| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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horizons Daisy Cave's Buried Secrets
Some archeologists excavate with a trowel. Others prefer a backhoe. Perched above the Pacific on one of California's Channel Islands, Jon Erlandson picks at the past with tweezers and a straw. "The adage in archeology is that you use the biggest tool you can for a job. It's extremely unusual to be excavating with tweezers," admits Erlandson, a University of Oregon archeologist. Slowly but surely, since 1992 Erlandson and his colleagues have been digging through one of the oldest shell middens in North America and uncovering clues at Daisy Cave, the earliest known paleoindian site in coastal California. In fact, no coastal site between Alaska and Central America rivals the antiquity of Daisy Cave, which may help revise ideas of how paleoindians got to California and survived here. People first visited this small fissure on a windswept cliff at least 11,700 years ago--about the time that Folsom hunters roamed the Southwest. They foraged for shellfish at low tide, then ducked into the cave to escape howling wind or rain. But they left little trace of their presence. Erlandson, who reported on his ongoing excavation in March during the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, calls the ephemeral nature of this early occupation a "postcard from the Pleistocene," that says little more than "Having fun on the islands. See you soon." When much of Daisy Cave was first excavated in the late 1960s, the site was thought to date back only 4,000 years or so. Its significance became apparent in the mid-1980s, when National Park Service archeologist Don Morris and some colleagues revisited the excavation. In the course of their observations, someone noticed that the lower layers contained bones from a species of mouse that went extinct about 5,000 years ago. That clue suggested a much older age for the cave deposits. So the team collected samples for radiocarbon dating, which revealed the site's true age. Eager to see what other secrets might remain in Daisy Cave, Morris invited Erlandson to resume excavations. The field work is limited to about a month in late summer, between the breeding schedule of nearby nesting cormorants and the teaching schedules of archeologists. Though they now have Park Service permission to camp near the cave and no longer make a daily six-mile round-trip hike through heavy brush to reach the site, the excavators must still contend with cramped quarters and delicate deposits that waves and rain easily erode. Erlandson's team has dug four small test pits in the rockshelter just outside the cave. Since much of the site's younger layers had already been removed, Erlandson focused on the early deposits. Besides a few "pretty scrappy" chert tools in the oldest occupation layer, Erlandson found shells from black turban snails, mussels, and abalone. "Everything cultural from that layer can probably be held in two hands, or a couple of red abalone shells," he says. Although the sparse remains hardly foreshadow the rich culture that Chumash people along the southern California coast and islands would develop during the next 10,000 years, the fact that Pleistocene people got to Daisy Cave at all attests to their having had seaworthy boats and probably the rudiments of fishing technology. Starting about 9,800 years ago, people came to the site more frequently and stayed for longer periods. Shellfish still figured in the diet, but fish, bird, and marine mammal bones suddenly are also abundant. The occupants at this time apparently relied on fish, especially California sheepshead, for as much as half their food--an unprecedented amount for an early coastal California site. Erlandson discovered several finished and incomplete double-pointed bone tools that probably served as gorges, or barbless aids for catching fish. A small remnant inside the rockshelter produced the most unusual archeological remains: cordage and woven artifacts preserved by the combination of salt spray and seabird droppings. These softer layers were easier to excavate but demanded using tweezers and a straw to avoid damaging the fragile artifacts. From layers dating back nearly 9,000 years, the team painstakingly removed hundreds of cordage fragments. Erlandson believes that these could be discarded trimmings from fishing line, nets, or baskets. A pair of twined basketry fragments, 8,600 to 8,800 years old, may be remnants of a child's woven seagrass sandals, since they resemble sandals preserved inside dry caves of the Great Basin. The oldest Daisy Cave cordage nearly doubles the age of first appearance of basketry on the Pacific coast. The slowly collected clues from Daisy Cave suggest that paleoindians--long portrayed as big-game hunters who came here on the heels of herds of megafauna--also had sophisticated maritime adaptations. Snails and sheepshead hardly amount to big game. "This whole perception of paleoindians as big game hunters still pervades the archeology of the Americas," says Erlandson. "It's hard to dispel the idea of intrepid hunters with spears poking at mammoths." Whether the Daisy Cave people split off from some population of inland hunters, or migrated separately along the coast remains a mystery, as does just when people first set foot at the site. Erlandson found two artifacts, a chert flake tool and a bone bead, recovered from a layer containing charcoal that has been dated to 15,000 years ago. Maybe humans have been coming here since then, or maybe the tools are younger intrusions into the older sediments. The charcoal may have formed in a wildfire, not a campfire. Since Erlandson knows that "Claims of 15,000-year-old sites are not taken lightly in America," he will soon expand his excavation of this layer. Whenever people ventured to Daisy Cave, they probably needed little incentive. Erlandson thinks that once people had such skills, they couldn't resist the allure of the shimmering Channel Islands. "I grew up on the Santa Barbara coast," he says. "I don't think you could spend much time looking at those islands without saying, 'You know, we've got to get out there.'" Could Neandertals A flurry of news stories followed the announcement three years ago that a Slovenian cave had yielded a bone flute--perhaps the first musical instrument. The 43,000-year-old flute suggested that those underappreciated cave dwellers called Neandertals weren't Pleistocene Philistines. It seemed to support the antiquity of music's diatonic, or do-re-mi, scale, prompting Scientific American to opine last year that Neandertals "had more in common with Julie Andrews...than anyone would have predicted." Many archeologists consider the Upper Paleolithic (roughly from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago) to have been a cultural watershed, when modern human behavior first flourished with an array of new stone and bone tool types, plus the first cave paintings, carved ivory, ceramics, and musical instruments. Such achievements are largely--some would say entirely--lacking in the preceding era when Neandertals ruled Europe. If the five-inch-long fragment from the thighbone of a young cave bear was a deliberately crafted flute, it would reopen the question of Neandertal cultural capacity. But the results from a pair of recent studies won't be music to the ears of those who see a flute in this perforated bone. The studies concur that a carnivore simply chewed it up and spat it out. "This is a gnawed bone," said archeologist April Nowell at a recent meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society. "There's no evidence to suggest that it's a flute." Slovenian archeologist Ivan Turk uncovered the disputed bone in July 1995 at the cave of Divje Babe I, in alpine foothills of the former Yugoslavia. The bone was buried about nine feet deep along with a few dozen artifacts, burnt pieces of other bone, and charcoal and ashes from a firepit. What caught excavators' eyes are a pair of circular holes in the middle of the shaft's flat back side plus the edges of another apparent pair of holes where the bone has been broken. None of the 600 other young cave bear thighbones from the site had similar holes; this one seemed special. "Of course," write Turk and his colleagues on a web site describing the find, "it must be first proved that the holes are manmade." Enter Nowell, who along with archeologist Philip Chase, had serious doubts as soon as they saw photos of the bone on the Internet. Nowell studies the earliest evidence for symbolism as part of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, and she wanted to see the flute firsthand. At Turk's invitation, she and Chase went to Slovenia last year. The first foreigners to examine the flute, they compared it with the extensive collection of faunal remains from the site. They came away even more skeptical that the bear bone had ever emitted music. For one thing, both ends had clearly been gnawed away by something, perhaps a wolf, seeking greasy marrow. The holes could have simply been perforated in the process by pointed canine or carnassial teeth, and their roundness could be due to natural damage after the bone was abandoned. The presence of marrow suggests that no one had bothered to hollow out the bone as if to create an end-blown flute. Says Nowell, "[Turk's] willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, whereas we're not." Authors of a separate study published in the March issue of Antiquity favor neither Neandertal nor wolf as the maker of the marks. Instead, they conclude, it was a cannibalistic cave bear, perhaps an adult groggily emerging from hibernation. Cave bear bones comprise nearly all of the animal remains at Divje Babe. And the holes in the alleged flute closely resemble--in size, shape, number, and position--tooth punctures found in bones from two Spanish cave bear dens where early humans never set foot. The Divje Babe bone bears some resemblance to the dozens of younger, uncontested bone flutes from European Upper Paleolithic sites. But, says Nowell, these obvious flutes are longer, have more holes, and exhibit telltale tool marks left from their manufacture. No such marks occur on the bear bone. Canadian musicologist Bob Fink proposed that the spacing of the flute's holes matches music's standard diatonic scale. Fink made a mock-up flute with similarly spaced holes, which had a tone "virtually the same as the sound of the opening four notes of the Irish tune, 'Oh Danny boy,'" he writes in a report published on the Internet. Nowell and Chase teamed with a more musically inclined colleague to show that the bear bone would need to be twice its natural total length to conform to a diatonic scale. More importantly, though, the scale argument is moot if the bone was never an instrument. No flute, no Julie Andrews. Blake Edgar is an associate editor of California Wild. |
Summer 1998
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