Blog Archives

The Remains of Little Crow

4/28/2015

Little Crow.

Little Crow (1810-1863) was leader of the Mdewakanton Dakota, a Sioux people with a historic homeland in what is now Minnesota. He is perhaps most famous for his roles in the 1851 agreements (the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota) that ceded much of southern Minnesota to settlement by Euroamericans and the Dakota War of 1862. This was a short and brutal conflict that ended with hundreds dead and many Dakota in exile. For their roles in the conflict, 38 Dakota men were hanged on December 26, 1862. The execution was the largest mass execution in U.S. History (source).

Little Crow, not among those captured and executed, was killed in a shootout with white settlers (who were apparently out to pick raspberries) in July of 1863 near Hutchinson, Minnesota. The story of Little Crow's remains is interesting to me for two reasons. First, it contributes to our understanding about what the phrase "double row of teeth" might have meant in the nineteenth century. Second, and more importantly, it is a vivid example of how Native Americans were regarded in this country in the 1800s and how their physical remains were treated.

The body, clearly that of a Native American, was not immediately identified as that of Little Crow. That didn't stop the locals from abusing it, however. I haven't yet tracked down original accounts of the events that followed the shooting of Little Crow, but I found a 1962 article titled "The Shooting of Little Crow: Heroism or Murder?" by Walter N. Trenerry that appeared in Minnesota History:

"The search party callously removed the dead Indian's scalp and went back to town. Later that day the body was
loaded on a wagon, brought into Hutchinson, and there tossed into the refuse pit of a slaughterhouse, like an animal carcass.
About a week later some local ghoul pried the corpse's head off with a stick and left this gruesome object "lying on the prairie for some days, the brains oozing out in the broiling sun."
No one knew at this time who the victim was. He appeared middle-aged; he had curiously deformed forearms; and he had the physiological oddity of a double row of teeth. Although several Hutchinson residents thought that the man looked familiar to them, no one seemed able to identify him positively."

The Wikipedia entry also states that "His body was dragged down the town's Main Street while firecrackers were placed in his ears and nose." If you have any doubt of the validity of the claim that Native Americans were treated with extreme brutality in this country in the past, I encourage you to go and read some newspapers from the 1800s. The language and what it describes are appalling.

Until I get the original sources cited by Trenerry, I won't be able to see exactly what the 1863 accounts say about a "double row of teeth." As I have written previously (e.g., here, here, and here), context and exact wording are important. I found one later newspaper article that suggests to me, however, that the identification of a "double row of teeth" was based on a misinterpretation of the normal arrangement of tooth root sockets (alveoli) in the maxilla. A story in The New York Times (April 14, 1879) reads as follows:

GHASTLY RELICS.

The St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer-Press prints the following communication:

LANESBORO, Fillmore County, March 28.--The Pioneer-Press of March 20 states that Dr. Twitchell, of Chatfield, has presented the State Historical Society with a part of Little Crow's skeleton. The skull of that famous chief is now the most prized relic in my collection of Indian curiosities. It was presented to me by an esteemed friend, the Hon. James Farmer, of Spring Valley. Mr. Farmer had it secreted in his house for several years, hidden in a nook covered with lath and plaster. I am now corresponding with Mr. Lamson who shot Little Crow, and hope soon to possess the gun with which he was killed. The sister of Little Crow's slayer (Mrs. Frank Ide) lives within four miles of Lanesboro. The skull is fractured in places where the stake was thrust through when the citizens of Hutchinson carried it though the town in triumph. The alveolar process (which held the teeth) are double, showing that the chief must have had a double row of teeth in the upper jaw. I have the skulls of "Spotted Horse" and "Two Fathers." Also many relics from the scene of the Sioux-Pawnee massacre on the Republican River in 1872, which I gathered before the Indians were all dead. D. F. Powell, M. D.

This account suggests to me that Dr. Powell made the same basic anatomical mistake as Bigfoot researcher Daniel Dover: he interpreted the parallel rows of root sockets associated with maxillary molars as evidence that two rows of teeth had been present in life. Notice how he specifies that a "double row of teeth" was present in the upper jaw, not the lower jaw (the mandibular molars typically only have two roots). I could be wrong, but I think it's likely that Dr. Powell just didn't know what he was looking at. He would certainly not be the first physician in the 1800s (or today, for that matter) to demonstrate a less-than-perfect knowledge of human skeletal anatomy.

Apparently Little Crow's remains eventually ended up in the care of The Minnesota Historical Society. This website shows a photo of what is apparently Little Crow's scalp in the Smithsonian. The remains were returned to Little Crow's grandson in 1971 and subsequently buried.

Another thing worth knowing: the bodies of the Sioux executed after the war in 1862 were used for medical study. William Worrall Mayo, father of the brothers who founded the Mayo Clinic, received the remains of Mahpiya Okinajin (aka He Who Stands in Clouds aka Cut Nose) and reportedly kept them in a rendering kettle in his home and used them to teach his sons anatomy. The remains were returned to the Sioux in the 1990s. A piece of skin from Cut Nose, found curated at the Grand Rapids Museum, was also returned for reburial.

8 Comments

ATTENTION GIANT ENTHUSIASTS: Bigfoot Researchers Are Stealing Your "Evidence"

4/27/2015

11 Comments

I got very little reaction to my recent post that used quantitative data to explore the meanings of the idiomatic phrase "double rows of teeth" as applied to all kinds of things completely unrelated to giants. That hurts my feelings: it took me many hours to assemble those data (and at least $15.90 worth of Newspaper.com subscription fees), and I would have thought that at least one giant enthusiast would have tried to tell me I was wrong. Maybe that means they think I'm right? Or maybe it is just because they're not listening.

Anyway, the one thing I have discovered from the very limited response to that post is that at least some Bigfoot researchers also have a fetish for "double rows of teeth." I learned this when one person, in response to a posting of the latest "double rows of teeth" post on Facebook, posted a picture of the base of a skull from the Humboldt Sink Flats, Nevada, that purportedly showed evidence of double rows of teeth. The Humboldt Sink Flats are near Lovelock Cave, a site beloved by giant enthusiasts for several "unusual" human skulls that they say are evidence of giants (I'll write about Lovelock at some point when I have more time).

I reproduce below a photo of the Humboldt skull from this page about Bigfoot by Daniel Dover. The yellow arrows that Dover has added to the photo are supposed to show the sockets of a double row of teeth, while the blue arrow is supposed to show an actual "double tooth" still in place. As best I can tell, the original photo was taken from this 1967 publication by Erik Reed titled "An Unusual Human Skull from Near Lovelock, Nevada" (I don't yet have access to the original).

Photo of the base of the Humboldt skull allegedly showing evidence of a double row of teeth.

Here is what Dover says about the skull:

"If you thought the features couldn’t get any odder then you were wrong. The unusual features just keep rolling in. Pictured below is the underside of the Lovelock Skull displaying another unusual feature — it has double rows of teeth. Now, if that isn’t divergent from Homo sapiens then nothing is. This odd feature is demonstrated by holes in the roof of the mouth where double rows of missing teeth were once embedded. and a few double teeth still remain.

It should have been obvious even before looking inside a sasquatch’s mouth that this is not a human skull, yet experts in this field declare it is Homo sapien by default due to scientists being “unaware” of anything else to attach it to. The anthropologists who wrote the paper on this skull likened it to “. . . Eastern Asiatic subdivision of the general Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens.” So, they likened it to a “subdivision” of Homo sapiens who once lived during the Upper Paleolithic, that era lasting from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, even though this skull is not anywhere near that ancient."

The dental features that Dover is pointing out as indicative of "divergent from Homo sapiens" are, in fact, absolutely normal features of a normal human dentition. Human maxillary molars (the large grinding teeth in the back of the upper jaw) typically have three roots: two on the cheek (buccal) side of the tooth and one on the tongue (lingual) side of the tooth. Mandibular molars generally only have two roots. Each root is associated with a socket, so each maxillary molar has three sockets (called alveoli). A diagram of a normal human palate missing all the teeth (source) shows the same morphology as the Humboldt skull:

Dover also tries to make a connection between Bigfoot and the skeletons from Delavan, Wisconsin. Good luck with that. You'll have to fight off L. A. Marzulli and the Nephilim brigade for ownership of the misinformation about that site.

I'm not really into Bigfoot, but it's clear that Dover isn't the only Bigfoot researcher who has latched onto the idea that the skeletons with "double rows of teeth" reported from the late 19th and earth 20th centuries may be the physical remains of Bigfoot (here's another example). The inability of Bigfoot researchers to produce physical remains of their own has led them, like giant enthusiasts, to claim for their cause any skeleton or skull that seems to be unusual. In addition to now claiming some of the same physical evidence and same misinterpretations of historical sources, giant enthusiasts and Bigfoot researchers also rely on the same lack of anatomical knowledge to perpetuate the idea that something is being hidden from them.

Each maxillary molar has three roots. Do you think they each only have one root? So each hole in the bone is from a single tooth? Did you think about looking into that a little bit before announcing that you know more than all the experts who have ever studied human anatomy? Go ask your dentist. Google it. Read a book. Stop being silly.

I do wonder, however, if this mistake was also made in the past and may have also contributed to the identification of skulls with only tooth sockets (i.e., where all the teeth have fallen out) as having had teeth arranged in multiple rows. It is another data point (along with things like the "giant's teeth" from Sardinia and the 1845 mastodon man) that highlights the generally low level of knowledge about human skeletal anatomy in our population. Unfamiliarity with features of the human skeleton and the comparative anatomy of humans and animals (even among health professionals such as dentists and physicians) has led to numerous misidentifications and misinterpretations and continues to do so. Maybe all giant enthusiasts and Bigfoot researchers should take an anatomy course before they can become certified. Maybe that's how I'll make my fortune: I'll develop an online training program that teaches basic familiarity with mammalian functional and skeletal anatomy. It's really not that tough to tell a cow's tooth from a human tooth, or to count the roots on a molar - I'm pretty sure I can help just about anyone achieve basic proficiency in that sort of thing. Let me know if you're interested. I'll start a sign-up sheet. Seriously.

Update (5/3/2015): Daniel Dover let me know on Facebook that he edited his original post. Here is what he said:

"Hello Andy White. I corrected that portion of my article, which I meant to do a good while back after [Micah Ewers] pointed out what looks like double teeth is likely just roots of molars. I had forgotten about it but I rewrote that portion. However, I find it interesting that there are several reports of double rows of teeth in large skeletal finds. Not to say I care for the condescending approach toward me and bigfoot in general, but I appreciate the correction anyway."

As far as the "several reports of double rows of teeth," I refer the interested reader to the now extensive work I've done discussing the various permutations and meanings of the peculiar phrases "double rows of teeth" and "double teeth all around," which are uncritically interpreted by giant enthusiasts (and apparently also Bigfoot enthusiasts) as indicating something abnormal, inhuman, of even supernatural. That's not what those phrases were intending to indicate in the large majority of cases - read some of my work on it and see for yourself.

In response to my "condescending approach," I would say that when you make such a basic error in anatomy as interpreting normal tooth root sockets as evidence that a skull is nonhuman while also saying that you know more than all the "experts" in human anatomy . . . you're asking for the that kind of treatment. And to be made aware that you made such a basic error but just to let it sit out there for years (? I don't know the date of the original post - I think it might have been 2012 or 2013?) . . .That doesn't suggest to me a great deal of concern about getting the details right.

The link to Dover's new post is the same as the old one, so the original text I quoted in my blog post is no longer visible. Dover's section about the teeth now reads:

"Included in the odd features of this skull are what appears to some to be double rows of teeth, an idea championed by M.K. Davis and others. Pictured below is the underside of the Lovelock Skull displaying the supposed double rows of teeth; however, the holes seen in the photo below are normal dentition found in humans caused by the multiple roots on molars."

I'll get back to the Lovelock and Humboldt Sink skulls at some point in the future. There are so many misinterpretations and misrepresentations about these remains that it's hard to decide what to look at next.

11 Comments

Who Built the Megalithic Monuments of Nartiang?

4/26/2015

6 Comments

My interest in the megalithic traditions of south and east Asia began in reaction to the ridiculous claim/belief that it was impossible for normal-sized people without advanced technology to have moved the large stones associated with prehistoric megalithic traditions (hence they must have been built by giants, aliens, advanced civilizations, etc.). The "living" megalithic traditions of Indonesia (Sumba, Nias, Toraja) and India (Angami Naga) are great because they clearly show not only that large numbers of people armed only with ropes and wood can move some pretty big stones. They also give us insight into the contexts and motivations that make moving those stones possible. There is both early 20th century ethnographic information and, in some cases, videos available on YouTube showing stones being moved. If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out my previous posts: the photographs and the videos are pretty sweet.

My interest in the Asian megalithic traditions has started to move beyond simply using them to demonstrate that normal-sized people can move big rocks. As I've learned a little bit more about the archaeology/ethnography of this part of the world, I've started to see the potential for building a really interesting case that might form a useful comparison/contrast to the prehistoric megalithic cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean and the earthen structures of eastern North America. So . . . perhaps I'm off on another large database project. Who knows. For now I just wanted write a note about the megalithic monuments of Nartiang,India.

My knowledge of the geography of south/east Asia is not great, and I'm guessing that's true for many of the readers of this blog, also. So I made a map showing the locations of the megalithic traditions I've written about so far:

The site of Nartiang is in the Jaintia Hills region of eastern India, in the state of Meghalaya. It is just one of many sites in the region with megalithic monuments. I do not yet fully understand what is known about the living/prehistoric megalithic traditions of this area, but I was struck by the explanations for the monuments at Nartiang (the following passage is from this paper by Vinay Kumar):

"The megalithic monuments of Nartiang in Meghalaya are significant because of larger dimension. Some of the monuments are very big even 9m high. Nartiang used to be the summer capital of the Jaintia Kings of the Sutnga State. The megaliths here are huge granite slabs probably hewn out by the fire setting method. The huge monolith, is said to be erected by Mar Phalyngki, a Goliath of yore. The Nartiang menhir measures 27 feet 6 inches in thickness."

Here is a photo of Nartiang (source):

Many of the monuments at Nartiang are composed of a combination of a standing stone (menhir) and horizontal slab balanced on supports (dolmen). In other areas (and apparently this one as well), the vertical and horizontal stones symbolize male and female, respectively.

Based on a quick perusal of online descriptions, it appears as if the prevailing belief is that the Nartiang monuments were erected during the reign of the Jaintia kings in the 16th-19th centuries (source for the photo to the left). An individual named Mar Phalyngki or Marphalangki is variously credited with building all of the monuments or the biggest monument, and is sometimes described as a "giant."

As I said above, I don't have enough knowledge of the ethnohistory or archaeology of this region to evaluate the claim that the monuments were built by the Jaintia kings. I will just point out that the clustered arrangement, the repeated male/female motif, and the variety of stone sizes all seem to me to be consistent with the "living" megalithic traditions that are related to prestige-building and funerary rituals (i.e., celebrating/commemorating particular individuals or households by harnessing human capital to move and erect large stone monuments). I'm hoping there's a lot more information available on the megalithic cultures of this region.

6 Comments

Was Birth Assistance Among Early Hominids a Gendered Activity?

4/25/2015

2 Comments

Depiction of male and female Australopithecines at the American Museum of Natural History.

I've always like Karen Rosenberg and Wenda Trevathan's (2002) paper "Birth, Obstetrics, and Human Evolution" (available here). It does a nice job of exploring the social implications of anatomical changes related to the emergence of bipedalism, focusing on how the shape of the pelvis in australopithecines would have complicated birth and transformed delivery from a solitary experience into one that often required assistance. I used a condensed version of the article (Scientific American 13:80-85, 2003) in my 200-level Human Origins class: it really helps students see how you can make connections between fossils and behaviors and how one aspect of human evolution can have implications for others.

While I was reading one of the student papers from that class this semester, I started to question the model I had in my head of australopithecine females assisting each other in birth. The student wrote something that seemed to imply (intentionally or not - I'm not sure) that males were the ones giving assistance at birth. It struck me as odd, which made me ask myself why it should strike me as odd: why did I assume females and not males?

I don't think Rosenberg and Trevathan ever specify that females would have been the ones providing assistance to other females, but they use the term "midwifery" several times in their papers. Though not technically defined today as excluding males, the term "midwife" carries a lot of history that associates it very closely with females. This is the etymology as provided by Wikipedia:

"The term midwife is derived from Middle English: midwyf literally "with-woman", i.e. "the woman with (the mother at birth), the woman assisting" (in Middle English and Old English, mid = "with", wīf = "woman")."

Based on a quick perusal of some of the web resources that pop up first (e.g.,this, this, and this) the idea of the ancient origins of the association between females and birth assistance is widespread. I have no reason to doubt that this is correct: I would presume a strong female bias in birth assistance could be amply demonstrated both historically and ethnographically.

So should we assume that females were also providing birth assistance among early hominids?

Maybe not.

It seems clear that our modern conceptions of who should provide assistance at birth are culture-bound. By "culture-bound" I mean connected to other shared, leaned aspects of human societies, behaviors, and symbolic systems. I don't think I'll get an argument if I state that there is zero evidence for anything like human culture among australopithecines. So what happens to our gendered conceptions of birth assistance if you remove all or most of their cultural underpinnings? Would birth assistance still be performed primarily by females?

For the sake of argument, consider how selection might act to reinforce the behavior of males assisting females during birth. If labor and delivery are dangerous for both the female and the neonate, any assistance a male mate can provide increases the chances his genes will be passed on. This would be true in a situation of stable male-female pair bonding, as pair-bonding decreases the uncertainty of paternity. The inclination of males to provide effective assistance during birth would be selected for if pair-bonding was present and birth was dangerous.

If we assume that pair-bonding among australopithecines would not have been the same thing as "marriage" (a human cultural behavior), why do we assume that australopithecine birth assistance would be the same thing as "midwifery"? Our historical and ethnographic record of what humans do now really only gets us so far in addressing questions like this: the universality of a cultural practice among modern humans does not necessarily mean it always existed in the same form deep into the past.

Rosenberg, K., & Trevathan, W. (2002). Birth, obstetrics and human evolution BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 109 (11), 1199-1206 DOI: 10.1046/j.1471-0528.2002.00010.x

Update (5/3/2015): The response of one of my friends on Twitter to this post was that "Sexual selection says they should've been too busy getting busy to care." I wrote this quick post taking an informal look at ideas about sexual dimorphism and sexual selection among australopithecines. It looks to me like the jury is still out, as there's a lot of conflicting information about the degree of sexual dimorphism in the two criteria we look at most often in primates: canine size and body size.

2 Comments

Crowdfunding the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project

4/23/2015

6 Comments

I started the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) a little over a year ago. The goal was/is to build a website that serves to assemble and freely distribute information about prehistoric house structures in eastern North America. The current database contains information and county-level spatial data for 2130 prehistoric structures. I've started a campaign on GoFundMe to raise money to support a research assistant to work on the project for a semester. This post explains why.

As I learned when writing this paper, much of the information about prehistoric houses in eastern North America resides in the so-called "gray literature" of CRM reports, theses, dissertations, and unpublished manuscripts. I hoped that the EWHADP would function as a magnet to identify information information locked up in the gray literature and make it known and available, allowing us as an archaeological community to capitalize on the work that's already been done. What's the point of information stored in a publication that only a handful of people even know exists? I really think we can do better than that, and we can save ourselves the wasted effort of repeated searches for the same information in the same stacks of legacy materials.

I was able to put a lot of time into the project to get it going, and as it sits now the website is functioning and is visited daily by people who make use of the information there. I have no idea how much time I put into the endeavor (both to collect the original dataset and to get the website up and running), but it surely runs into the many hundreds of hours.

With the demands of my job this year and other commitments, I haven't been able to devote any serious time to the EWHADP. There was some forward progress this semester, however, thanks to the efforts of GVSU undergraduate student Emily Gilhooly. She was able to spend a couple hours per week on the database, consulting primary sources and re-coding the information (primarily reclassifying structure shape and applying a finer chronological scheme). For her trouble she got some experience that will hopefully be useful to her, and she'll be added as a contributor to the database when a new version is released. Thanks Emily!

Emily's work on the database gave me some insight into what it will take to get it fully updated. She worked perhaps 25 hours and got through about 200 records (about 8 records per hour). At that rate, it will take about 230 hours to get through the 1850 or so records that haven't been re-coded. Some records go faster than others, of course, and I'm hoping it will go faster rather than slower. A few hours difference here or there won't change the reality, however, that a significant time commitment will be required to get the database ready for the next release.

I would love to have the EWHADP up and running in high gear again for a couple of different reasons: it's an important component of my research agenda for the job I'll be starting at South Carolina in August, and I know that a lot of archaeologists out there are using and will continue to use the information that is being assembled. The EWHADP is also being knit into a larger effort to build an infrastructure of linked archaeologoical data in North America. None of the effort put into these kinds of projects is wasted when everyone can use it.

I've never done a GoFundMe campaign before, but I thought I'd give it a shot and see if it's a viable way to support something like this. I'm looking for funds to support a graduate student research assistant to bring the EWHADP database and the website up to where it should be (i.e., incorporating all the information I currently have in a clear, consistent format that is useful to others). The goal of $3400 is based on a $12/hour rate for 280 hours (20 hours per week).

I'll have some start-up funds at South Carolina that I could potentially use if this campaign falls short or doesn't work at all, but I thought this would be worth a try. Projects like the EWHADP are on the ground floor of what is going to emerge as a new architecture for using our previously-collected archaeological data to address questions with big temporal and spatial scales. The data collected by the EWHADP are, and always be, open access. If I saw someone building a similar database that would add another component - radiocarbon dates, mortuary data, copper artifacts, etc. - I would support it. I hope some of you will support the effort to continue to build this tool.

If you think that it's time we start really leveraging the archaeological information that we've spent untold dollars and person-hours collecting in this part of the county, please consider contributing to this project.

6 Comments

"Double Rows of Teeth" in Historical Perspective

4/21/2015

4 Comments

In previous posts, I have provided several isolated examples (e.g., President Teddy Roosevelt, boxer Jack Johnson, comedian Cecil Lean, Teapot Dome Scandal figure Roxie Stinson, actress Helen Lowell, and several more in this post) that demonstrate that the phrase "double rows of teeth" (or "a double row of teeth") was an idiom often used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to describe a full, normal set of teeth. When used to describe living individuals, it often described a healthy smile: "better" than normal rather than something abnormal.

As becomes quickly apparent when looking at period newspapers, however, the phrase "double rows of teeth" did not always mean just a healthy smile. In some cases it actually does appear to have been used to indicate the presence of multiple, concentric rows of teeth in the same portion of the jaw. This presents an interesting historical-linguistic problem: if the phrase was used in multiple ways, how can we determine what the intent was when it was used to describe the teeth of skeletons? As an archaeologist, my inclination is to collect data and look for patterns. If the use of these idiomatic phrases was not simply random (i.e., there were cultural "rules" underlying their use) we may be able to recognize patterns in the way the phrases were used that will help us understand their intended meanings. If we can discover patterns in circumstances where the intent can be ascertained directly (i.e., where the phrase was used to describe something known), we may be able to understand the intent of the phrases in cases that are less clear (i.e., where the phrase was used to describe something unknown, such as a skeleton).

I collected 160 examples of the use of the phrases "a double row of teeth" and "double rows of teeth" from newspaper stories dating from 1822 to 1992. (Note: to cut down a little on wordiness, I'm just going to say "double rows of teeth" for the rest of this post - I'm including both variants of the phrase in my analysis, however.) I used both Newspapers.com (again, taking one for the team by ponying up my $7.95/month subscription fee) and the newspapers available via the Library of Congress. I'm sure the sample size could be greatly increased with access to more newspapers, but this is enough to get started and see some patterns.

Key used to classify what was being described by the phrase "double rows of teeth."

I created a database of the examples I found. For each example, I created an entry that recorded the year, the decade, and the exact phrase itself. I then coded what the phrase was describing using a simple dichotomous key (illustrated). Was the phrase describing a lost dog? That would be "animate-nonhuman-alive." Was the phrase describing a rake? That would just be "inanimate." I also recorded a brief textual description: shark, lizard, sea serpent, Teddy Roosevelt, etc.

Next, I classified each example according to whether it was describing rows of teeth that were "opposed" or "layered." Opposed rows of teeth are like those found in a normal human mouth: there are two rows of teeth (one in each jaw) that meet when you bite down. Layered rows of teeth, in contrast, are present when there are multiple rows of teeth in each jaw, one behind another (like in a shark). In cases where I could not determine whether the phrase was intended to describe opposed rows or layered rows, I coded it as "indeterminate."

An analysis of these data revealed several interesting things:

First, the phrase "double rows of teeth" peaked in popularity at about the same time as reports of giant skeletons;

Second, the phase "double rows of teeth" was used to describe both humans and animals of various kinds, as well as inanimate objects such as rakes and combs;
Third, the configuration of teeth described by the phrase shifts over time: while more commonly used to describe opposed rows of teeth in the mid- late-1800s, it is now almost exclusively used to described layered rows of teeth.

Put these together and they explain both (1) why the phrase "double rows of teeth" appears to be strongly associated with "giant skeletons" (although its not) and (2) why it is so commonly misinterpreted today among those who don't bother to try to understand the context of what they're looking at. I'll go through the points one by one.

Plot of number of examples of phase "double rows of teeth" in database by decade.

Popularity

First, let's look at the use of the phrase through time. The figure to the right shows the occurrence of my 160 examples by decade. The occurrence of the phrase "double rows of teeth" peaks in the late 1800s, very similar to the time when accounts of "giant" skeletons are at their peak in US newspapers (see this post for a graph from my in-progress database of giant reports).

If you're a giantologist, you might have just said "ah ha!" thinking that the similar tiime frame of the peaks supports your idea that the finding/reporting of giant skeletons with double rows of teeth is responsible for both distributions. Before you start celebrating, I should tell you that only a handful (perhaps three out of 160) of the examples in my database have anything to do with the possible remains of "giant" skeletons. That's next.

Who/What Had "Double Rows of Teeth"?

The large majority (131 out of 160) of the examples that I located used the phrase "double rows of teeth" to refer to living people and animals - not giant skeletons. I also found a handful of examples that used the phrase to describe inanimate objects.

The Hellbender, a large salamander native to the eastern United States, has two concentric rows of teeth.

The animal examples are interesting because they clearly show that the phrase was used to describe creatures with opposed teeth (such as mammals) and animals with layered teeth (such as sharks and some fish). On the opposed teeth team we have bats, bears, dogs, lizards, alligators, horses, mountain lions, tapirs, porpoises, opossums, moray eels, and a camarasaurus. On the layered teeth team we have sharks, several kinds of trout/salmon, various other fish, and some dogs with abnormal dentitions. I have no quantitative analysis (yet), but I think there is an interesting pattern of using the phrase "double rows of teeth" in connection with an impression of fearsomeness or aggression. It seems to often be used to describe animals with teeth that are opposed but visibly protrude past one another (e.g., bulldogs, alligators, etc.).

The human examples also describe a variety of conditions, from the healthy (opposed rows) smile of Teddy Roosevelt to the "abnormal" (layered rows) dentitions of sideshow attractions and persons with birth defects. Because of this range, It is not always clear what the meaning the accounts are intending to convey. Again, I have no quantitative data but I think there is something interesting in the deeper meaning of how this phrase is applied to humans. In some instances it seems to be implying some status of being animal-like or otherworldly. This is something to investigate further in the future.

The inanimate objects that are described with the phrase also can have opposed or layered rows of teeth. The picture to the left (an advertisement from The Times, March 22, 1895) shows a rake with "a double row of teeth" arranged in layers. The Piqua Daily Call (September 16, 1902) had a short piece about a comb buried with St. Cuthbert:

“It was formerly the custom to bury combs with the dead, which clearly shows that these articles of the toilet had sacred significance in the eyes of the people of the old world. The comb buried with St. Cuthbert and now preserved at Durham, England, is of ivory and measures 6 ¼ inches in length and 4 ½ inches in width. It is ascribed to the eleventh century and has a double row of teeth, divided by a broad, plain band, perforated in the middle with a round hole for the finger.”

As shown in the drawing reproduced here (source), St. Cuthbert's comb had opposed rows of teeth (facing in opposite directions). Other inanimate objects with "double rows of teeth" include dump rakes, fish scalers, electric de-tangling combs, and dentures.

Change in Meaning Through Time

It is clear that the phrase "double rows of teeth" was meant in some cases to describe opposed rows of teeth and in others to describe layered rows of teeth. The balance of these intents has not stayed constant through time. When I take my dataset and calculate the percentage of these two different uses by decade, the results clearly show a shift through time away from descriptions of opposed rows and toward descriptions of layered rows:

The implications of this are easy to see. The phrase sounds strange to our ears now because it is not one that we commonly use. And when we do use the phrase "double rows of teeth" in current idiomatic English, we understand it to mean teeth that are arranged in layered rows. When "giant skeletons" were being reported in the mid- to late-1800s, however, the phrase was more commonly understood to mean teeth arranged in opposed rows. That doesn't mean that the phrase was never used to describe layered rows of teeth: it clearly was. In reference to humans, however, it was more commonly used to describe opposed rows of teeth which were perhaps abnormal only in their soundness.

I think it's pretty clear that the phrase "double rows of teeth" was an idiom that existed and was used quite independently of "giant skeletons:" the apparent association between the two is created not by an actual relationship, but by a temporal coincidence. It is a mirage produced by the overlap of the period of popularity in reporting "giant skeletons" and the period of popularity of an idiomatic phrase that was used to describe a wide range of things.

I'm not sure how long it will take giant enthusiasts to understand this component of the story or to learn the lesson about putting their accounts of giants in context. Just last week I heard an interview with an author of one of the recent books alleging that the Nephilim built the earthen mounds of North America STILL talking about "double rows of teeth" as a marker of prehistoric populations.

It's idiotic and disingenuous at this point to continue to say such things.

4 Comments

Normal-Sized People Can Move Big Rocks: The Example of the Toraja

4/18/2015

1 Comment

I don't know exactly how many societies in the world have "living" traditions of megalithic construction, but here is another one: the Toraja people of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. If you're keeping score at home, this is the fourth group I've discussed (the others are the Angami Naga of India and the megalithic traditions of Sumba and Nias in Indonesia). If you have any doubt that lots of people with some wood and rope can move some pretty big rocks, you should watch some of the videos from the Naga and Sumba cases, or look at the early 20th century photographs from Nias.

Menhirs at Bori Parinding.

The Toraja erect menhirs (standing stones) as monuments for the deceased. In a paper in this 2006 edited volume titled Archaeology: Indonesian Perspective, Retno Hondini explains the connection between status in life and treatment at death: larger, more complex, and more expensive funerals are performed for higher status individuals. These funerals include several ceremonies, one of which involves moving and erecting menhirs (Hondini 2006:551):

"Mangriu batu is a stone-pulling ceremony. The stone then functions as a menhir (simbuang), a symbol that a ceremony has been performed for the deceased. Every burial ceremony, particularly those of an aristocrat, always includes the manufacture of a menhir (simbuang). The raw materials to make menhirs are usually available in the surrounding environment. The chosen stone is pulled by a large number of people from its original place to the place where the ceremony is to take place (rante). After the stone arrives at the rante, a menhir (mesimbuang) is then erected"

I've been able to find just a few videos of stone-pulling among the Toraja. This one is of poor quality, but shows a stone (maybe 3m long?) being pulled into a village and erected using ropes and poles. This video shows a smaller stone being pulled by a relatively small group of men (a second video shows another stone being moved).

This 1937 photo by F. van der Kooi reportedly shows a Toraja stone-pulling ceremony. Source: http://www.tanatorajasulawesiselatan.com/monoliths.htm

I'm no expert on South Asian megalithic traditions, but I feel comfortable pointing out the positive relationships between status/wealth, the ability to mobilize/support human labor, and the size of the stones moved in the four cases I've looked into so far. I'm not saying those relationships explain all the megalithic monuments erected by prehistoric non-state (e.g. Neolithic) societies, but it's a much more reasonable place to start than giants or aliens. Or giant aliens.

References

Handini, Retno. 2006. Stone Chamber Burial (Leang Pa'): A Living Megalithic Tradition in Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi. In Archaeology: Indonesian Perspective, edited by Truman Simanjuntak, M. Hisyam, Bagyo Prasetyo, and Titi Surti Nastiti, pp. 549-557. Jakarta: LIPI Press.

Simanjuntak, Truman, M. Hisyam, Bagyo Prasetyo, and Titi Surti Nastiti (editors). 2006. Archaeology: Indonesian Perspective. Jakarta: LIPI Press.

1 Comment

8' Tall Brachiosaurus Sculpture: Free to a Good Home

4/17/2015

1 Comment

Just a little over a year ago, I wrote this post about trying to convert my hand-made Brachiosaurus sculpture into a computer so I could continue my modeling work. Skimming over that post brings home to me how much things have changed for me professionally over the last year. I still don't have HPC access, but I ended up being employed for the last academic year (in a visiting position at Grand Valley) and will be moving to a new position at the University of South Carolina that begins in the Fall. I still don't have HPC access, but it hasn't mattered much this year as the overwhelming majority of my efforts have gone toward teaching. The position at SCIAA will emphasize research, and I will have the opportunity to get my modeling work going again after I get down there.

The Brachiosaurus remains in the yard. I still have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it - I know I could make it into something that I really love if I had the time and energy to do that, but I can't invest in it anymore. I also don't want to invest in moving it across the country (we're going to have a hard enough time just moving the things we actually need). I've made some tepid attempts to sell it in the past, but for a variety of reasons those never panned out. In the interests of getting it moved and taken care of, I'm now prepared to give it away. I want it have a good home, though, not just a one-way ticket back to Haggerty Metals.

As a bonus, a robin has built a nest inside. So that might complicate an immediate move. But if you're looking for a way to spruce up your garden and attract wildlife, this would be a total win. Do you live in the Ann Arbor area or are you willing to make the trip? Do you have a place for a 92" tall, 87" long Brachiosaurus? The lower legs can be detached for transport, but it is still heavy and requires at least two people and a truck/trailer to move and re-assemble.

1 Comment

Linking the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) Database to DINAA: Work in Progress

4/13/2015

0 Comments

In previous posts (here, here, and, most recently here), I have discussed what I see as the benefits of building a system of linking archaeological datasets together. In February of 2014, I started the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP), an effort to assemble information about prehistoric residential structures in eastern North America. I got drawn into the DINAA project through that and we've been working on building the architecture to link together independent archaeological datasets through DINAA (when I say "we" it's really "them" - I'm a participant but the DINAA people are doing 99% of the work). I haven't been able to spend much time this academic year on the EWHADP, but the people at DINAA have been forging ahead. So I'm happy to report their progress.

I am third author on a poster that will be presented at the SAA meetings next week that will discuss what they've done to use DINAA to cross-link datasets:

Sarah Kansa, Eric Kansa, Andrew White, Stephen Yerka and David Anderson--DINAA and Bootstrapping Archaeology’s Information Ecosystem

The poster will be at session titled "The Afterlife of Archaeological Information: Use and Reuse of Digital Archaeological Data" on Thursday, April 16, from 6:00-8:00 pm in Grand Ballroom A. I can't be there, but many of the cool kids involved with the project will be, and you should go and talk to them. Linking together independent datasets is going to be a real game changer for archaeological research in this country, and these are the people that are making that happen.

We've done a "pilot" run linking the entries in the most recent published version of the EWHADP dataset to the entries in DINAA. The electronic matching was not complete: several states remain to be included in DINAA and the attempt to link the datasets revealed some other issues that will need to be resolved (both on my end and their end). That's exactly the point of doing this sort of thing, though: someone has to go first and figure it out. I've created an entry in my Database section to provide an Excel file that contains the automatically-generated hyperlinks to site records in DINAA. The interface from the DINAA end is here (it also references data from the Paleoindian Database of the Americas).

This step of engineering the first links is important. It is moving linked data from the realm of the hypothetical to the world of the actual. There is much work ahead to really get things knit together, but what they've done so far is not insignificant. I will be able to devote some time to the EWHADP after I'm moved down to South Carolina in the Fall. Stay tuned!

0 Comments

The "Oxhide Ingot" from Lake Gogebic, Michigan

4/10/2015

41 Comments

Clear your schedule for the next five minutes, because you’re not going to want to stop reading this blog post. My quest to understand the story of the alleged “oxhide ingot” from Lake Gogebic, Michigan,"heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightning-paced, intelligent thriller…surprising at every twist, absorbing at every turn, and in the end, utterly unpredictable…right up to its astonishing conclusion" where I remain frustratingly unable to track the claim back to its source. I'm guessing it's pretty much like The Da Vinci Code, to which the above quote refers. I haven't actually read The Da Vinci Code, but, as I'm learning, becoming familiar with primary sources is not a requirement when doing "research" about things like the presence of Old World copper miners in eastern North America.

Copper oxhide ingot from the Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck found off the coast of Turkey (source in text).

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an oxhide ingot is an ingot of copper cast into a quadrilateral shape with concave sides and four "handles" (apparently its called an “oxhide” because it resembles a stretched animal hide in shape). During the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean (ca. 3200-1000 BC), copper was smelted and cast into ingots of this shape weighing about 60-70 pounds (~30 kg) for transport. We know something about oxhide ingots because they’ve been found on shipwrecks, were depicted in art across the region, and have been analyzed to try to understand their role in Bronze Age production and exchange networks. The photo to the right (from this site) shows two people holding one of the ingots from the Uluburun shipwreck so you can get an idea of the size of these things. If you skim through the pictures available online, you'll notice quite a bit of variability in shape. If you want to get further into the nitty gritty of the Bronze Age copper trade, a recent (2007) thesis by Michael Rice Jones titled Oxhide Ingots, Copper Production, and the Mediterranean Trade in Copper and Other Metals in the Bronze Age is available here.

What does this have to do with Lake Gogebic? Proponents of the idea that the ancient copper mines of Michigan were actually worked by miners from the Old World (rather than Native Americans) have latched on to various "artifacts" over the years as proof of trans-oceanic contact. I'm not even going to attempt to get into all that - none of the various inscribed tablets, petroglyphs, etc., has held up to scrutiny. What caught my attention this week was a claim that an actual oxhide ingot had been found in the New World. I became aware of this claim when I saw a post in a Facebook group by David Towle, one of the guests on this interview. Towle stated that multiple full-size (i.e., 60-70 pound) oxhide ingots had been found near Lake Gogebic, in the western Upper Peninsula.

Towle's statement got my attention: finding an actual oxhide ingot in good archaeological context would be a game changer for proponents of a Bronze Age connection with the New World, and the claim that one actually had been found was news to me. An actual oxhide ingot that had been created in a mold would provide direct evidence of New World participation in a Bronze Age raw materials economy. That would be much clearer evidence than any kind of chemical test on Old World bronze artifacts that I can think of, because it would remove ambiguity about the changes introduced into the signature of the copper through refinement and mixture. Given how important such a find would be, I was surprised when my first attempt at an online search came up empty: no story, no photos, nothing. Where could I read about this find from Lake Gogebic? When I asked Towle about it online, I got a response which I would characterize as less than helpful:

Okay – so no help there. Towle had pointed me to yet another website that talked about copper mining in the New World but showed images of oxhide ingots from the Old World. And it looked like the number of Michigan oxhides was growing - now we were at seven. As you can see from my exchange with Towle, by then I had succeeded in finding a written source that mentioned the alleged oxhide ingot. Frank Joseph’s (1995:40) book Atlantis in Wisconsin contains the following sentence:

“Closer to the focus of our investigations, a sixty-pound copper ox hide was discovered near Lake Gogebic, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.”

So that was something: I had found a written source. There is an endnote attached to the sentence, but, frustratingly, I couldn’t read it because the limited view available in Google Books didn’t allow me to see the last portion of the book. I asked around online and couldn’t find anyone who owned a copy. So it looked like my search would be on hold until I could get a copy of Joseph's book to read that endnote.

Dammit.

After more searching, however, mostly by just Googling phrases with various combinations of key words related to the ingot and its location, I found some online chatter that had paraphrased part of a (1993) article by Better Sodders that had appeared in Ancient American magazine (Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 28-31). This seemed promising, as it would take me back two years before Joseph's book and maybe get me to the source of the story or more information. I dutifully paid my $4.95 for a pdf of the issue so I could read the story (“Who Mined American Copper 5,000 Years Ago?”). In that article, Sodders writes:

“A wall-painting in the Egyptian Tomb of Rekmira depicts red-skinned men, possibly American Indians, carrying oxhydes on their shoulders to the tax collector. The copper ingots are exact duplicates of a specimen excavated near Lake Gogebic in Michigan’s Ontonagon County.”

Frustratingly, there was no source given for the story or any other information provided. So that seemed like another dead end. I found Betty Sodders online, however, and sent her an email asking about the alleged oxhide ingot from Lake Gogebic. She sent me a very nice reply the next morning and directed me to her (1991) book Michigan Prehistory Mysteries Two (the second volume of a two-volume set). She even told me what pages to look on and said that there were . . . wait for it . . . photos of the oxhide ingot. Thank you Betty Sodders.

Okay, now I was getting somewhere. I found Michigan Prehistory Mysteries on Amazon.com, but was disappointed to learn that the second volume, unlike the first, was not available electronically.

Dammit!

I looked around for other ways to get ahold of the book, but couldn’t find a way to download it anywhere without feeling like I was putting my computer at risk of being infected by something. Then, in a stroke of genius, I remembered that I actually work at a university that has a real library with real books. Lo and behold, Grand Valley’s library owns a copy of Michigan Prehistory Mysteries Two. Even better, it turned it was actually housed in a “library use only” collection less than 200 yards from my office.

So, it was really time to take David Towle's admonition to heart and get out of my La-Z-Boy and go the Seidman House library (disclosure: my desk chair is actually made by Steelcase, as is just about everything at Grand Valley). I made plans to go and look at the book that afternoon. Brian Fagan was doing an informal question-answer session with some of our students from 3:00-4:15 that afternoon, so I planned to go to that and then stop by the Seidman House library on the way back to my office. Fagan was great, and I hung around for a few minutes afterward to introduce myself and shake his hand. I got to the Seidman House at 4:28 and the door was locked: the library there closes at 4:30.

Dammit.

Map showing the distance I had to cover to see a picture of the alleged oxhide ingot from Lake Gogebic. It was raining really hard, so I borrowed an umbrella from our Office Coordinator.

So I had to wait until the next morning to finally get a look at the elusive oxhide ingot of Lake Gogebic. I taught class from 8:30-9:45, then I had office hours from 10:00-12:00 – my students are working on their papers, so I expected I would be busy and I was. By the time noon came around it was raining like a $%*!(&$@ outside. But I made the journey anyway, because science is important.

I had to fill out a form to see the book, but I did it, because science is important. When I finally got my hands on Michigan Prehistory Mysteries Two, I was not disappointed. I skimmed the chapter that Betty Sodders had pointed me to and photographed all the pages.

And there, as promised, was a picture of the alleged oxhide ingot.

At first glance it looks “better” than I thought it would. It is about the right size, has four sides, and appears to be tabular. It is not a great match for any of the Mediterranean oxhide ingots that I've seen pictures of, however: two of the sides are concave, one is convex, and one appears to be roughly straight. The surface is rough and the edges are rough. And that's about all I can tell from looking at the photo.

It is shown being held by Dr. James Scherz, who is identified as the finder in the caption. Here is what Sodders writes about it:

“This particular oxhyde Scherz is holding was photographed by Warren Dexter at Topaz near Lake Gogebic, east of Bergland and Matchwood in the western confines of the U.P.”

That’s not much more than I already knew, but at least there is another name: James Scherz is going to be the key to wrapping this story up. So far, I have been unable to identify a publication of his (he has written many having to do with New World-Old World contacts) that tells the story of this artifact. I have also been unable to find a current email address for him so that I can ask him about it directly. Doing a little bit of searching makes it apparent that he has been involved in Burrows Cave, the story of which is beyond the scope of anything I plan to write about.

So what is the rest of the story behind this artifact? Where did it come from? In what context was it found? Where is it now? I'm pretty sure James Scherz could answer all of these questions. If anyone knows how he can be reached or can make him aware of this post, I would appreciate it. Then maybe we'll have a conclusion to the exciting story of the oxhide ingot from Lake Gogebic.

I emailed Bruce H. Johanson, President Ontonagon County Historical Society, and he informed me the alleged oxhide ingot is not in their collections.

Now you can go back to whatever else you were doing.

41 Comments

<<Previous

Archives

Categories