Abstract
LOVELOCK CAVE.—In 1911, during mining operations for bat guano, numerous ancient Indian objects were discovered in the Lovelock Cave in the Humboldt Valley of West Central Nevada. Further excavations were carried out under more favourable conditions in 1924 by Mr. M. R. Harrington and Mr. Loud, which are now described in a fully illustrated monograph issued as No. 1 of Vol. 25 of the University of California Publications in American Archaeology and, Ethnology. To the description of the recent excavations Mr. Loud adds an account of the objects obtained in 1912. Originally Lovelock Cave was a long shed-like rock shelter about 150 feet in length and 35 feet wide. Earthquakes and other natural agencies caused masses of rock to fall from the roof blocking the opening in front, converting it into a cave. The local Indians, the Northern Paiute, have a legend that the inhabitants were Pit River Indians whom they drove out. The cave had undoubtedly been used as a dwelling place, and not solely as a cemetery and place of ceremonial deposit, as has been suggested. The earliest horizon of occupation belongs to the Basket-Makers of possibly three to four thousand years ago, with possibly sixty burials in the cave, and as the cave refuse lies directly on the lacustrine deposits it begins possibly within a hundred years of the subsidence of Lake Lahontan. The deposits of human origin show no bones of the sabre-tooth tigers, horses, or camels found in the lake-shore gravels. The culture of the earliest occupation resembles, but is poorer than, that of the Basket-Makers, nor was there any knowledge of agriculture. It resembles the hypothetical ‘basic culture’ of the south-west. After a deposit of five feet, a foreign influence creeps in, forming a transition period, and finally, as it grows stronger, the bow and arrow appear. Then begins a ‘Later Period,’ possibly about A.D. 1000, containing many articles which have their counterpart among the modern Paiute. The cave dwellers would thus appear the cultural, if possibly not the linguistic, kinsfolk of the Northern Paiute.
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Research Items. Nature 123, 658–660 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/123658a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/123658a0