Tribal advocates and state officials say a large stone mound that tops the 200-foot rise was put there a millennium ago by Indians during a religious observance. It is similar to rock mounds found up and down the Eastern Seaboard, historians say, and likely dates to Indians of the Woodlands period that ended in 1000 A.D.
“It’s just heartbreaking,” said Elizabeth Ann Brown of the Alabama Historical Commission. “I find it hard to believe that for fill dirt anyone would do this.”
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The patterns that the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s archaeology curator saw on the graph paper looked like the signatures of a large-scale ancient dwelling. The dots could be cooking or trash pits, the parallel lines a couple of filled-in ditches, and the oval possibly the remnants of a stockade.
Five weeks of digging this summer by professional and amateur archaeologists from the Cleveland museum and the Firelands Archaeological Research Center, guided by the magnetic readings, have confirmed the presence of a major occupation, and have begun to reveal some tantalizing details about the encampment and its inhabitants.
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“We call finds like these time capsules,” Osborn said. “The dugouts are food pits which early natives stored food, and when its usefulness was finished, the pit was filled with trash.”
He added these finds are valuable as they tell the archeologists about the prehistoric diet the natives followed and their hunting practices. It can show how the prehistoric natives adapted their diet and what animal, fish and plant species they favored.
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Construction crews working on a sidewalk in Oakland unearthed a human skull, possibly a remnant from an American Indian burial site.
The construction site is adjacent to the Hide-A-Way Cafe on the 1900 block of Dennison, near the Embarcadero, and local historians say that area was indeed the site of numerous American Indian burial grounds, also known as shellmounds.
“Maps from 1878 and 1910 indicate there was a shellmound tract right there,” said Dennis Evanosky, an author, local historian and editor at the Alameda Sun newspaper. “In fact, it shows Dennison Street runs right smack through the middle of the shellmound tract. This skull find, it kind of verifies that the shellmound was there.”
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A coroner says the bones found in the basement of a barbershop in eastern Indiana belong to prehistoric Native Americans.
Gary Engelbrecht discovered the bones in a basement vault when he opened his Fading Tradition barbershop about a year ago in Albany, about 10 miles northeast of Muncie.
But he forgot about them until last September when Delaware County Coroner Jim Clevenger came in for a haircut.
Engelbrecht mentioned the bones to Clevenger, who investigated. About 125 bone fragments were found in a deteriorating cardboard box. An anthropologist determined that they were from three prehistoric native Americans.
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Advanced dentistry techniques allowed Native Americans to inset gemstones to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago.
The early dentists used a drill-like device with a hard stone such as obsidian, which is capable of puncturing bone.
“It’s possible some type of [herb based] anesthetic was applied prior to drilling to blunt any pain,” Jiménez said.
The ornamental stones—including jade—were attached with an adhesive made out of natural resins, such as plant sap, which was mixed with other chemicals and crushed bones, Jiménez said.
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Archaeologists and volunteers are fanning out over part of New Mexico to study how early Navajos may have used smoke signals to warn against invaders.
The sites in the area where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah meet feature the remains of what were once formidable structures made of stacked sandstone. The theory is that Navajos bunkered down inside the pueblitos and possibly used smoke to send warnings across long distances, said Jim Copeland, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Farmington.
Copeland said experiments in the early 1990s showed the method of warning could work in general, but scores of new sites have been identified since then and scientists want to know more about how the signals could have been relayed. Improved computer modeling and analysis has refined the idea of an “early warning system.”
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An archaeologist claims that someone has been secretly cleaning a Utah tourist attraction with a high-pressure washer, damaging the world-famous rock art in Nine Mile Canyon.
The biggest issue is dust from hundreds of industry vehicles. Miller says dust is obscuring many ancient artworks. “We suspect it’s being damaged, but we don’t have scientific studies yet,” she said.
But the most famous one, the Great Hunt Panel, seems brighter, more colorful, less dusty, even compared with art a few feet away. Miller believes someone has washed the Great Hunt Panel at least two or three times with high-pressure equipment.
“I think it’s bad. I think it has the potential to really damage the site,” she said.
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