The Strange Saga of Sandia Cave- Part 1

Discovery

People have lived in the Rio Grande Valley for a long, long time. But how long exactly? There are no memories, no records that extend back more than a few centuries, and oral tradition quickly becomes myth in the space of only a handful of generations. Yet, despite the lack of certainty, it is in our nature to want to know, desperately, who came before. In the absence of history, we turn to physical evidence, the scattered leavings of our forebears- chipped stone, sooty hearths, pictures of animals and beings of unknown significance traced onto the rocks. We have developed ways to read this evidence, of course, a multitude of methods to determine age by what type of earth a flint hand ax is found buried in, to learn something about the character of a society by the bones in their ancient garbage heaps.

But, there is a problem. Our methods are human inventions themselves. Too often we forget that they are rooted in the perceptions of our own time, and frequently informed by the biases, hopes, ignorance, and even greed of the people making the discovery and analyzing the evidence.

1935.

In 1935, Kenneth Davis, a student at the University of New Mexico, brought a cigar box to the Department of Anthropology. In it was a collection of artifacts Davis had found in a cave while exploring Las Huertas Canyon in the Sandia Mountains, approximately 20 miles outside of Albuquerque. The artifacts, “a few bits of pottery… some fragments of woven yucca sandals and basketry”, indicated relatively recent occupation, and were therefore nothing astounding in themselves, but “the cave had been inhabited, and that…was something.” Prompted by these meager findings, several students, headed by a young up-and-comer named Frank Hibben, set out to explore the cave.



A nearby cave gives an impression of what Sandia Cave looked like before Hibben's discovery.
Sandia Cave itself is now enclosed by a metal cage.

Writing years later about this seminal event in his career, Hibben’s description of the party’s initial entry into Sandia Cave, and their surprising discovery, has all the dramatic flair of a boy’s adventure novel:

As the scientific party had crawled and groveled almost to the end of the tunnel-like passageway, a flight of bats was disturbed from a chimney-like aperture that led upward from one of the galleries. With characteristic squeaks and the rustle of leathery wings, the bats rushed down the narrow passageway for the cave mouth. As they passed, the party flinched close to the rocky walls to give them ample room. As they did so, one of the group felt beneath his hand, on a pile of debris, a curved bone. Even in the dark it felt unusual and important.

The bone, “shaped like the curved flat blade of a Turkish dagger”, was the claw-core of a giant ground sloth. This find indicated the cavern’s considerable age, and with mounting excitement, the students began their dig.

Their excitement was justified. Within a few days of careful excavation in the dust-choked cavern, the team had uncovered a crust of stalagmatic stone, which they broke and opened “like… the lid of a gigantic sardine can…”. Beneath that, they found the ancient cave floor littered with signs of early human habitation. Among the animal bones and assorted debris, there were Folsom spear points- relics of a known culture that had been dated to as early as 9000 BC. But they were soon to find more thrilling evidence of an even older culture that would prove to be one of the most important anthropological discoveries of the era.



Digging further into the cave floor, they next excavated a layer of yellow ochre, which rose up “in penetrating yellow clouds at the slightest disturbance” and necessitated the use of ventilation machines to clear the air. Beneath that, there was yet more indication of human occupation, but this was from a culture that had never been recorded -

The flint points that we carefully lifted… from among the debris of the Sandia Cave floor were totally different from the Folsom… we recognized at a glance that we were dealing with a different kind of man. These were Sandia Cave men, and they had lived as many thousands of years before Folsom times as it had taken to deposit the yellow ochre that separated their two levels of occupation in the Sandia Cave… In this level we traced out fireplaces… where ancient cooking fires had been, and around their blackened borders were the split bones and fragments that showed where men had sat around these same fires and had gnawed the greasy flesh from these same bones and thrown them to one side. We could almost see, in the flickering excavation lights, the Sandia Cave men of so long ago, squatting around these now-dead embers.

It was success beyond their imaginings. Analysis of the layering of the yellow ochre and later radio-carbon dating of bones and other materials would indicate that the relics had been deposited at least 25,000-35,000 years ago, a date far older than any other known human habitation in the Americas. Perhaps most exciting of all, the peculiar shape of the Sandia Points was unlike any that had ever been found on the North or South American continents. In fact, the only known antecedent for the odd, single shouldered design was a group of flint artifacts known as the Solutrean Industry in eastern France. The resemblance between the Sandia Points and the Solutrean Industry indicated a possible European origin for the oldest known settlers in North America, a possibility with profound anthropological and social implications.



A Sandia Point, found by Hibben in Sandia Cave.
Note the single shouldered design.

Hibben published his findings five years later. His discovery of an American culture more than twice as old as any previously known sent shockwaves through the establishment, propelling both him and the University of New Mexico to international renown. History and Anthropology textbooks were rewritten to reflect the find, and Hibben became a giant in his field, and would remain so for many decades to come.


Next: The Strange World of Frank Hibben- Sandia Cave “Oddities”- and Why You’ve Never Heard of Any of This.

Works Consulted-
The Lost Americans- Frank Hibben
"The Mystery of Sandia Cave"- Doublas Preston, New Yorker Magazine, June 12 1995
Sandia Cave: A Study in Controversy- Dominique E. Stevens and George A. Agogino