell culture, a thousand years older, or Archaic going back 7,000 years or more.
We visited (and so can you) the once great Mississippian center at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site just across the river from St. Louis. I climbed the 100-foot earthen pyramid Natives piled up, long ago capped by a timber temple. Archaeologists estimate that at its peak aroung AD 1100, Cahokia’s population may have exceeded that of London.
I visited the Makah Museum and Ozette Native American Village on the northwestern most tip in the Pacific of the continental United States. There, a mudslide sloshed down at exactly the right speed to entomb a Makah village — just fast enough to bury artifacts, just slow enough to let people escape.
No human remains were found. But that perpetually sodden soil, like perpetually dry soil, preserves nearly everything that normally decays — entire houses built of wooden planks, artworks like a killer whale sculpture carved of cedar and studded with sea otter teeth. Just there off Cape Flattery lies the maritime pathway humans journeyed from Asia and, beyond that, the world-spanning trail we humans trekked from Africa where we all got our start.
Speaking of pathways, Shippee led me afoot those 60 years ago from that cave to a pioneer cemetery and the grave of Mattie Alkire, who was born on Christmas Day, 1863, during the Civil War and died five months later. “Budded on earth to bloom in heaven,” reads her gravestone, an inscription common for babies in that era. The bleak epitaph her parents chose perhaps more truly expressed their grief.
“Mattie is dead.”
Were those pioneer parents so different, then, from the Native parents who, 1,000 years before but only a mile distant, nested their child in soft grasses? And how different were those pioneers from mothers and fathers today?
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.
