A method to my madness? Yes, always, when off on my little reading and research adventures, even ones that lead me to faraway places. No matter how distant they pull me, my goal is to be led back home.
In fact, being place-based — that is, focused on my place, the place where I was born, that small slice of Connecticut Valley paradise framed south and north by the Holyoke Range and Northfield, and anchored by the deep-history landmarks known as Mount Sugarloaf and the great waterfalls at Riverside/Gill — it’s always the reason why I pore over data involving distant cultures and issues. I want to learn about known North American indigenous cultures studied by anthropologists and relate their patterns, their rituals and worldviews to what is unknown about the cultures driven from our valley 200 years earlier, before anthropological analysis mattered.
A case in point was my recent reading of a bargain-basement Daedalus Books offering: “The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest,” by David Roberts, a Massachusetts man who once taught at Hampshire College. Published in 2015, this book is the first and only Daedalus book that was sold out when I tried to order it online. “Hmmmmmm?” I thought. “It must be worth pursuing.” And off I went on a short, cyber-search that effortlessly produced a reasonably priced hardcover from Amazon.
The book is about Ancestral Puebloans from the picturesque Four Corners deserts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. There, before the 16th century Historic Contact period of Spanish exploration and conquest, a sophisticated civilization of pueblo dwellers disappeared from the face of the earth, leaving behind a rich legacy of rock art, archaeological sites and artifacts to forever be studied, interpreted and reinterpreted.
Looking at the photos and reading about the petroglyphs and pictographs of these curiously vanished Anasazi and Freemont people immediately got me thinking about Connecticut Valley rock art at Bellows Falls, Vt., and on the mysterious, submerged Indian Rock, inundated by the Vernon Dam (1909) in the ancient meadow behind Brattleboro Retreat, where the Connecticut and West rivers meet. These Vermont petroglyphs have long been a fascination of mine and I had recently attended a PowerPoint presentation on the topic by avocational local historian Annette Spaulding at the Discovery Center in Turners Falls.
A devoted scuba-diver with an interest in Connecticut Valley history, Spaulding had in her spare time spent 30 years searching for Indian Rock in that Brattleboro meadow and, at the time of the presentation I attended, appeared to be closing in on it. After years of fruitless searches, she had finally uncovered an underwater anthropomorphic petroglyph of a round face with eyes, nose and mouth, pecked into an underwater rock. It was a Yaaaaahoo moment. The image duplicated several rock-art effigies carved into the riverside stones in her hometown of Rockingham/Bellows Falls, Vt. No, it wasn’t Indian Rock, decorated with thunderbirds and a deer, but it was a previously unknown petroglyph from the same meadow, and it presented a familiar rock-art image associated with the Northeast, with examples in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and elsewhere.
Curious if there had been any new developments since I last visited the topic, I did an internet search on “Bellows Falls petroglyphs” and, sure enough, found recent Brattleboro and Keene, N.H., newspaper articles saluting Spaulding for finally finding Indian Rock this past fall. Wow! I hadn’t heard a whisper. She found it. Good for her.
Later that night, I watched a YouTube video of a Spaulding presentation in Montpelier Vt., almost identical to the one I had attended in Turners Falls, a great refresher course. Then, amazingly, the very next morning, the phone rang and it was paleontologist Richard Michael Gramly. Just touching base, he summarized what he’d been up to of late. In the course of the conversation I mentioned that Indian Rock has been rediscovered by a scuba diver. He was immediately interested, knew quite a bit about the Bellows Falls petroglyphs and understood the symbolism of rock-art images — the deer, the underwater serpent, the ghost spirits usually aimed westward toward the Native American spirit world. He calls the effigy faces “sucker heads,” with their distinctive round heads and round eyes. “Some have round mouths and noses, too,” he said. “They differ but represent the same ghost spirit.”
Then the bombshell. He had an ancient, prehistoric, shard from a steatite (soapstone) bowl that had been reworked into a three-holed pendant with two ghost-spirit effigies carved into the face. He said he’d get it out in the mail to me pronto. It had come from a collection of artifacts deaccessioned from a now-defunct Holyoke library museum. This particular piece had been misplaced in a Skinner Discovery Auction “box lot” of artifacts from Tabun, a well-known Old World archaeological site near Palestine and Israel. Quickly going through the box before the auction, Gramly saw the back of the steatite pendant in the bottom of the box but never saw the carved effigies on the front till he got home.
“It’ll be a nice little adventure for you,” he said. “I held onto this piece and even had it professionally drawn by an artist to use it for my American Society for Amateur Archaeology’s New England Chapter stationary letterhead. Although I can’t prove it, I do believe it’s from the Connecticut Valley. Maybe you can track it down.”
The fascinating artifact came in the mail a few days later, and I immediately brought it over to a neighbor’s house. A sophisticated collector, this retired jeweler was trained at Shreve, Crump and Low in Boston and Sotheby’s Los Angeles. He collects many things, including Indian artifacts, so I knew he’d be blown away by this piece of deep North American antiquity. Sitting at his desk under LED lighting, he held the piece, looked at it and reached for a jeweler’s glass to get a closer look.
“Wow!” he said. “I always have to first rule the possibility that it a recently made phony. This is no such thing. The tool marks are very old. I have never seen anything like it. Plus, it has a powerful presence in my hand. It’s incredible.”
This from a man who’d seen a little of everything brought to his San Francisco office by customers.
The chase was on. Although I can’t say I’ve pinned this piece down yet, Gramly provided some very promising leads, I have sent out queries and the discovery mission is underway. What an exciting journey. Who knows? This artifact, dated to between 900 and 1400 BC, could have been gathered at Riverside/Gill or South Hadley Falls. The soapstone could have originated in a well-known prehistoric Wilbraham quarry. Then again, maybe not. But given what I’ve read in Edward J. Lenik’s hard-to-find “Picture Rocks: American Indian Rock Art in the Northeast Woodland, (2002)” it is almost definitely from the Northeast, likely close to home.
I’ll keep you posted. Promise.
Recorder sports editor Gary Sanderson is a senior-active member of the outdoor-writers associations of America and New England. Blog: www.tavernfare.com. Email: gsand53@outlook.com.