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.
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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
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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-
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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