New Humanoid Cave Drawing Discovered
Located in a somewhat unexpected place.
Hiya!
During a city tour in Florance, Italy, a few years ago, my friend pointed out that most of the buildings on the tour are older than the United States of America. The United States is known for many things, but ancient cultures or structures aren’t among them. Even on the East Coast, the oldest area of the country, the oldest buildings are only a couple centuries old.
Whereas the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (also called the Duomo) in Florence was constructed almost 500 years before the United States was even founded. Further, when we think of ancient cultures, several come to mind, but none of them are thought to be in America. I suppose this is why I was a tad surprised when I learned that some ancient cave art was discovered depicting humanoid figures… in Alabama.
The Discovery
Imagine you’re out walking on your property somewhere in Alabama when you find an eastern-facing cave with an 80-foot wide opening. Feeling adventurous, you venture inside to discover a long tunnel. As you explore farther, the floor and ceiling slope closer together. Soon you don’t need to crawl, but you can’t quite stand up either. Curiosity running high, you decide to keep going.
A moment later, you can still see the mouth of the cave, but the light is weakening. Before you, large pools of water are sprinkled all around. While absorbing the magic of your new surroundings, you look up to discover figures carved into the mud ceiling above you. Hundreds of swirling lines, some depicting animals and others looking almost human.
I actually don’t know if that’s how it went down, but a cave fitting that description was discovered on private land “somewhere” in Alabama in 1998. A year later, archeologist Jan Simek, photographer Alan Cressler, and others published a paper about the mysterious cave art. There was only one problem, the cave’s floor and ceiling were too close together, and with the technology at the time, Cressler was unable to capture suitable photographs of the art.
The cave is called the 19th Unnamed Cave because, well, it doesn’t have a name. It’s the tenth prehistoric mud glyph cave art site to be recognized in the Southeast United States, but it is the first discovered in Alabama.
Founder of the Ancient Art Archive and photographer Stephen Alvarez also visited the cave with Simek and Cressler in 1999 but also could not capture any images at the time. Thankfully — and to the delight of Simek, Cressler, and Alverez — technology has advanced quite a bit in the last two decades.
In 2017 the trio returned to photograph the cave, using photogrammetry to create a 3-D model of the site. Photogrammetry is a technique that stitches together a 3-D photo using thousands of high-resolution images. On May 4, 2022, Simek, Alverez, and Cressler published their new findings in the journal Antiquity. Check out the 3-D video of the carvings provided by the Smithsonian:
The carvings sprawl across about 4,300 square feet (almost 400 square meters) along the cave’s ceiling. Simek, Alverez, and Cressler identified bears, insects, birds, and what appears to be an eleven-foot-long (about 3 and a half meter) diamondback rattlesnake, which was known to be a sacred animal to Indigenous groups of the Southeast United States.
What’s super cool about this technology is the 3-D video shows images too faint for our eyes to see. Including four humanoid figures, one is almost seven feet (over 2 meters) long and seems to be wearing elaborately patterned clothing. Ancient Native Americans carved these images into the mud ceilings sometime between 660 and 949 C.E.
Simek and his team checked Ethnographic records and held initial consultations with descendant Indigenous collaborators to learn the identity of these humanoid figures. Unfortunately, they remain a mystery.
However, considering the Indigenous groups in the Southeastern region are known to believe caves were portals to the underworld during the period when the art was created. So Simek believes the artwork most likely was of spiritual significance.
Thanks to the cave’s cool, damp air and wet environment, we can see the artwork over 1,000 years later. Even the slight airflow inside would blow the dry dirt and smooth over the carvings if the cave were dry. Since its discovery, the 19th Unnamed Cave holds the title of the most extensive cave art site currently known in the Southeastern United States.
There’s More
As I mentioned, the States isn’t known for ancient history. But it turns out, the 19th Unnamed Cave is in good company. Ancient cave art and rock carvings have been found throughout the country, and some are much older than those found in Alabama.
Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest, was home to the oldest rock carvings in North America for a while, believed to be around 6,700 years old. Then in 2013, similar-looking rock petroglyphs were found at Winnemucca Lake in Nevada, dating to have been carved between 14,800 years and 10,500 years ago.
The first ancient cave art in the United States was an image of a bird found in a Tennessee cave in 1979. It’s since been named the Mud Glyph Cave by archaeologist Charles Faulkner who initiated the research project on the cave. From his work, Faulkner identified the artwork as belonging to the Mississippian culture and was about 800 years old. The images show ancient Native American beliefs and characters, some of which are still held by Mississippian descendants today.
Not long after the discovery of the Mud Glyph Cave, archaeologists (including Simek) at the University of Tennessee began systematic cave surveys. In an article penned by Simek for the Conversation, he states they’ve since cataloged 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Perspective Shift
The way I learned history in school made it almost seem as though history didn’t begin until Christopher Columbus set foot in North America. I wasn’t taught much of anything about what occurred beforehand. The story pretty much said Columbus landed, befriended the Natives, and everyone lived happily ever after — all of which, of course, is a lie.
The United States may be less than 300 years old, but the ground the States sits on was occupied for much longer by cultures actually native to its land.
These Natives had rich beliefs and practices, which they depicted on cave walls that we can enjoy millennia later. Learning about the Alabama cave and all other ancient art discovered in the States shifted something in my mind.
Now instead of imagining westernized people walking the same ground I’ve walked, I wonder about the Natives and what the ground I’m walking on used to look like before we took over.
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