Mapping a Prehistoric Tapestry

Jan Simek is an intrepid cave explorer. He’s probed the depths of more than 800 caves in the rich grotto country of East Tennessee and its border states.

The master spelunker isn’t on a quest for adventure, however. He’s a scientist, trying to unlock the prehistoric secrets of Native American cave art.

Simek’s discoveries are vast. From petroglyphs to pictographs to mud glyphs, he’s uncovered biopic murals, mythological creatures, storyboards behind native legends, religious symbols and depictions of how native people viewed the world.

The sweeping anthology found in East Tennessee caves is the most extensive collection of prehistoric art in America, as well as the oldest, dating back 6,000 years.

The question Simek gets most is why. Why did they do it?

“Because it is a mile underground, because it is dangerous, and because they know this. Because they have entered into a world they don’t normally occupy, because they have crossed a boundary,” says Simek, a distinguished professor with the University of Tennessee’s anthropology department. “Caves are portals to an aspect of the cosmos that humans don’t normally get to interact with.”

For the record, Native Americans didn’t live in caves. But they went in and out of them a lot, and there were a lot of them—some 14,000 caves in the prolific geologic zone of Tennessee, North Georgia and northern Alabama.

Native people hauled sundry goods out of caves: gypsum for paint, cave salts for medicine, fluorite and calcite for carving figurines, chert for stone tools.

But resource extraction wasn’t the end game.

“They are doing other things in caves that are not economic, but are ideological,” Simek says. “They make art in these caves and make it from very early on.”

Simek and his team made national headlines in 2013 for their superlative find of the oldest prehistoric art in America dating back 6,000 years.

But that’s not the true focal point of Simek’s work.

“The eureka moment was when we realized the artwork we find in caves relates to their spiritual narrative. We were able to see that native people perceived their world as a cohesive entity,” Simek says. “It is not random, there is an intentionality to it.”

Native tribes of the region believed in a layered world, with a celestial realm in the sky, middle world where humans lived, and an underworld. Art on bluffs and high cliff walls depict spirits of the celestial realm, while cave art below depicts images associated with the underworld.

“They are actually mapping their religious landscape,” Simek says.

Iconography on cave walls is found on pottery and amulets from the same period, indicating unified religious beliefs across an immense territory.

Cave exploration wasn’t possible without light, of course. When Simek’s research team goes exploring, they carry three lights each.

“Without light you’re dead,” Simek says.

Native Americans used torches made from river cane, leaving the telltale signs of their passage in the form of stoke marks. Black charcoal smudges found on cave walls all over the mountains are the ancient residue from knocking ash columns off their torches.

Simek has come across bundles of unlit river cane torches dating back hundreds, even thousands, of years. They weren’t forgotten, but left in caves intentionally, Simek explains.

A three-foot bundle of river cane burns for just 45-minutes. But prehistoric people went for miles into caves—in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, archaeological evidence is found more than 8 miles from any entrance. It was impossible to  carry all the torches they need in one fell swoop, so they stockpiled bundles along their expedition routes.

“They leapfrog themselves forward, all the while provisioning the light sources they are going to use,” Simek says. “They understand how long these things would burn, and they could obviously do the math to get themselves in and out.”

Curious how they worked, Simek and his fellow researchers attempted to make their own river cane torches, a field known as experimental archaeology.

“We were not very good Indians. The only way we could get them to burn was to carry a butane torch with us and keep lighting them,” Simek says.

The team dried the river cane stalks, for an entire year. They should have burned. Puzzled, Simek went to a botanist for answers.

The vascular structure of river cane alters when it dies in the ground, Simek learned. It would only burn if was cut already dead, but not if it was cut green and then dried.

“The implication is that they understood the life history of these plants,” Simek says. “This reflects a relationship they had with their environment that we just don’t have.”

Caves were a coveted source of chert for prehistoric tools, but rather than lug huge rocks out, they flint-knapped the stone into arrowheads deep in the caves.

But things got complicated light-wise when they wanted to stay in one spot for a while, either to make cave art or stone points. The cane torches gave off too much smoke when they weren’t moving.

“In a closed space like that, you could asphyxiate yourself,” Simek says, something he learned during the river cane torch tests. “It became a danger.”

His research team eventually discovered hearths inside caves alongside piles of lithic scatters where they quarried stone, up to a mile deep in the cave.

“They provisioned themselves with slow-burning wood that wouldn’t smoke when they got inside, and then extinguished the torches and lit the hearths,” Simek says. “There was  extensive planning involved just for light.”

Simek’s team from the University of Tennessee and elsewhere has been systematically surveying caves for prehistoric art and artifacts for 25 years.

“I don’t work alone,” Simek says. He’s the archaeologist, but it takes a crew of scientists with their own expertise. A grad student on the team analyzes the chemistry of prehistoric paint using a spectrometer, for example. Expert cavers often tag along to help with technical challenges. And his go-to photographer for cave art expeditions is Alan Cressler, a geologist who’s been in some 3,000 caves.

As for the 800 caves Simek’s been in, he’s found cave art in around 100 of them.

It’s an impressive number, but Simek believes the teams had barely scratched the surface. For thousands of years, prehistoric people explored and frequented the caves of East Tennessee.

 “People who live off the land, hunters and gatherers in particular, know the landscape like the back of their hand in a way we can’t even imagine,” Simek says. “They are using a landscape that is intrinsic in their culture.”

About the photographer: Geologist Alan Cressler has descended into more than 3,000 caves worldwide. He’s the chief photographer for the cave art project based in East Tennessee, cataloging the oldest and most extensive collection of prehistoric art known in the U.S.