The art inside "Picture Cave" shows humans, animals and mythical creatures. Jan Simek receives funding from the Archaeological Institute of America/National Endowment for the Humanities.A Missouri cave featuring artwork from the Osage Nation dating more than 1,000 years was sold at auction on Tuesday. Prehistoric wine discovered in inaccessible caves forces a rethink of ancient Sicilian culture It was written by: Jan Simek, University of Tennessee.Īrchaeologists have a lot of dates wrong for North American indigenous history – but we’re using new techniques to get it rightĬahokian culture spread across eastern North America 1,000 years ago in an early example of diaspora The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. That archaeologists were unaware of the dark-zone cave art of the American Southeast even 40 years ago demonstrates the kinds of new discoveries that can be made even in regions that have been explored for centuries. With each new discovery, the tradition is beginning to approach the richness and diversity of the Paleolithic art of Europe, where 350 sites are currently known. These artists worked in ancient times when ancestral Native Americans lived by foraging in the rich natural landscapes of the Southeast all the way through to the historic period just before the Trail of Tears saw the forced removal of indigenous people east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.Īs surveys continue, researchers uncover more dark cave sites every year – in fact, four new caves were found in the first half of 2021. These texts reflect similar religious ideas to those represented by graphic images in earlier, precontact time periods.īased on all the rediscoveries researchers have made since Mud Glyph Cave was first explored more than four decades ago, cave art in the Southeast was created over a long period of time. As it turns out, they refer to various important religious ceremonies and spiritual concepts that emphasize the sacred nature of caves, their isolation and their connection to powerful spirits. Alan CresslerĬherokee archaeologists, historians and language experts have joined forces with nonnative archaeologists like me to document and translate these cave writings. On a cave wall in Alabama, an 1828 Cherokee syllabary inscription relating to a stickball ceremony. Sometimes, more than one technique is found in the same cave, and none of the methods seems to appear earlier or later in time that the others. Pictographs are paintings, usually made with charcoal-based pigments, placed onto the cave walls.
Petroglyphs are drawings incised directly into the limestone of the cave walls. Mud glyphs are drawings traced into pliable mud surfaces preserved in caves, like those from Mud Glyph Cave. There are three forms of southeastern cave art. There are also a few sites known in Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin. Today, we have cataloged 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. Many of those beliefs are still held by the descendants of Mississippian peoples: the modern Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Coushatta, Muscogee, Seminole and Yuchi, among others.Īfter the Mud Glyph Cave discovery, archaeologists here at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville initiated systematic cave surveys. His archaeological work showed that the art was from the Mississippian culture, some 800 years old, and depicted imagery characteristic of ancient Native American religious beliefs. He initiated a research project there, naming the site Mud Glyph Cave. Nevertheless, the Tennessee cavers recognized that they were seeing something extraordinary and brought archaeologist Charles Faulkner to the cave. Artwork deep under the ground was unknown in 1980, and the Southeast was an unlikely place to find it given how much archaeology had been done there since the colonial period. As the earliest expressions of human creativity, some perhaps 40,000 years old, European paleolithic cave art is now justifiably famous worldwide.īut similar cave art had never been found anywhere in North America, although Native American rock art outside of caves has been recorded since Europeans arrived. Subsequent discoveries served to authenticate this and other ancient sites.
The scientific establishment of the day immediately denied the authenticity of the site. Alan Cressler Cave art in America?įew people think of North America when they think about ancient cave art.Ī century before the Tennessee cavers made their own discovery, the world’s first modern discovery of cave art was made in 1879, at Altamira in northern Spain.
From the outside, these caves betray no hint of the ancient art that might be inside.