BlO—Uncaster Farming, Saturday, January 29,1983 Early Indian farmers leave glyphs KNOXVILLE, Term explore Mud Glyph Cave. First, slide down the entrance hole for about eight feet at a 45- degree angle. Take a good lords at that slide; it’s not just the only way in, it’s the only way out. With belly down, crawl a few feet to the first “room.” Crawl through a tiny hole in a wall barely big enough for a human body, wade through an underground stream, walk bent-over beneath an overhanging rock ledge, squeeze through a second hole, and slither belly-down again to enter a room large enough to stand up in. Now look up. There, incised on both walls of a long, narrow corridor that extends for about 100 yards, are drawings, hundreds of them. There are human stick figures and more sophisticated ighi lity of Tennessee Professor Charles H. Faulkner examines some of the glyphs incised on the mud-covered walls of an east Tennessee cave. Scientists know of no other North American cave where prehistoric Indians drew on the walls in this fashion. ■wsa?? I . BLACK 2. REP 3, VfeUOW 4-. BLUE 5, BROWN GEORGIA IS the larg est state locatedeast OFThe Mississippi River. JAMES OGLETHORPE BROUGHT TAB FIRST SET TLERS TO GEORGIA,4ZYRS. BEFORE THE RE VOLUTION ARY WAR. THIS STATE SOP. PUBS FOUR-FIFTHS OF THE urn OHS TURPENTINE AHO ROSIN. GEORGIA BE CAME A STATE /H 1786. human faces, pictures of birds and serpents and turtles, geometric designs, and drawings that look like simple sqoiggles. Those squiggles are meaningless to modem Americans, but they may have had some significance to the earlier Americans who put all these glyphs here: Indians who lived in the vicinity of this east Tennessee cave from the 12th through the 16th centuries. “Picture yourself as an Indian, barefoot and naked except for your loincloth, carrying cane torches and crawling in here for die pur pose of putting these drawings here,” says Bill Deane. Deane is a professional photographer and a caving veteran who has been photographing the glyphs as part of a research team. Charles H. Faulkner, a professor of antrhopology at the University Come 6. PEACH 7. GREEN 8 . LTBROWN 9. LT BLUE 10. LT. GREEN S7fiTBB/eO BROWNTfJRZSHE 2-3 -83 of Tennessee here, is leader of the team, which is funded by the National Geographic Society. He says the cave is unique, that scientists know of no other cave that Indians entered solely to carry out ritual. The medium, too, is unique: the glyphs were made using either a finger or a sharp slide, and incised into the soft, damp mud clinging to the cave walls. Because of the cave’s dampness, the glyphs have been preserved over the centuries but were unknown until a U.S. Forest Service ranger, who also is a spelunker, found them in 1979. “Some of the motifs in the cave are found on copper plates and shell pendants that date back to the 13th and 14th centuries,’’ says Faulkner. “The important thing about this site is that it gives us a much larger repertoire of Mississippian motifs than we have already. Until now, we’ve had artistic expression only on nonperishable items like shell or copper or bits of bone. This is the first time we’ve found these motifs on clay. “And the style, which is kind of crude, might indicate that or dinary people were goiiig in there and trying to copy the religious iconography of the time.” Scientists have known for some time that prehistoric American Indians entered caves. But in other cases, they were seeking shelter or minerals. That applies, for example, to Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, where the mining history was studied by Patty Jo Watson of Washington University in St. Louis, another member of Faulkner’s team. But preliminary archeological digging disclosed no evidence of mining in Mud Glyph Cave. There in Tennessee cave was no sign of tools or tool refur bishing, no pottery, no food remains no artifacts at all ex cept for the charcoal residue of torches used to light the cave. “As far as we can tell, this cave was entered only for cereproniaTor ritual purposes,” Faulkner says. A combination of radiocarbon dating of the charcoal residue and identification of the known motifs found on the cave walls helned place the time the drawings were made. “Quite a number of Mississip pian Indian sites have been ex cavated in east Tennessee,” Faulker says. “We know what their villages were like, we know what their houses were like, we have a good handle on their material culture.” The people living in the vicinity The figure of a bird, possibly a great homed owl, is seen on the wall of a cave in east Tennessee. Scientists say drawings in the cave made tv prehistoric Indians date to between the 12th and 16th centuries. STfiT£ FLOUJBR- C of the cave between the 12th and the 16th centuries came from the dallas culture, named for a Ten nessee River island, Faulkner says. The Dallas culture emerged about A.D. 1200 and may he an cestral to either the Creek or the Cberdkea peoples. The Dallas Indians were a farming people who grew core, beans, and squash and lived in villages* with a chief tainship and a high priesthood. Their square booses bad hearths in the middle, and had walls made of mud or day covered with thatched roofs. From the formal art of the Mississippian Period, scientists have concluded that the art on the copper plates and shell pendants was executed by training artisans. (Turn to Page Bll) ★ ATLAN
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers