The image is straight out of the Victorian Era: the ruggedly handsome adventurer (me, of course) furiously hacks his way through the dense jungle with his machete, revealing the remarkable remains of an unknown city, the capital of a lost civilization previously believed by most to be little more than a legend, a bedtime story, or a cautionary tale. The Victorians had a particular knack for discovering lost civilizations by repurposing actual ruins that were well known to local people as part of their native traditions and cultures, transmuting them into the remains of lost or legendary European colonies or the far-flung outposts of biblical people. For example, the native, sub-Saharan African civilization today known as Great Zimbabwe, long known to local people as the capital of an expansive and indigenous kingdom, became to many in Europe, instead, the city of the biblical Queen of Sheba (Connah 1987). In another instance, the earthen mounds of the American Midwest and Southeast became the remnants of the settlements and monuments built by members of the Lost Tribes of Israel (Silverberg 1989). While such rebranding isn’t as common today, the theme of the white archaeologists discovering hidden, forgotten, and lost civilizations—now using sophisticated technologies like Lidar instead of machetes—has become a part of romantic discussions about archaeological research. Just such a misrepresentation has recently occurred in the case of the Ciudad Blanca in Honduras (Begley 2016).
Two converging channels underlie the lost civilization trope: (1) the western scientist discovers a great and previously unknown or merely legendary civilization, lost, apparently, even to the local people who live adjacent to it and (2) the lost civilization is not the product of local people but represents foreigners with a far more sophisticated culture than that of the Natives of the region. That latter trope is precisely what lies at the heart of the examples focused on in this guide under the heading Lost Civilizations: the forgotten Roman Jewish colony reflected in the Tucson Artifacts; the Grand Canyon Secret Cave in Arizona; Burrows Cave in Illinois; and the underground city of Moberly, Missouri.
25. Tucson Artifacts, Tucson, Arizona
Archaeological perspectives
There’s an important lesson here for all of you aspiring archaeological hoaxers; don’t aim too high. Maybe just be satisfied with a one-off artifact. Though experts usually can diagnose a fake—wrong materials, wrong style, wrong language, or simply an impossible assortment of anachronisms—you might get away with a one-off for at least long enough to get your fifteen minutes of fame or a little spending money. However, once you start finding a bunch of stuff and then claim that the artifacts you have found represent the remnants of an entire, previously lost colony of ancient people, you are going inevitably to fail.
You need to understand that archaeologists are adept at recognizing the remains of a human settlement. That’s what we do. As discussed throughout this book, people together in one place (a camp, village, town, or city) extract resources from the environment, they make tools from those resources, and with those tools they hunt (leaving behind the butchered bones of the animals they hunted), plant crops (leaving behind seeds, nut fragments, and pollen), and they prepare that food for eating (in ceramic pots or stone bowls). Most important from an archaeological perspective, people break, use up, lose, and throw stuff away, and that stuff is culturally diagnostic. As I have mentioned incessantly in this book, every culture’s stuff is different and unique, and cultural stuff is precisely what we find at settlements that we now call archaeological sites. There simply is no culture in the history of the world where people left behind nothing more than about thirty crosses, swords, and assorted other tchotchkes—almost all of them in lead, by the way—and not a single other indicator that they had been there. Yet this is exactly the evidence presented for the existence of a lost colony of Roman Jews in Arizona more than a thousand years ago. You read that right.
Here’s what we know
The richly detailed story of the Tucson artifacts has been wonderfully told by Don Burgess (2009). It all begins on September 13, 1924, when Charles Manier and his family stopped at an old lime kiln located on Silverbell Road in Tucson, Arizona. Lime kilns are found all over the world. Their purpose is to produce quicklime from the calcium carbonate contained in a natural deposit called caliche, a kind of natural cement. Quicklime in Arizona was long used in the production of plaster and mortar needed in adobe construction. The Silverbell Road lime kilns had been abandoned in 1910. Poking around the remnants of the old kiln, Manier saw a piece of metal firmly embedded in the dense calcium carbonate. He needed a pick to remove it and was amazed at what he found it to be: a more than sixty-pound lead cross bearing a detailed inscription that he could not read (figure 7.1).
Figure 7.1. This lead cross inscribed in Latin was found at an abandoned lime kiln outside of Tucson, Arizona, in 1924. Some interpreted it as proving the existence of a Roman Jewish colony in Arizona dating to between AD 775 and 900.
Courtesy of Don Burgess
He was stunned, of course, and realized that he didn’t know nearly enough about history, linguistics, or archaeology to explain the object, so he brought it to the Arizona State Museum on the campus of the University of Arizona. Scientists at the museum—including A. E. Douglass, who would go on to become an icon in archaeology for developing the very accurate and precise technique tree ring dating—examined the cross and, it is fair to say, were intrigued. Thinking he had stumbled onto something of great monetary value, Manier brought the object to a local man, Thomas Bent, and offered him a financial partnership in their own dig at the site on land that, as it turns out, was not owned by anyone at the time of the initial discovery. Bent agreed, and thus began a period of a few years during which thirty-one more objects—thirty made of lead and one actually made from a piece of the local caliche—were excavated from the abandoned lime kiln. Most were crosses, many were swords, and there was a lance head and a fan-shaped object as well. Some noted the obvious at the time; lead would seem to be an especially poor choice for a sword. It doesn’t keep a sharp edge, and it is monstrously heavy.
Then there was the story told in the Latin (!) inscriptions on the objects. Together, they identify the place as a colony called Calalus, a settlement of Roman Jews that existed between AD 775 and 900. The inscription claimed that the colonists arrived from across the sea and that they had contacts with the Toltecs to the south. Toltec is the name given to a Mexican civilization that predated the Aztecs, who were encountered by the Spanish conquistadores in 1519.
If the thirty-two artifacts were genuine and if the inscription could be verified, the implications certainly were mind blowing. More than a thousand years before the discovery of those objects, a group of European Jews had established a colony near modern Tucson! Remarkable indeed. But are the Tucson artifacts legitimate? People began arguing that point almost immediately upon their discovery.
Why are archaeologists skeptical?
Seriously? Dull-bladed, impossibly heavy lead swords? A colony of Roman Jews lasting 175 years in the desert of southern Arizona that left no material traces behind—including no burials—other than a bunch of lead crosses (um, Jews with crosses?), swords, and a caliche plaque? How did anyone take the discovery seriously?
Much of the argument on the part of those who strongly supported authenticity along with those who simply weren’t sure concerns the fact that the objects were found embedded in the caliche deposit. The caliche was ancient, so the artifacts must been even older than the caliche.
There was a serious problem with that argument. Sure, the caliche deposit in which the artifacts were found was ancient, but, in fact, it was far too ancient. Tucson geologist James Quinlan identified the caliche deposit on Silverbell Road as being Pleistocene in age and origin. In other words, the deposit in which the artifacts were found was, at a minimum, ten thousand years old! If the Tucson artifacts were legitimately encased in ten-thousand-year-old caliche, then they must be at least that old and possibly as much as 1.8 million years of age. Which is nonsensical, if you hold onto the one-thousand-year age as indicated in the translation.
A careful examination of the context of discovery of at least one of the artifacts showed pretty clearly that a hole had been etched into the caliche and the object jammed in; the gap in the caliche in which it was found was actually longer than the object, and that certainly aroused suspicion. It has also been suggested that once a gap was artificially made in the natural deposit and the object placed within, loose calcium carbonate was packed into the hole and around the object. With a bit of water added to the mix, a hard, dense, and of course, very modern caliche was produced, making the artifact appear to have been there since the natural deposit formed. However, whoever accomplished this task was unaware that, for that to be true, the artifacts would need to be at least ten thousand years old.
Clearly those who had the most to gain monetarily from the pieces were the most vociferous in their defense—Thomas Bent, the co-owner of the objects, wrote and self-published a 352-page report on the artifacts and their excavation. However, many (not all) trained archaeologists and language experts declared them to be poorly rendered fakes that made little sense.
For example, Frank Fowler of the Classics Department of the University of Arizona pored over the inscriptions. He not only declared them to be a poorly rendered fraud, he even found what appeared to be a source for the inscriptions. Apparently the hoaxer plagiarized bits and pieces of the inscriptions—word for word and in the same order—from three widely available books about Latin grammar (Harkness’s Latin Grammar, the Latin Grammar of Allen and Greenough, and Rouf’s Standard Dictionary of Facts).
When experts at the British Museum were shown photographs of the large lead cross, the consensus as reported to A. E. Douglas was:
We all find it difficult to believe that the cross can be anything but the work of a person living not very long ago, and desirous of mystifying persons. In our opinion it cannot have any historical value. (as cited in Burgess 2009: 14)
As reported in the New York Times on December 13, 1925, when shown the lead objects including the swords, the curator of arms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City labeled them “crude and childish forgeries.”
Beyond this, chemical analyses conducted on the lead indicated that the swords, crosses, lance head, and fanlike object had been made from a modern metal, similar, in fact, to the lead used to make the anodes of lead batteries! Shocking (sorry for the pun).
There was—and still is—the broader archaeological puzzle faced by supporters of the authenticity of the Tucson artifacts: Where are all of the other mundane objects that would be expected at an archaeological site that ostensibly represented a long-lived colony of Roman Jews in the eighth and ninth centuries? Where are the remains of their houses, their kitchens, their workshops, and, ultimately, where are their burials? Authenticity supporters like Byron Cummings, whose official title at the University of Arizona was Dean of the Archaeological Department and Director of the State Museum, recognized this very problem and, in December 14, 1925, in the New York Times admitted:
“It is strange,” he said, “that nothing, no human bones, were found with these articles. What must be done is what we are planning to do. I have promised to make further excavations in a systematic manner after the holidays. I will try to find the camp site of the people who had these articles. Apparently their weapons and crosses were washed down a slope in times of flood, and I think a camp site will be found near-by where they were washed from.”
Search as they might, subsequent excavations revealed no evidence of the actual colony, and Cummings himself, one of the few experienced archaeologists who initially supported authenticity, changed his mind. The artifacts were isolated; there was no archaeological context for them, and they simply could not have been actual elements of an ancient colony of immigrants from Rome in the eighth century.
Finally, it didn’t exactly help supporters of the artifacts’ authenticity when, on April 5, 1925, another lead sword was found and on its blade one could very clearly see the image of an animal etched into its surface. The identification of the animal was, well, either perplexing or hilarious, and maybe both. The animal on the blade of the sword was a dinosaur, apparently a brontosaurus or apatosaurus, to be precise (figure 7.2). At this point I think it appropriate to raise the question: Had the hoaxer, whoever he or she was, tiring of the game, planted an absurdity, a sword bearing an image certain to signal that the entire thing had been a bad joke? Unfortunately, none of the believers in authenticity seem to have been bothered by the dinosaur, even when a drawing that appears to have been the source of the image on the sword was located in a book titled The First Story Ever Told. That book was in the collections of the University of Arizona Library. No surprise there.
Figure 7.2. This impossible lead sword is another of the Tucson Artifacts. Why is it impossible? Well, to begin, it weighs over forty pounds, which would be interesting in actual combat. Oh, and there’s an engraving of what appears to be a dinosaur on its blade.
Courtesy of Don Burgess.
Whodunit?
There are no deathbed confessions, no smoking guns, and no DNA recovered from any of the objects, so answering the “whodunit” question is a challenge. Don Burgess (2009) has enumerated the possible perpetrators, including: local Freemasons; Mormons; Daniel Soper (the individual responsible for the Michigan Relics); and an elderly Mexican man, Timotio Oldohui, who lived nearby, was familiar with metal fabrication, and apparently had hoped to inspire his son to go into the priesthood. As Burgess points out, most of these scenarios constitute little more than conjecture. He suggests that the most probable perpetrators were the individuals who revealed the existence of the site. Admittedly, the evidence is circumstantial, but Manier and Bent had primary access to the location where the objects were found and are the most likely perpetrators. But the truth is, we may never know.
Why?
If Charles Manier and Thomas Bent were the creators of the Tucson Artifacts, the motive is pretty clear: money. Manier and Bent hoped to sell the set of artifacts and digging rights to the University of Arizona. The deal was that the university would pay out $16,000 (the equivalent of $150,000 today), but this was “contingent on the artifacts being authenticated as pre-Columbian” (Burgess 2009: 36). The deal fell through when it became clear that the artifacts were frauds.
Fake-o-meter
Five.
Getting there
The lime kiln where the artifacts were “found” is long gone now. But the artifacts are stored at the Arizona Historical Society. Unfortunately, they are not on display as I write this, but it is hoped that one day, with a bit of funding, this fascinating saga in Arizona history and the history of archaeological oddities will take its rightful place, in public view.
26. Grand Canyon Secret Cave, Grand Canyon, Arizona
27. Moberly Subterranean City, Moberly, Missouri
Archaeological perspectives
Fake news. As I write this in early June 2018, it’s impossible to open a newspaper, turn on a cable news station, or read your online news feeds without encountering discussions about fake news. It’s ironic, right? There’s a lot of real news right now about fake news, stories that are either gross exaggerations of fact or entirely fabricated, simply made up out of nothing. American soldiers in Afghanistan have captured a biblical giant. Of course they have. It has been grotesquely claimed that the mass murder of children and their teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 was a staged event, a so-called false flag engineered to take away people’s constitutional right to own firearms—and no one actually died in the incident. Tell that to the still grieving parents. Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. OMG. Just OMG.
As troubling and shocking as these false stories may be—and while it’s getting a lot of press right now—fake news is nothing new. Elevating the assumed entertainment value of a story above its veracity, popular media has, for decades, printed or broadcast stories despite warning signs that they were fake. Even more troubling, popular media has, again for decades, reported stories they knew were false but whose implications supported the political views of the media outlet’s ownership or that were simply viewed as harmless entertainment, the kinds of stories that sell newspapers. Fake news was so common at the turn of the twentieth century there was even a name given to it: yellow journalism. The supermarket tabloids so popular in the period before internet fake news took over were the ignoble descendants of the yellow journals of the last century. Think The Onion, only they sort of expected you to believe the nonsense.
Some fake news—both today and in the past—exploited people’s fascination with human antiquity. Two examples—one from the late nineteenth and one from the early twentieth century—of archaeological oddities that involve entirely fabricated stories about the discovery of astounding ancient remains in the United States are: (1) the secret cave in the Grand Canyon, in Arizona and (2) the “lost” subterranean city of Moberly, Missouri. Let’s look at them both.
Here’s what we know: Grand Canyon Secret Cave
You will clearly notice many similarities between the story of the subterranean city of Moberly and that of a lost city hidden in the deep recesses of a cave in the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon story begins with a newspaper account published in the Arizona Gazette on April 5, 1909 (you can read the text of the newspaper article at Jason Colavito’s web page at: http://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-1909-grand-canyon-hoax.html, where he also provides a wonderful dissection of the hoax). That article concerns the discovery by Mr. G. E. Kincaid, an Idaho native, of the hidden entrance of a secret cave located high up on a vast rock wall, 1,486 feet from the top and about 2,000 feet above the Colorado River as it snakes its way through the Grand Canyon in Arizona (figure 7.3).
Figure 7.3. The Grand Canyon is emblematic of both the beauty of the American landscape and the tremendous success of our National Park system. I can’t show you a photograph of the secret cave hidden here, and I can’t show you a photograph of the remarkable bounty of Egyptian or Tibetan artifacts found within the case for one simple reason. They don’t exist.
iStock ID: 511191448; Credit: Yue734
According to that article, Kincaid spied evidence of the hidden entrance to the cave while navigating the river, whereupon he scaled the immense rock wall, found the cave, and then entered it, discovering the lost world of a forgotten civilization.
Kincaid reported that the interior of the cave was gigantic and clearly artificially engineered with finely made, rectangular rooms and oval doorways. The walls over the doorways, along with urns and tablets, were covered in mysterious hieroglyphs that, the article admits, had not yet been translated. In those rooms, Kincaid discovered fabulous treasures, all indicating the presence of an advanced and populous “oriental” civilization in Arizona deep in antiquity.
Artifacts of gold and copper were strewn about in the cave. Some of the walls appeared to be overlain with thin sheets of platinum. One cavernous room was littered with cooking utensils; Kincaid concluded that it had been a dining hall for the residents of the colony who, based on the enormous size of the cave, he numbered at as many as fifty thousand. That’s fifty thousand people living in a cave in the middle of a cliff. In Arizona. A long, long time ago. Secretly.
In the center of another room, Kincaid found the most impressive artifact of all, a monumental idol of what appeared to be a cross-legged Buddha holding a lotus or lily in each hand. The Buddha was surrounded by other statues; Kincaid likened them to those seen in ancient Tibet.
According to the article, Kincaid had already contacted and shared his discovery with Professor S. A. Jordan of the famed “Smithsonian Institute,” which was now funding the research. Scientists at the Smithsonian were leaning toward the hypothesis that the residents of the cave were from Egypt—though how Tibetan statuary and a Buddha fit that hypothesis is unexplained—and may date to the period of the fabled pharaoh Ramses. As there are eleven pharaohs who bore the Ramses name, it’s difficult to date the site based on an Egyptian king list, but I presume the article’s author was referring to Ramses I, who ruled about three thousand years ago. The article further suggests that through study of the material in the cave: “the mystery of the prehistoric peoples of North America, their ancient arts, who they were and whence they came, will be solved.”
We are compelled to ask the very same questions to be posed of the Moberly lost city: Who were the people who left their mummified remains in the lost Grand Canyon colony? Where did they come from? When did they get to Arizona? Where are their artifacts and mummies housed today? Where are the archaeologists who excavated the place, and where can we read their journal articles and PhD dissertations about the fabulous lost cave city of the Grand Canyon? All reasonable questions, but, as we will see in the case of the Moberly lost city, there are no answers.
Why are archaeologists skeptical? Grand Canyon Secret Cave
Though unlike the newspaper article about the subterranean city of Moberly, there never was a retraction of the Arizona Gazette article about the lost city of the Grand Canyon, there are many, many clues that it was a practical joke.
To begin, no one has ever been able to track down, either at the time or after the fact, G. E. Kincaid. As far as anyone can tell, he wasn’t a real person. A story like one involving a lost city in a cave in the Grand Canyon would certainly have generated follow-up media coverage. Ambitious journalists would have made every attempt to track down Kincaid to get more information, to get an exclusive interview, to ask to be brought into the cave, and to photograph the fabulous treasures he had encountered there. But there’s nothing. No interviews. No follow-up articles. No photographs. Kincaid said explicitly that he photographed one of the mummies, illuminating it with a flashlight. Where’s the photograph? It doesn’t exist, nor are there any museum exhibits. There’s nothing.
How about the Smithsonian Institute’s Professor S. A. Jordan? He should be easy to trace. What did he have to say about the lost city of the Grand Canyon? Well, he didn’t say anything because he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he doesn’t exist either. There was no S. A. Jordan, or anyone with a similar name at the Smithsonian. Ever. The Smithsonian has been queried about this story by curious researchers almost since the initial publication of the article. They have always maintained that there was no S. A. Jordan and, even more significantly, that they have absolutely no record of anyone contacting them about a lost city in a cave in the Grand Canyon. If you’re going to now accuse the Smithsonian of being part of a grand coverup about the site (so of course they deny any knowledge of it), please provide some evidence for that claim. And even if they could cover it up, why, exactly, would they want to?
There is another little problem. There is no such thing as the “Smithsonian Institute.” The national museum of the United States is called the Smithsonian Institution. (The same mistake was made by the discoverer of the Heavener Runestone.) Wouldn’t a real journalist writing a real article about a real discovery by a real explorer whose discoveries were being examined by a real professor know the name of the national museum of the United States where that professor worked? One would hope.
Ultimately, it’s abundantly clear that there is no hidden cave filled with the treasures of a lost civilization in the Grand Canyon any more than there is a lost city filled with treasures underlying the city of Moberly, Missouri. There aren’t even any ostensible artifacts from Moberly or the Grand Canyon cave to argue about.
Though you won’t find too many people who will still argue that the underground city of Moberly was the real deal, the internet is filled with claims that the secret Grand Canyon cave is genuine and that it has been found! I hate to be the party-pooping skeptic here—who am I kidding, I love being the party-pooping skeptic—but without any artifacts, no archaeologist is going to take such claims at all seriously. All the folks who claim to have found the cave need to do is bring in some skeptical archaeologists and a film crew from National Geographic or, better yet, the Smithsonian (Institution, not Institute), and show those skeptics the artificially carved cave, the shelves filled with mummies, and the lotus-holding statue of the Buddha, and we’ll change our tune. Until then, well, I’ll wait here.
Here’s what we know: Moberly Subterranean City
On April 8, 1885, the St. Louis Evening Chronicle published a hyperventilated article about the accidental discovery of fabulous treasures seen in the ruins of an abandoned city deep beneath the surface of the town of Moberly, Missouri, today about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from St. Louis. You can read the original 1885 article on Jason Colavito’s web page here: http://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-1885-moberly-lost-city-hoax.html.
The story claimed that while operating his coal mine, and at a depth of more than 360 feet, Tim Collins broke into a voluminous cavern beneath the coal seam where he and his crew discovered a (and all caps are in the original) “LITERAL WORLD OF WONDERS.” The miners could readily see that the cavern was not natural, but artificial, with smooth stone benches, vertical walls, and polished floors clearly carved by ancient stone masons. Scattered throughout the cavern were the metal tools those masons had used in their work, though the wooden handles had turned to dust.
As the explorers traveled more deeply into the cavern along the remarkable, wide avenues of the subterranean city, they came upon a series of rooms, each filled with an array of spectacular artifacts. In one hall there were grotesque statues made of stone and bronze. In an adjoining courtyard they found a stone-carved fountain, and near it the skeleton of a truly giant human being. His femur (thigh bone) alone was about 4.5 feet (fifty-four inches) long. By way of comparison, the average adult male femur is about nineteen inches in length. Using a little math, a man with a 4.5-foot-long thigh bone must have been more than fourteen feet tall. It all sounds a bit like the author Jules Verne’s story Journey to the Center of the Earth, published only about twenty years before the Moberly story hit the newspapers.
Who were these subterranean giants of Moberly, Missouri? Where did they come from? When did they get to Missouri? Where are the artifacts and bones recovered in the lost city housed today? Who were the archaeologists who excavated the place, and where can we read their journal articles and PhD dissertations about the fabulous lost city? Those are all very good questions. With no answers. That’s because, like the Grand Canyon lost civilization, the entire thing was fake.
Why are archaeologists skeptical? Moberly Subterranean City
Certainly this was an amazing discovery, and interest was sparked all over the world. Can you imagine, with today’s penchant for such stories and with the lubrication supplied by social media, the hundreds of websites and YouTube videos it would have generated? And maybe even a cable series?
There’s just one problem. The story was entirely made up, and Col. John G. Provines, the newspaper’s editor, admitted that it was a late April Fools’ Day prank. Though he later claimed that he had been duped by his reporter, J. W. Estes, many at the time thought that, though the idea may have been the young reporter’s, the details of the story were concocted by Provines.
The man who owned the mine, Tim Collins, was a real person, and the mine was a real place, but the story of the lost city was entirely fake news. The newspaper retracted the story just three days later, on April 11. The Rockingham Register, one of the papers that picked up and ran with the story, concluded, “The only truth connected with it being that there is a hole in the ground.” Displaying his annoyance about the unwanted publicity the story had generated about his coal mine, Collins posted a sign with this poorly spelled message at its entrance: “No burryied sity lunaticks aloud on these premises.” The lost city of Moberly was a blatant fabrication whose dual purpose was to entertain and sell papers, which, apparently, it did.
Whodunit?
Though we don’t have a smoking gun in the case of the Grand Canyon hoax, it likely was the anonymous author of the article. We know the responsible party in the case of the lost city of Moberly, Missouri. It was Johnnie Estes, an ambitious young journalist who came up with a cool idea for an April Fools’ Day story who then had his editor, Colonel Provines, fill in the details.
Why?
I began this double entry talking about fake news and the fact that fake news often supports a particular set of preexisting beliefs—sometimes not just bordering on the paranoid but full-bore pathological paranoia. In other cases, the intent isn’t malevolent but simply to entertain by making up something that readers might find interesting. In the Grand Canyon story, there is the claim that Native American cultures will be explained as resulting from contact with those illegal aliens from Tibet (or is it Egypt?). This is a common theme among those who denigrate American Indians by ascribing all of their achievements to ancient visitors who taught them how to farm, how to build monumental structures, and how to make calendars. Nevertheless, I suspect that the intent of the Grand Canyon hoax was primarily to sell newspapers. Please note that, as we saw in the Moberly hoax, the Grand Canyon lost city article was published in early April, perhaps as an April Fools’ prank.
Fake-o-meter
Ten. That’s five for each.
Getting there
When I submitted my proposal for this book to the publisher, I requested that I be given sufficient time to visit at least the great majority of the sites or museums in my listing of archaeological oddities. Unfortunately, dear reader, I was not able to fulfill this goal for the two sites discussed in this entry. But you need to cut me some slack. I couldn’t visit the Moberly underground city or the lost cave of the Grand Canyon because neither are real places. But I plan to visit them. In my imagination.
28. Burrows Cave, Somewhere, Illinois(?)
Archaeological perspectives
It may be Gertrude Stein’s most quoted quip. In her 1937 autobiography, Stein indicated that she didn’t have any desire to visit Oakland, the city where she was born and raised, simply because “there’s no there there.” She meant that very narrowly, that her childhood home was no longer standing so there was nothing to draw her back, but people have applied the phrase ever since much more broadly and metaphorically to places that don’t seem to have any strong personality, individuality, or unique sense of place. I will now take further liberties with Stein’s phrasing and apply it to an archaeological site. Though thousands of strange and unique ancient artifacts are alleged to have been recovered from Burrows Cave, ostensibly in Illinois, the fact is, no one other than the individual claiming to have discovered the artifacts has been there, and he hasn’t taken anyone there to see it. Further, his story about its location and disposition have changed dramatically through time. Though the artifacts are here for us to marvel at, it has never been proven that they were recovered from Burrows Cave and, in fact, there’s no evidence that Burrows Cave exists in the first place. It would appear, in my application of the Stein quote, there literally is no there there.
To characterize the story behind Burrows Cave as a hot mess would be a vast understatement. It’s more a molten shitstorm. This is largely because there is no single “story” but a bunch of differing and contradictory tales, none of which make any sense. Oh, and there is no evidence to confirm any of the myriad versions of the story concerning the cave’s discovery or location.
Burrows Cave is yet another example of an ostensibly spectacular archaeological site in North America that contradicts the standard histories of our continent. It is supposed to be a secret cave chock-a-block with remarkable ancient artifacts traceable to the Old World—a combination of the Grand Canyon Secret Cave (also of no known location) and the Moberly Subterranean City (lots of artifacts said to have been witnessed but never produced), but with a plethora of actual objects, however fake they may be. So where is Burrows Cave, and what do the artifacts allegedly recovered there imply about the history of North America?
Here’s what we know
The story of the discovery of Burrows Cave—actually, the two different and contradictory stories—originates with one man, the ostensible discoverer, Russell Burrows: and yes, the cave is named for him. There is absolutely no way to verify his story as there were no eyewitnesses to any of it. According to that story, Burrows was walking around somewhere—the exact where has never been revealed—in Illinois in April 1982 (as described in Wilson 2012; Wilson’s article is a fantastic and detailed summary of the Burrows Cave tale). Burrows states that he was looking for artifacts, maybe with a metal detector, when either he simply found the entrance to a cave or nearly fell into a trap designed to kill whoever dared disturb the sanctity of the site. Wilson notes the similarity between that version and the original Indiana Jones movie. Anyway, after either falling or walking in, he noted a staircase hewn into the stone and, upon descending that staircase, he breathlessly encountered the presence of hundreds upon hundreds of artifacts strewn about. As he entered a series of chambers, he encountered numerous crypts, life-size statues of Egyptian deities made entirely of gold, gold coins, suits of armor, and lots more.
Most of the objects Burrows said he found in the cave were stones with inscriptions that have later turned out to represent messages in various ancient Old World scripts, including Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Sumerian (note that these languages date to wildly different periods in the Old World, so their presence together in one place, no matter where, represents a series of extraordinary anachronisms). Also among the inscriptions were drawings of oared boats, helmeted warriors, profiles of individuals who appear to be wearing Egyptian headgear, Egyptian gods and goddesses, people with Nubian (south of Egypt) hair types, and lots of other images, none of which would appear to belong in an authentically ancient site in Illinois. If genuine, a heretofore entirely unknown chapter of the history of North America is revealed and all of us archaeologists and historians are going to need to obey the cliché, tear up our archaeology and history books—and it might not be a bad idea to tear up our PhDs while we’re at it—and start them afresh, leaving plenty of room for the cosmopolitan, multicultural lost civilization of Illinois.
Why are archaeologists skeptical?
It is fair to say the scientists are skeptical about claims that turn our knowledge of any particular subject on its head. And it is reasonable to be skeptical. Skepticism is not cynicism, and doubt isn’t denial. After all of the work archaeologists have done excavating at thousands of places in North America, we have a pretty good idea of what happened here and when. Not perfect, of course, not complete, certainly, but pretty good. Of course, we’re willing to revise our consensus, tweak our reconstructions, and yes, even throw out what we thought we knew and start from scratch. But we need—I should even say we demand—definitive and convincing proof. In the case of Burrows Cave, that proof has been neither definitive nor convincing.
Here, our understanding of the history of human movement into and through the New World would certainly need to be reevaluated and completely revised if the artifacts claimed to have been found in Burrows Cave—including evidence that ancient Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks, Nubians, and Sumerians were all living together as one happy family in a cave in Illinois—were genuine. It is important to add, however, that scientists are also intrigued by game-changing discoveries, and many want to investigate them more deeply. And following the discovery and revelation of those discoveries of Russell Burrows, there certainly was an interest on the part of researchers, some sympathetic to the possibility that ancient Europeans, Africans, or Asians traveled to the New World in antiquity and left behind artifacts confirming their presence here. Unfortunately, however, none of these interested researchers have ever been shown the cave. Burrows has steadfastly refused to take anyone to the site or reveal its location. Ostensibly it is located near the Embarras River (write your own joke) somewhere in Richland County, Illinois, but that’s all we know. And we don’t even know that. By the way, the existence of an actual cave in Richland County, Illinois, would be mind boggling to geologists; there are no known caves there, and local geology simply isn’t conducive to the creation of actual caves or caverns. I won’t waste time here going into the personality of Russell Burrows, but if you’re interested, check out the late Rick Flavin’s detailed description of his personal experiences with Burrows and the, um, interesting cast of characters involved with Burrows Cave (Flavin 2012).
Now back to the archaeology, such as it is. Burrows was approached by the Early Sites Research Society, a group dedicated to the idea that there’s lots of evidence of the presence of Old World people in North America in antiquity. Members of that society can in no way be characterized as mainstream, skeptical naysayers, so Burrows couldn’t claim that they were a group of unfair skeptics predisposed to reject his discoveries. Yet Burrows turned them down flat simply because they wanted to document the discoveries made in the cave, something that scientists and historians might be able to assess for themselves (Joltes 2003). Burrows has explained his reluctance to show anyone the cave as resulting from his fears that once its location becomes widely known, it will be looted. As a working archaeologist I sympathize with that perspective, but I also know that there are ways of protecting the site, so Burrows’s explanation simply doesn’t ring true. Burrows has gone further to suggest that he won’t take anyone into the cave because there’s $60 million worth of gold artifacts hidden there. Of course there is.
If you need to ask why scientists are skeptical of the claims made about Burrows Cave, you haven’t been paying attention and need to go back and read the opening chapters of this book. You might end up failing the course and will have to attend summer school to repeat it.
When trained scientists have had the opportunity to examine artifacts allegedly extracted from Burrows Cave, the verdict has been unanimous: they aren’t ancient, the drawings are absurd and childish, and the writing is nonsensical.
And there’s this: several of the Burrows Cave–inscribed stones are made of marble. On one side of those marble artifacts is a carving of a woman squatting on one knee. Above her head, with her hair done up in a very ancient Egyptian look, is a circular image of what almost certainly is intended to represent the sun with a series of lines representing rays descending from it. It has been proposed that the woman in the carving is a representation of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the mother of the falcon-headed god Horus.
Of course, an image of Isis or, for that matter, any other Egyptian deity, is completely out of place in an Illinois cave, at least in terms of an existing archaeological consensus about the history and prehistory of the American Midwest. However, it fits nicely within the assemblage supposedly found in Burrows Cave. But this artifact can easily be shown to be a fake, and an obvious one at that. The person who used the particular piece of marble to craft the Burrows Cave artifact made a very big mistake.
That mistake was first noted by Dorothy Hayden (1993) and later confirmed by Scott Wolter (2010), whose cable show America Unearthed was not exactly a model of skeptical inquiry. Wolter is a geologist, but you really don’t need a degree in geology or anything else to prove the fakery here. All you need is a working pair of eyes. Or even one working eye. As Hayden noted, one of the Burrows Cave–inscribed artifacts was actually made on a fragment of a marble, historical gravestone! Wolter confirmed this, finding on the reverse side of the stone with a carving of Isis cursive letters spelling out the word there. Anyone even passingly familiar with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century cemeteries will recognize that the Isis carving was made on the back side of a gravestone, in all likelihood one not more than about 250 years old. Looking at a photo of the back face of the stone, it appears that someone attempted to remove the text carved there by striking the surface, perhaps with a rock hammer, but they weren’t entirely successful. Wolter goes on to conclude that ten more marble objects found in the cave bear properties that similarly suggest that they were made from the same gravestone material. He suggests that all of these artifacts were frauds made after the discovery of the cave in 1982.
Now, in fairness I should add that Wolter continues to at least entertain the possibility that Burrows Cave and many of the artifacts said to have been found there are authentic and ancient. For him, evidence that eleven of the Burrows Cave artifacts aren’t genuine but twentieth-century fakes manufactured from a repurposed gravestone does not reflect on the authenticity of the rest of the assemblage. Okay, but this clear evidence of fakery seems pretty damning. In the article, Wolter pleads with Burrows to actually take people to the cave to clear up these issues. Yeah, Wolter’s never been to the cave either.
The only rational conclusion to reach concerning Burrows Cave is that it is a big fat fake. The archaeology and history books are safe.
Whodunit?
Let’s see: Russell Burrows discovered the cave; Russell Burrows is the only person who has ever entered the cave; Russell Burrows is the only person who has actually seen artifacts in place in the cave; Russell Burrows is the only person to have recovered artifacts from the cave. Whodunit? Hmm. Not sure.
Why?
The motive behind the Burrows Cave fake artifacts—I can’t bring myself to call it “the Burrows Cave Site” because there simply does not appear to be a cave or an actual site—is pretty simple, a combination of money and attention. There are people who admit to having purchased artifacts either directly or indirectly from Burrows. And Burrows and his followers certainly have garnered quite a bit of attention from the place; a cursory glance at issues of the magazine Ancient American shows quite a bit of coverage concerning Burrows Cave and, with the exception of the piece by Scott Wolter, it’s all been credulous as hell. Ultimately, as Rick Flavin (2012) succinctly put it, the Burrows Cave humbug is: “Talk-radio silliness, financially motivated fraud, outrageous religious agendas, and amateur historical revisionism is what this is all about. It’s never been about history or science.”
Fake-o-meter
One hundred.
Getting there
This one is easy. To get to Burrows Cave first, think happy thoughts. Then, fly off to the second star on the right and straight on till morning. Be careful though. The cave might be guarded by pirates. Sorry for the snark, but it’s easy to wipe that snark right off my face; reveal the location of the cave, bring in a film crew from National Geographic, photograph the fabulous array of artifacts in situ. Done. Until then, scientists are going to figure that the cave is located in Neverland, as the directions indicate.