Oddest archaeological finds from the Midwest
Seven finds. Seven Midwest states. Four are real. Three are fakes.
Some rewrote the continent’s history. Some were jokes that got out of hand. We say which is which, and who was in the room.
Four dogs were buried like people in Illinois
Koster, in Greene County, Illinois. Researchers found three dogs there in the 1970s. A fourth turned up about 35 kilometers away at the Stilwell II site.
For years, charcoal dating put them at about 8,500 years old. In 2018, researchers dated the bones themselves. National Geographic reported that the dogs are closer to 10,000 years old. That makes them the oldest directly dated domestic dogs in the Americas and the oldest intentionally buried individual dogs known anywhere, according to the research paper.
Each was laid on its side in a shallow grave. They received the same treatment as the people buried nearby.
Hunters built stone lanes that are now 121 feet underwater
Alpena-Amberley Ridge, Lake Huron, Michigan. About 9,000 years ago, this was dry land, a corridor from northeast Michigan to Ontario.
University of Michigan archaeologist John O’Shea found a stone drive lane there, with hunting blinds built into it, reported in a 2014 study. Hunters used it to funnel caribou. Chipped stone flakes lay nearby.
Live Science says it’s the most complex set of ancient hunting structures found beneath the Great Lakes. The site is so well preserved that O’Shea compares it to Pompeii, the Christian Science Monitor reported.
A farm in Kenosha County hid two butchered mammoths
Wisconsin. In 1992, amateur archaeologist Dan Joyce began digging on the Schaefer farm. He found about 80 percent of a mammoth, with V-shaped cut marks and two stone blade fragments, Archaeology Magazine reports.
“We had a Clovis date, so we thought we had a Clovis site,” Joyce said. The new dates came back at about 14,500 years. That’s more than a thousand years before Clovis.
A second mammoth turned up a few miles away at the Hebior site. The Milwaukee Public Museum says it’s the most complete mammoth ever found in North America. Some archaeologists dispute the cut marks and the tools, one reference work notes.
Etzanoa was counted in 1601 and found in 2015
Kansas. In 1601, Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate’s men wandered an empty settlement for days. They counted about 2,000 houses, the Vintage News recounts. They called it the Great Settlement.
Then it was lost. In 2013, scholars at UC Berkeley released new translations of the Spanish accounts. Wichita State archaeologist Don Blakeslee used them to look near Arkansas City, and in June 2015 he led the field study that found it, Visit Arkansas City says.
The city may have held 20,000 Wichita people. That would make it the second-largest or even the largest settlement in North America in the early 1600s. A teenager, Adam Ziegler, helped find cannonballs from the 1601 battle, Ancient Origins notes.
The Newark Holy Stones had Hebrew that looked like type
Ohio. In 1860, Licking County surveyor David Wyrick found a carved stone at the Newark Earthworks, per the Ohio Traveler. That November, he found another, the “Decalogue Stone,” in a mound about 10 miles south, Ohio State’s archive notes. Both had Hebrew letters.
Scholars doubted them early. Archaeologist Charles Whittlesey examined the first stone and concluded it was a 19th-century Masonic artifact. The Hebrew looked thoroughly modern, and local Masons identified the shape as a Masonic keystone. The Decalogue Stone’s text had errors that could only come from copying a 19th-century Hebrew version of the Ten Commandments.
No one ever admitted making them. Bradley Lepper, an archaeologist with the Ohio History Connection, noticed that the Decalogue Stone’s robed figure resembles an etching in a popular 1850s book on Nineveh and Babylon. It’s circumstantial, not proof, Knox Pages reports.
The stones are now in the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton, the museum’s own page shows.
The Davenport Tablets were probably roof slates
Iowa. On January 10, 1877, the Reverend Jacob Gass uncovered two slate tablets in a mound on the Cook Farm near Davenport, the Davenport Library recounts. One showed cremation and hunting scenes. The other looked like a calendar.
In 1885, ethnologist Cyrus Thomas declared them frauds. The slates matched those on a nearby building’s roof, right down to the nail holes, Futility Closet reports.
In 1991, archaeologist Marshall McKusick found a confession from a member of the local academy. They’d called Gass “the biggest windjammer and liar,” and wanted to shut him up. The modern view is that Gass was the victim of a hoax.
A farmer’s 200-pound stone said Vikings were in Minnesota in 1362
Minnesota. In 1898, Swedish immigrant Olof Ohman said he found a 200-pound slab of greywacke in the roots of a tree on his Douglas County farm, the Minnesota Historical Society recounts. It was covered in runes.
The Society calls it a record of “either Norse exploration of North America or Minnesota’s most brilliant and durable hoax.” Linguist Erik Wahlgren and historian Theodore Blegen both concluded it was a hoax. Ohman never admitted it.
The scholarly view has held since the first years, one reviewer notes: the inscription dates from the late 1890s. The stone is on display in Alexandria, Minnesota.
The bottom line
The Koster dogs were laid on their sides in graves, about 10,000 years ago. The three fakes appeared within 38 years of each other, from 1860 to 1898.
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