Survey of possible graveyard site along a highway destined to be four-laned.

What’s a water dowser do when his method is demonstrated time and again to be nonsense on stilts? Turn to dowsing for graves, I suppose. It wasn’t mentioned if the dowser who worked for Mississippi landowner about to lose a strip of pastureland to a new highway project used a forked stick or metal rods, but one thing is clear, he didn’t actually find any graves (click “A Grave Matter” for the story).

But that hasn’t stopped MDOT from sending out a CRM team to clear the area. It’s their due diligence, after all. If all they had to go on was a “dowser’s” word, I would say they should dismiss it out-of-hand and get on with the highway project. Imminent domain can be a pain in the butt when you’re a landowner, but at least he isn’t loosing his home. And the highway addition will benefit the whole of society in his area. Not to mention they probably offered him reasonable compensation.

But since there were some anecdotes from local residents, the CRM survey is the right thing to do (plus, it means some archaeologist are gainfully employed!). The landowner hired an attorney to intercede on his behalf and they’re complaining that the equipment used is a single-antenna GPR (ground-penetrating radar) instead of a dual-antenna.

“The research is pretty clear that the dual-antenna system gives you a better depiction,” the attorney said. “The rules have been changed, so it’s frustrating.”

The dual-antenna is probably nice to have, but not necessary for something as straight-forward as locating graves. The single-antenna GPRs are also called monostatic since they use the same antenna to transmit and receive the electromagnetic (EM) wave, whereas a dual-antenna GPR is considered bistatic since it transmits on one antenna then receives on another. Both have their advantages, the monostatic probably being the easiest and fastest to use. The bistatic GPR works a little slower, but it’s datasets are somewhat smaller and give better resolution. Bistatic is what you want for the precision of locating pipes and cabling under city streets. Monostatic is plenty sufficient to find a few graves. But the CRM team was also using a magnetometer, which could be very useful if gravestones are buried.

That the landowner used the services of a “grave dowser” is laughable, but the response of MDOT and the CRM team to the possibility of genuine cultural resources was appropriate. Particularly since there was some apparent anecdote suggesting an otherwise undocumented graveyard was present as well as some alleged “Indian mounds.” Clearly the landowner is hoping to deflect the project away from his own property.

Bad news mister landowner… if they find a graveyard that isn’t Native American, they’ll very likely just move it. The good news is, major highways are good for picking up cans so there’s a potential opportunity for income!

Related articles

• A Map-Dowsing Competition? We Can Do Better Than That (randi.org)
• Some of us have the dowsing rod talent. (icanhascheezburger.com)
• The JREF brings Dowsing Workshop to Capital (randi.org)

Using a $1.5 million NSF grant, a team led by the University of Arizona plans to study the how humans in the American Southwest responded and reacted to forest changes due to wildfire and climate.

Living in a drought stricken region of the U.S. myself, and having witnessed the devastating effects of wildfires first hand, I fully agree with Swetnam when points out that “drought and dry conditions are going to keep going on, so there’s an urgency in understanding what’s happening.” What his research team seeks to discover is what ways might we be overlooking as we try to coexist with forests as climate changes occur.

They’ll study “how people and climate and fires have interacted in one place over long time scales” and hope to “learn something fundamental about how the people-fire-climate system works.”

“What amount of change with regard to fuel, forest densities, how often you burn it or don’t burn it, leads to forests that are sustained through time?”

Ethno-archaeological methods will likely be used in working with existing tribes in New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains region (tribes of the Jemez, Zuni, Hopi, and Apache peoples). They’ll also gather substantial amounts of tree-ring data from the region along with other archaeological methods that will allow the team to detect the fire history of the forest through time. Data gathered by the team will end up in a database which can be used to create dynamic computer models.

More information can be found at:

UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research
http://ltrr.arizona.edu/

UA School of Anthropology
http://anthropology.arizona.edu/

UA College of Education
http://www.coe.arizona.edu/

Quotes above and the full story can be found at http://uanews.org/node/42041

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Related articles

• UA Awarded $1.5M to Study Human-Fire-Climate Interactions (yubanet.com)
• How wildfires happen (edmortimer.wordpress.com)
• Tree Rings, Ecology and Culture in Mongolia (edmortimer.wordpress.com)
• Record U.S. Fires of 2011 Studied for Impacts (yubanet.com)
• New Mexico Wildfires Continue (nasasport.wordpress.com)

http://thescienceforum.org and http://thescienceforum.net

There once was an Internet forum called The Science Forum. Then our friend, who owned the software, database, and all the writings of our community decided to move on with his life and sell to more capable hands. His motives were right and no one holds it against him. We’re forever grateful for the space he provided for a community of like-minded folk to come together in discussion about something we all love: science.

The new forum software owners are really smart. Truly they are. And well meaning. Truly they are. But they don’t know dick about folk.

As it happens, I sensed the problem and was fortuitous enough to buy the .org and .net domains of the same name, so our little community is still going. Same software as it used to be (but a newer version) and many of the same folk!

We’re an organization of like minded folk who are interested in science and care about science education. We’re not a website or a forum. We’re a community of folk.

Come check us out while we get things rolling again! The Science Forum.

We lost our database and all of our past posts, threads, and discussions. But we’ll start fresh.

I rarely mention the passing of notable people on this blog. But I find that I have to make time and space for an archaeologist who’s been so influential on so many.

Lewis Binford, 79, passed away at his home in Kirksville, MO on April 11, 2011. Binford was one of the leading archaeologists of our time and, whether or not you agreed fully with his perspectives and theory, he is arguably one of the more influential archaeologists when it comes to shaping modern archaeology into a discipline of that is “a more scientific enterprise,” to quote David Meltzer of SMU.

I once described his seminal work, “Archaeology as Anthropology” on this blog, an article of his which was critical of the practice of merely cataloging data and hunting artifacts for museum display. Instead, Binford urged his fellow archaeologists to become scientists who were interested in discovering and describing the way people lived in antiquity and to do so using a scientific approach.

Binford’s ideas have many critics, some of whom I find to have valid criticisms and questions, but there’s no denying Binford got people talking.

If you talk to many archaeologists who have been around a few decades, you’ll here anecdotes about Binford. Some of them are amusing, some of them are even somewhat startling. One of the more curious that was relayed to me was that Lewis Binford was the inspiration behind the persona of Wilson, the next door neighbor to “Tim the Toolman” Taylor from the popular television sitcom, Home Improvement, and lent his name to the show’s fictional company “Binford Tools.”

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I like the story.

There are a hundred reasons why Lewis Binford will not be forgotten. And a hundred more why he shouldn’t.

Related articles

• Lewis Binford, Leading Archaeologist, Dies at 79 (nytimes.com)
• Lew Binford is Dead [Greg Laden's Blog] (scienceblogs.com)

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http://home2.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/

http://69.57.190.74/~molecule/

Compared to previous years, 2010 wasn’t really a productive one for the pseudoarchaeologists. Very little has been said about the Bosnian Pyramid, and rightfully so since it wasn’t a pyramid. The James Ossuary went back to the toilet it came from. The Jesus tomb was a bust, but made Simcha Jacobovici some money. And so on.

Still, there were a few pseudoarchaeological happenings in 2010 and here’s a summary:

Shroud of Turin
At the beginning of the year, in January, a Jewish death shroud was found in the Old City of Jerusalem that dates to around the time of Jesus. The significance is two-fold: it’s the first shroud found in Jerusalem and the textile is simple two-way weave. The find itself isn’t pseudoarchaeological, but it does have some ramifications on a long-held pseudoarchaeological find: the Shroud of Turin. The Turin shroud has been known for some time to be a 14th century hoax, with its ocher and vermillian (paint) facial image that is inconsistent with a cloth being wrapped around a skull. The real shroud, more recently discovered is nothing like the one purported to be that of Jesus. The Turin shroud has a complex weave, rather than the simpler, two-way weave. A complex weave is consistent with the 14th century, but evidence now shows the first century CE to have much simpler textiles.

Crucifixion Nail
In March, certain individuals claimed to have found a crucifixion nail of Jesus Christ. My skepticism surrounded the way in which the nail might be dated: it had no context and had been handled a lot. Sure enough, a few days later Bryn Walters of the Association for Roman Archaeology echoed my skeptical point of view in a bit more detail.

Noah’s Ark! Again!
A Chinese Christian cult discovered the lost boat of Noah. Yeah, not a year goes by that someone doesn’t discover Noah’s Ark. It’s a myth people! A story! Based on earlier flood tales like the brief story of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh. Some of the Noachian myth are line-for-line copy. Gilgamesh was the earlier of the two, and didn’t purport to be fact. The Noachian tale has everything you would expect from a story borrowed from another culture: parts that are word-for-word the same, embellishments and hyperbole, and no basis in reality whatsoever. It’s amazing how people are so willing to spend money on “expeditions” that purport to bring back “proof” that no one ever gets to see. Amazing.

The Saint
Saint John the Baptist, a character in Christian mythology that may or may not have actually existed had his 15 minutes of pseudoarchaeological fame in August when officials in Bulgaria claimed to have discovered some of his remains in a small reliquary. Found under the basilica of an ancient monastary, this little alabaster box contained a few cranial, dental, and hand bones. Clearly motivated by religious and nationalist agendas, some Bulgarian officials rushed to the “holy relic” conclusion without any evidence. Since John the Baptist is alleged to have had his head separated from his body, the cranial section becoming a legendary trophy, one is left to wonder what contet might explain cranial and post-cranial bone if the claim were true.

Indiana Jones?
The Hollywood rumor mill buzzed about an Indiana Jones sequel. The last movie ended with space-aliens. How do you top that? Go to the Bermuda Triangle, apparently. If the make it, I’ll suspend disbelief for a couple of hours to enjoy the show… I doubt it will ever top The Last Crusade, however.

Pseudoarchaeological Vomit
Glenn Beck opened his mouth and spewed forth what can only be expected: nonsense. But for a change, he pretended to know something about archaeology! According to Beck, the Newark mounds in Ohio are measured differently in his reality than in everyone else’s. And Victorian era hoaxes are evidence that a lost tribe of Israel built the mounds and founded, apparently, the Mormon Church.

I did, however, just write a short rejoinder of sorts, in which I respond to a commenter who objected to my labeling the artifacts Beck discussed as “frauds” and “hoaxes.” I maintain their hoaxes, but it is possible they’re genuine artifacts.

“Biblical” Archaeology
Most of the pseudoarchaeology of 2010 centered around religious claims. Which is one of the reasons why I wrote, Why Biblical Archaeology So Very Often Equals Pseudo-archaeology. So-called theologians seek to “prove” through science their particular notions of god and why their particular scriptures are that god’s word. But, more often than not, these theologians (a questionable term in itself) resort to outright deception or poor science to support conclusions they already have. In the article linked above, I used Bryant Wood as an example where he uses shoddy science and deceptive data to arrive at dates more to his liking for Jericho.

I suspect the “biblical” archaeologists and their pseudoarchaeological methods were always there but found a shadow in the grand claims of the now much quieter significance-junkies and mystery-mongers like those who jumped on the Bosnian “pyramid” band wagon. Perhaps Michael Cremo, Hancock, and Osmanagic will return to regal us with new extraordinary claims that haven’t even the most ordinary of evidence to support them, putting all this religious pseudoscience back in its closet.

Yonaguni – It’s Just Rocks, Guys.
Still, even though I wrote the post in 2009, the Ruins of Yonaguni remain a hot topic in 2010, with a very active comment thread. It seems that there are those who will not be convinced that the geologic formations under the surface of the Yonaguni coast -that small island of Southern Japan- aren’t made by aliens, high-tech ancients, or [insert wild claim]. The rock formations were last above sea level prior to 10,000 years ago, so it’s possible they were walked on and even admired by humans in the area. But the geology under the sea exactly matches that above the surface, yet mystery-mongers and significance-junkies still insist it can’t happen in nature, this is an undersea city, etc. Never mind that were the megalithic structures formed by man an not nature, the caloric requirement would be so great that the earliest Joman people (14,000 – 5,000 BCE) would have needed an agricultural infrastructure that went way beyond the rudimentary, semi-sedentary Neolithic lifeway that presents itself in the archaeological record.

That’s all I’ve got this year. I’m looking forward to 2011. I can only imagine what pseudoarchaeological finds await us! But we should start a pool on the first claim of “Noah’s Ark Found” for 2011. I’m saying April 14th, 2011.

Related articles

• Pseudoarchaeology Talk in Uppsala on Thursday [Aardvarchaeology] (scienceblogs.com)
• Loon Alert: More Turin Shroud Madness (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
• Monday Miscellany (scienceblogs.com)

When it’s done in antiquity, of course.

Below are some photos of a particular kind of vandalism commonly referred to as “pilgrim gouges.” I’ve noticed these peculiar scoops of stone in various photos of columns, ashlar blocks, monuments and so on, but never really stopped to think about what they were.

Image by Cammyjams

In hindsight, all the examples I can think of or locate on the net or in books, are within reach of people. Still, my first guesses included eroded palimpsests and some sort of vandalism in antiquity.

Palimpsests in this sort of context are places where one set of inscriptions or a bas relief is removed or plastered over to create a new set of inscriptions or a new bas relief. This wasn’t an uncommon practice in ancient Egypt -sometimes one ruler wanted to substitute his own name or beatitudes or perhaps curses of an enemy. Sometimes a bit of vandalism occurred in antiquity when a subsequent ruler was unhappy with a predecessor or if a new culture just simply had no regard for a much older one. There are monuments with graffiti etched by Greeks and Romans in Egypt and there are monuments around Europe and the Middle East that have bullet holes that could only have been deliberate vandalism.

But these curious little scoops and gouges in the stones of Egyptian monuments and reliefs are something different. One thing they seem to have in common is that they are typically vertical and that they are deeper in the center, as if scooped out. Pilgrims and believers in magic scraped the stone to remove a fine dust, which they collected and mixed in a drink. By scraping out a portion of the temple or monument, the pilgrim hoped to obtain some of the power through sympathetic magic. This practice occurred from about the time of the New Kingdom to around the 5th century CE.^[1].”

What’s interesting about the practice is the frequency and distribution of the “gouging.” Deeper gouges indicate more attention spent at a particular gouge over time (a single gouge probably wasn’t produced by a single pilgrim at a single visit), as do more gouges at a particular spot. The sphinx above, for instance, has more, deeper gouges than it’s neighbor tot he right. Both of these have more than other neighboring sphinxes, and so on, suggesting that the first two, in particular the first, has more perceived power than the others.

Frequency & Distribution -not random

Or perhaps more accessibility. Gouging by pilgrims was not random and the distribution tended to be concentrated in certain areas such as “outer corners of buildings, hypostyle pillars, and certain hieroglyphs and divine faces on outside walls^[1].” So while there was the concern of the object’s power, there was also an obvious concern of accessibility. The sphinx above may have been easier to scrape without being observed by those that might interfere (caretakers of the temple) or it might have been perceived as the more powerful of the sphinxes (i.e. its position in the line along the avenue). But it wasn’t always an image or a temple, which are obvious places to perceive power, but also writing. The gouges on the Ramses II‘s treaty with the Hittites above may be written on a temple wall, but the gouges themselves are grouped together in ways that suggest it wasn’t the wall or the temple that had the power, but the words of the inscriptions that resided there.

Pilgrim gouges are a fascinating topic. Anyone who’s visited Karnak or stared at photos of Karnak for hours as I have will probably have noticed them. I can’t believe I’ve never really questioned what they were or how they came to be until a few days ago! So my thanks for that bit of inquiry goes to a reader of my blog that had a question about them. I think she’ll agree the bit of research we each did was fun. She actually found the answers faster than I, pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks, L!

Related articles

• Archaeologists in Egypt unearth sphinx statues (sfgate.com)
• Archaeologists discover sphinx-lined road in Luxor, Egypt from 4th century (dailymail.co.uk)
• Egypt’s Plans for Luxor: Vegas on the Nile? (time.com)
• National Geographic presents Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology: The Exhibition (eon.businesswire.com)
• The Politics of Biblical Archaeology (insidecatholic.com)

1. Frankfurter, David (2000). Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance. Princeton University Press, pp. 51-52

In a paper published in PNAS in 2007^[1], Firestone and others suggested that there was evidence that shows that the Younger Dryas period in the Northern Hemisphere was interrupted by a barrage of extraterrestrial comets at about 12.9 ka. This impact, the authors said, was the cause of abrupt climate change, a sudden cooling, that led to “broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period.”

In short, along with megafaunal extinctions (i.e. mammoths), the Clovis period of human development in North America was brought to a close by this barrage of comets. The evidence Firestone et al cited included magnetic grains with iridium, magnetic microspherules, carbon spherules, fullerenes with extraterrestrial helium, and nanodiamonds. From that and other physical evidence, Firestone et al proposed:

that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event-related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in North America.

Their hypothesis was met with a fair amount of debate and discussion, particularly evident on several well-known science blogs^[2].

Now, Vance T. Holliday and David J. Meltzer, may have finally closed the debate with regard to the fate of the Clovis culture in a paper available free at Current Anthropology: The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and North American Paleoindians. In this paper, Holliday and Meltzer challenge the ET impact hypothesis as a cause for Clovis collapse. Indeed, they challenge the automatic assumption that absence of post-Clovis occupation of Clovis sites should be interpreted as collapse at all.

… an examination of archaeological, geochronological, and stratigraphic evidence fails to provide evidence of a demographic collapse of post-Clovis human populations, especially where the Clovis and post-Clovis site records are reasonably well constrained chronologically. Although few Clovis sites contain evidence of an immediate post-Clovis occupation, interpreting that absence as population collapse is problematic because the great majority of Paleoindian sites also lack immediately succeeding occupations.

The authors stress that, when it comes to Paleoindian sites, single occupation is the norm. It isn’t unusual for either a Clovis or a post-Clovis site to show evidence for only a single occupation. Archaeological sites generally follow the rules of superposition, with oldest materials at lower strata and younger material at higher strata. Sites like tells in the Near East or Mesopotamia often have multiple levels of culture that demonstrates successive occupations through time at the same site as newer cultures build on the ruins of older ones. Not so, however, with most, Paleoindian sites. This is because “Paleoindian groups had a relatively empty landscape and unfettered mobility, and they rarely used the same spot twice, save in the case of fixed places on the landscape that provided important but rare resources, such as outcrops of high-quality stone for tool making or freshwater springs^[3].”

The absence of successive Paleoindian occupation of sites is an important point because the ET Impact Hypothesis, in part, relies on this as evidence for societal collapse of the Clovis culture. Holliday and Meltzer, however, make a very convincing case that, while immediate post-Clovis occupation of sites is rare, there is a “trend of continuous occupation” during the period in which the barrage of comets -the ET impact event- is hypothesized to have occurred.

Paleoindian site occupations through the Younger-Dryas (grey area)

Holliday and Meltzer aren’t attempting to refute the hypothesis that some sort of extraterrestrial impact occurred at around 12.9 ka. They are, however, eliminating the alleged disappearance of Clovis culture at several sites as evidence for societal collapse due to their inability to cope with sudden changes in subsistence as a result of the sudden absence of megafauna. In addition to showing the faulty assumptions related to the absence of successive occupation at Paleoindian sites, Holliday and Meltzer also question the methods of choosing sites that some proponents of the ET impact hypothesis have used which may have introduced bias in their results. Also questioned is the fact that bison populations appear relatively unaffected by the alleged ET event, which suggests not an ET impact but, rather, a competitive release as large grazers go extinct for other reasons.

While Holliday and Meltzer weren’t necessarily refuting the ET impact hypothesis itself, others might be. Another bit of evidence the ET Impact proponents cite is the presence of nanodiamonds at the YD boundary. This claim has recently been challenged by Daulton, Pinter and Scott (Aug. 2010). They found that there was no evidence of nanodiamonds as claimed by several papers since 2007, among which is included the Firestone et al report. Instead, what they discovered were graphene and graphane-oxide aggregates that weren’t constrained to just the YD boundary^[4].

It probably wasn’t a meteor or comet that caused the disappearance of the Clovis point. Rather, it was probably just a cultural decision. Perhaps the Clovis point was the platform shoe or the bell-bottom pants of North American antiquity.

Related articles by Zemanta

• No evidence for Clovis comet catastrophe, archaeologists say (eurekalert.org)
• Impact hypothesis loses its sparkle (eurekalert.org)
• No evidence for Clovis comet catastrophe, archaeologists say (spacefellowship.com)
• Scientist Smackdown: No Proof That a Comet Killed the Mammoths? | 80beats (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• Scientists discover nanodiamonds in Greenland ice (physorg.com)
• Comet theory carbonized (nature.com)

Holliday, V., & Meltzer, D. (2010). The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and North American Paleoindians Current Anthropology, 51 (5), 575-607 DOI: 10.1086/656015

1. Firestone RB, et al. (2007) Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:16016–16021
2. The Younger Dryas comet-impact hypothesis: gem of an idea or fool’s gold [RealClimate]?, More Clovis Comet Debate and a Response from Dr.Richard Firestone [Anthropology.net], The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas [Greg Laden's Blog]
3. V.T. Holliday and D.J. Meltzer (2010). The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and Norht American Paleoindians. Current Anthropology, 51(5), 575-607, DOI: 10.1086/656015.
4. T.L. Daulton, N. Pinter, and A.C. Scott (2010). No evidence of nanodiamonds in Younger-Dryas sediments to support an impact event. PNAS, 107(37), 16043-16047; published ahead of print Aug. 30, 2010, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003904107

You know how you start googling for information on one thing but end up going down a completely different rabbit hole from the one you started on? This happened to me over the weekend and I found myself looking for more information on a story I came across while looking for something else entirely.

It all started this past weekend when I was watching Hondo, starring John Wayne and Ward Bond on cable. This is the story of the Army scout (Wayne) who comes across a soon-to-be-widowed woman (John Wayne shoots her husband) in West Texas who is under the protection of Victorio, the Apache chief.

Victorio was a real person, even if the widow and her new-found lover and his pissed off dog weren’t. So I got to wondering how much of the Hondo story was based on fact, etc….

Long story short: I started googling for Victorio and his battles and then started looking for Victorio Peak, which was supposed to be in the Diablo Mountains region near Van Horn, Texas. I used to live out that way, so when Google Earth pointed me to a place in White Sands, NM near Almagordo, I was initially confused. Turns out there are two Victorio Peaks. One in Texas and another about a hundred or so miles away in New Mexico.

And its the one in New Mexico, far from the place Victorio staged his last battle, that is possibly the more interesting!

In the links at the conclusion of this post^[1][2], you can read a couple of articles posted on the web that go into more detail, and I encourage you to read them. I’m not saying the stories are true, mind you. But they were both captivating reads!

Doc and Babe in the 1930s

The story could begin in the mid-1800s with the battles of Victorio, an Apache chief (and, arguably, in charge of Homeland Security at the time). But that’s a story for another time (I’ve been pondering what an archaeological survey of these battles might consist of).

Instead, I give you Milton Ernest “Doc” Noss and his eventually estranged wife Ova “Babe” Beckworth.

Doc and Babe

They were a handsome couple. Doc was a “foot doctor” (no record of sort of medical degree, however) and he and Babe lived in Hot Springs, now known as Truth or Consequences, NM.  One November day in 1937, Doc and Babe were part of a hunting party that camped near Victorio Peak. While ducking under a rock overhang to escape a light drizzle of rain, Doc discovered an entrance to a cave that had been covered by a stone. Thinking at first that he’d stumbled on an abandoned mine shaft, Doc and Babe kept the discovery under their collective hats, returning several days later with ropes and flashlights. What they allegedly discovered is straight out of an Indiana Jones story!

At the bottom of the narrow shaft was a chamber about the size of a small room with drawings around the walls. Doc thought these sketches were made by Indians, as they were crude and stick-like. Some were painted, while others were chiseled into the rock face. At the other end of the chamber, the shaft continued sloping downward. Descending another hundred and twenty feet before it leveled off, Doc found that the passageway emptied into a huge, natural cavern large enough “for a freight train to pass through.” He saw several smaller rooms chiseled from the rock along one wall.

As Doc inched his way across the great cavern, he made a terrifying discovery…a human skeleton. The hands were bound behind the back, and the skeleton was kneeling, securely tied to a stake driven into the ground, as if the person had been deliberately left there to die. Before leaving the room, he found more skeletons, most of them bound and secured to stakes like the first. Some skeletons were found stacked in a small enclosure, as if in a burial chamber. All told, he reportedly found twenty-seven human skeletons in the caverns of the mountain.

As Doc explored the side caverns of Victorio Peak, he found amazing riches amounting to extreme wealth by today’s standards. Jewels, coins, saddles, and priceless artifacts were everywhere, including a gold statue of the Virgin Mary. In one chamber, he found an old Wells Fargo box and leather pouches neatly stacked to the ceiling.

And gold bars. Lots of them.

The Noss Treasure?

Keep in mind, this was the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed Executive Order 6102 in 1933, which forbade U.S. citizens from “Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion, and Gold Certificates.” So, assuming the story of his find is true, what was old Doc supposed to do? From the stories I’ve read of Doc Noss, he was a bit of a shady character -a wheeler and a dealer. He allegedly brought up a bar or two at a time, smuggled them to Mexico and sold them on the black market at a price far below their worth.

What’s the Theory?

There are a lot of “theories” to explain Doc Noss’ treasure. Some think it was the Casa del Cueva de Oro, Spanish for the House of the Golden Cave, and was a cache of wealth established by Don Juan de Onate in the 16th century. Others think Noss may have chanced upon the treasure of Felipe La Rue, a 18th century French priest that was in search of riches he’d heard in stories and that he established a wealthy gold mine there in the Hembrillo Basin where Victorio Peak, once known as Soledad Peak, is. The peak was renamed in honor of Victorio, who used the site for a stronghold and stood off U.S. Army soldiers in the 19th century.

Victorio Peak

But did Doc and Babe Noss really find a cache of wealth in the 20th century?

This is where the story has a twist. Doc had filed a claim on the site for prospecting by the end of the 30s but ended up collapsing the entrance in a attempt to blast a wider entrance. He had a few hundred bars brought to the surface by now, but Executive Oder 6102 was still in effect, so his desperation for cash put him in a dilemma.  In 1949, 12 years after his alleged discovery, Doc Noss was shot in the head by a “business associate,” apparently wanting his gold.

But it doesn’t end there. In 1951, the U.S. Army, somewhat evolved from the days when it chased Victorio, annexed the land that Victorio Peak sits on as part of the White Sands Missile Range. This is the period following World War II where we were now in a nuclear arms race and White Sands was where much of the nuclear weapons were being tested. Babe fought for decades to work her inherited claim, but the Army had full control of the surface of the land.

What follows are a few tales of conspiracy and intrigue. Even an airman first class and a captain who apparently found an open fissure and reported seeing gold bars in a cavern. The Army excavated the site using Gaddis Mining Company in 1963 with no results. A member of the Noss family was finally given permission to excavate for two weeks in 1972, but also came up dry.

Victorio Peak: Courtesy Google Earth

To this day, the heirs to Babe Noss are still trying to access the site, which is still part of White Sands Missile Range.

My thoughts are that the site was part of an elaborate scam that involved seeding a mine to scam people out of their cash. Still, there’s always that romantic hope that a buried treasure sits there waiting for the right person to discover it. There may or may not have really been a treasure, but the story is ripe for a movie!

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1. McGuire, Bonnie (2010). The Treasure of Victorio Peak. http://www.mcguiresplace.net/The%20Treasure%20of%20Victorio%20Peak/
2. Paul, Lee (date unk). The Strange Mystery of Victorio Peak. http://www.theoutlaws.com/gold7.htm

An archaeologist from from Ankara University, Fikri Kulako
lu, reports the discovery of a 4,000 year old skeletonwhich has evidence of “a successful brain operation” in which the patient survived.

This sort of trephination isn’t unheard of in the ancient world, but it’s probably the oldest example of medically purposed trephination that I’ve heard of. Still, it isn’t too big a stretch to imagine that it might have been done. The technology wouldn’t have needed to be more complex than a sharp stone. The understanding that such an operation might be beneficial can seem to be a stretch of imagination, but it speaks to the cognitive ability of humanity.

We see ourselves as existing within our heads. Not our feet, stomach, or even our chest -but behind the two eyes and between the two ears that we use to sense the world around us. Perhaps the first person to be trephined this way in this Assyrian tradesman’s culture was done so in an effort to remove a foreign object, behind which cerebral fluid collected (what we would, today, call a subdural hematoma). Patients suffering a hematoma show almost immediate improvement with draining, so all it would take is a single observation to make a connection that a local “healer” can exploit.

Brain injuries that result in subdural hematoma are also frequently accompanied by seizures. So it isn’t improbable that the connection between seizures and built up fluid would be made. This might explain evidence of trephinations where obvious injuries aren’t present in the cranial remains. But then it might also be that the injured bone was removed, leaving no evidence of the injury itself.

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