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Dave
Gillilan Finds
Pickaway
County, Ohio
| In 2005 Dave
Gillilan, a house builder and farmer, contacted this author to
report finding artifact material like that shown on this
website. The fact that he was seeing the same morphology
and incorporated imagery in his lithic material was very inter-
esting but not surprising or remarkable considering the many photos of this that had already been
contributed by other visitors. In October 2005, Dave took some of his
finds to Columbia, South Carolina, where this author was
attending the Clovis in the Southeast conference (including Topper,
etc.). Close inspection revealed that the morphology and
imagery in these were indeed essentially the same as in the
Day's Knob artifacts, although generally of
more refined workmanship.
In May 2006 this author
visited Dave at his home to photograph the material. In
the meantime, Dave had found, just below the surface of a
crawlspace in a house he was building, the
material shown on this page at about 1.5 m (5') beneath the
surface of rural terrain that was undisturbed below a plow zone
of about 20 cm (8"). Within glacial till (clay), the artifacts had been
placed in a horizontal layer of creek sand that was not parallel
to the sloping contour of the terrain. Most of them were like those viewed in
October,
but accompanied in direct context by a cache of flint, quartz,
and calcedony points, blades, and scrapers that have since been
professionally charac- terized as Late Archaic and/or Early
Woodland, from very roughly 2000 years BP. These
identifiably "Indian" objects seem to offer some hope of gaining
professional attention to the material as a
whole, including the more controversial artifacts. Com-
plicating all this a bit, and rather intriguingly, in direct
context were clearly manmade objects of glass,
iron, and concrete
incorporating the bird and bird-human imagery characteristic of
very old Native American artifact material. This could (should) become interesting.
The technology probably currently exits to at least determine
whether these anomalous hand-crafted objects are of historical
or of more ancient origin. It is hoped that there will be sufficient interest in doing this.
There was no professional
interest in assisting with, or even witnessing, the retrieval of
this material, and it is most unfortunate that its original
context and its removal were not properly documented or
photographed.
To demonstrate the important
"replicability" factor, some of the artifacts shown here are accompanied by
references to similar ones at the Day's Knob site. |
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Zoomorph? Late Archaic bottle opener? |
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Above, flint and
quartz artifacts. |
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Half of a
banded slate bannerstone. |
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Miscellaneous
objects, including an apparent abrading stone. |
| A large fragment of a
thick-walled ceramic vessel professionally identified as
dating from 2500-3000 years BP. |
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A small pottery
fragment. For whatever reason, the groove and ridge
pattern is on the concave side. |
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Bird-form artifacts, including two
pendants. The pendants are perfectly balanced when suspended
from a cord. The large one does not look balanced in
two-dimensional view, but its thickness (hence weight
distribution) varies to place the balance point in the hole.
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| Looped and intertwined
hairs (apparently deer) partially embedded in a coating of powdered lime on the surface of a
rock - for whatever reason...
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Bones, most or
all of
them human-modified.
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Teeth, the larger
of which has been professionally identified as a bison molar. |
| Below: On the left, a
molar in a Pleistocene-age bison jaw from Oklahoma, and right,
the large tooth shown above. The arrows point to an "isolated
stylid", a distinguishing feature of bison
molars.
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| Carved walnuts. Note the
one coated with a whitish material, with the simple grinning
face so characteristic of figures on artifacts at the Day's Knob
site. And the one above and to the right of it seems to
incorporate the typical simple bird form.
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Simple
zoo-anthropomorphic clay figures.
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__________________ Glass
__________________
| This glass point was in the point
and blade cache that is apparently of Late Archaic to Early
Woodland age. It seems
out of place, to say the least, but it is the author's opinion
that Dave would have not "planted" it. Also,
there were numerous artifacts (a few shown below) and
byproducts in direct con- text that strongly suggest an early
glass manufacturing technology. Three photos below:
Glass object found in context, similar in color to
the point. Note the apparent raw material
fused with its surface. |
|
A small glass
object with apparently beveled edges. |
| A close-up of the raised area
on the pointed object, with the light source behind it.
This appears to be an intentionally formed bird head in raised
relief. |
| A bifrontal polymorphic
glass figure, both a bird head looking to the right
(note the eye and the demarcation of upper and lower beak), and overall
seemingly a flying bird profile (head upper left).
Below, the opposite side of the figure with backlighting:
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| A close-up of the embedded rock
(about 3.5 mm), quite possibly worked itself.
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| Another interesting glass
figure, 3 cm (1.25") . The blue-green inclusion is physically separate,
but fused with the rest of the piece.
Below, the piece
from two more perspectives:
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_____________ Metal
and Concrete _____________
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An
anthropomorphic figure of
lime-based cement/concrete.
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Out of place as this may seem,
one might keep in mind that a well developed and refined natural concrete technology was employed in Mexico 2000 years ago.
The composition of the cement in the concrete among Dave's finds
has been analyzed and determined to be a mixture of natural
limestone and clay, as opposed to
the synthetic (Portland) cement developed in the early 1800s and
almost always used currently.
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| Left, another iron-spitting
head. Right, a small (3 mm diameter)
iron protrusion from the back of the head, also in classic
zoomorphic form. Note the extension of the
figure-from-the-mouth (the simple two-eyes-and-a-mouth) theme in
the protrusion. |
| Formed iron rods possibly
intended (or earlier actually used) for the attachment of
anthropomorphic concrete heads as on the two pieces shown
above these photos. (The rightmost two of the photos
directly above are of the same rod.) The iron in its
current state is not at all flexible, indicating that it
likely was formed while still hot. |
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An iron rod overlain with
cement and stones. Length 5 cm (2"). |
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Below:
Close-ups
of the tip, which incorporates bird-like figures. |
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Above, two iron
and concrete figures. |
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More metal
artifacts/byproducts. |
| Below: Iron slag pieces,
all magnetic, but not uniformly. Some of these have been
formed into the typical zoomorphic or quasi-anthropomorphic figures. |
| Below: Strange indeed - a
large iron and
concrete abstractly zoomorphic figure. The rods are not welded, but
seem to have been fused while still hot. The end of the
tail is hammered flat. |
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Below are two
close-ups of rod joints:
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| Iron smelting
- like glassmaking - seems a stretch, but this was done thousands of years ago
in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Is it reasonable to assume that the people here in North America, who did a lot of
experimenting with fire, were any less intelligent and resourceful?
Possible evidence of prehistoric
iron smelting has long been recognized in Ohio, as at the well
known Spruce
Hill Hopewell walled earthworks site in Ross County, close to the
location of Dave Gillilan's finds.
It is interesting that none of
the iron and slag artifacts in Dave's cache have any obvious
utilitarian purpose. They seem to be of an iconographic nature, and it appears
that this was the main or only purpose of smelting technology
here. Of course there is the
awkward fact that Native Americans are not recorded as engaging
in iron smelting at the time of European contact. This
author's tentative hypothesis is that this time-consuming and
labor-intensive technology with no practical use was abandoned
(and subsequently forgotten) around the time of cultural decline
corresponding to the transition from the Middle to the Late Woodland
Period, when
survival-related concerns became paramount.
The anomalous and
"problematic" material in Dave Gillilan's finds will
be scien- tifically evaluated as time and other resources
permit, leading to whatever conclu- sions may result. This
is, of course, a strictly avocational project, as professional
and academic archaeologists seem, for the most part, to have
little interest in things beyond the realm of what they have
been taught to expect. But things are whatever they are, and the
scientific method dictates that unexpected phenomena be examined
and evaluated in terms of actual physical evidence rather than
sum- marily dismissed because they do not fit within an
established paradigm.
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__________
Radiocarbon Dating __________
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The carbon content of the
iron artifact shown above (presumably from charcoal fuel used
in the smelting process) was radiocarbon dated at the
University of Arizona's AMS laboratory in 2007.
Readings from three separate samples indicate
about a 90% probability of origin somewhere between 209 and
783 AD, the two more closely corresponding readings indicating
209 to 551 AD, altogether coinciding more or less with the
Middle Woodland Period. Click on the image below to see
charts of the readings calibrated against the IntCal04
atmospheric curve using Oxford University's OxCal software:
While
this is quite interesting, strongly suggesting that the iron
is in fact temporally associated with the Native American
artifacts in direct context, one can say with certainty only
that these are the numbers returned by the radiocarbon
dating pro- cess. Carbon dating in the best of
circumstances is a tricky business with many pitfalls, and
the dating of iron is even more so than that of other
materials. Alto- gether, there remains a lot of
time-consuming and expensive research to be done.
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__________________
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| An interesting and certainly
exasperating aspect of this project is the fact that
Dave Gillilan repeatedly asked the archaeologists at the Ohio
Historical Society (mainly Dr. Bradley Lepper) to at least take a look at his material as
he was removing it from where it appeared. (He had no
choice but to remove it, as he was committed to finishing and
selling the house beneath which the artifacts had appeared;
this was an urgent matter of financial necessity.) His
pleas were ignored. Upon being shown photographs
of the material taken by this author after its removal, the
OHS archaeologists declared it to be typical of a nineteenth
century landfill (trash dump), and of no archaeological
interest. It was not meaningful to them that the
artifacts included points and blades, groundstone tools, half
a bannerstone, and pottery fragments, all professionally
assessed as being from around 2000 years BP, and absolutely
nothing definitively identifiable as culturally of the
historical era. (There is no record of there ever having
been a landfill at this location, and in laying utility lines
for the property, Dave had dug up thousands of cubic feet of
ground, seeing nothing suggesting a trash dump.)
In October 2006, Dave and
this author, at considerable expense, engaged the services of
a professional geomorphologist recommended by the Ohio
Historical Society to assess the stratigraphy immediately
adjacent to the find area.
The geomorphologist's report
states "With
the exception of the uppermost 20-cm thick plow zone, there is
no evidence of prehistoric or historic disturbance of the
sediments revealed in the soil profile of the trench."
The OHS archaeologists' response to this: "There must
be a landfill there somewhere. Just keep looking for
it." Apparently this is their understanding of scientific
inquiry - start with an a priori conclusion
and work back through the evidence for as long as is necessary
to make this support the conclusion. Needless to say,
there is a bit of a communi- cation problem here, given this
author's own approach of carefully assessing all the available
evidence, however unexpected or anomalous, and working from
this to hypotheses that can be either proved or disproved on
their own merits. |
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