My archaeologist / anthropologist friend Mike Gramly placed the call a week into his latest dig at Lower Blue Licks in northeastern Kentucky – a 13,000-year-old mastodon boneyard located along an ancient saline spring bed on a Licking River floodplain.
I could feel the man’s enthusiasm. It was infectious, and told him so.
“I’m always happy when learning,” he said. “Hopefully, I’ll continue learning till my dying day.”
A noble wish, indeed. Don’t bet against it. Though rapidly approaching octogenarian status, the man is driven.
Overseeing his second organized excavation of this Ohio Valley treasure-trove site, purchased for $100,000 by a friend and benefactor, Gramly sees no reason to hide his excitement. What he’s bringing to light is groundbreaking in the realm of North American and world archaeology and anthropology, yet largely unknown and uncelebrated.
Gramly believes the key to mastodon research is finding the saline springs they sought for sustenance. It was at these important sites that Clovis hunters killed them and left behind artifacts for posterity. Thus far, he has apparently discovered the world’s earliest shaman sled burials – first at the Hiscock Site in upstate New York, now at Lower Blue Licks.
His theory is that such ritualistic burials – fancy ivory sled runners and all – staked the claims of competing hunting bands at important saline-spring haunts.
Gramly calculates that his latest 11-day mission, which ended on September 5, consumed 120 man-days of volunteer work, all of it performed by a trusted crew from his own brainchild American Society for Amateur Archaeology. Their mission? To establish the site’s southern perimeter and, in so doing, define the extent of a Paleoindian mastodon-hunting midden littered with bone and ivory fragments. In the process, of course, many fascinating artifacts came to light and spun the crew’s creative anthropological wheels to a shrill scream.
Exciting stuff.
Now, with the expansive midden defined, Gramly and his crew can return next year with a game plan for their final dig. In the meantime, he’ll organize, clean, and reassemble the broken artifacts he has collected before publishing his discoveries and hypotheses between the covers of a book.
Thus far, he’s most excited about a couple of remarkable artifacts. One is a drilled bead crafted from a thick seashell that looks to him like that of a periwinkle. The other a five-inch-long mastodon chin tusk, worked into ancient decorative art.
Despite being buried for 13,000 years, Gramly says this cleverly carved tusk is so polished that he can see his reflection on its mirror-like surface. He believes it was created as an atlatl hook, secured to the spear-throwing weapon’s shaft. There it would have engaged the butt end of the javelin, akin to nocking an arrow on a bowstring. Gramly identifies it as a sculpted phallus, symbolizing the power and penetration of the hunt.
At the time of our telephone conversation, Gramly was still 1,000 miles away from his North Andover home workshop. His latest assemblage of artifacts, a work in progress, will receive intense scrutiny when he returns home.
As for the bead, Gramly suspects it was worn to the Kentucky site by a member of a Paleoindian hunting party following megafauna game trails from the West Coast. Just on a hunch, he thinks the shell came from the Pacific Ocean, though it certainly could have come from the East Coast as well. He expects expert analysis, probably at a Harvard University lab, will easily identify its genus and place of origin.
“There’s no question it’s a deliberately-made bead,” he said. “In fact, we also found the piece of another broken example. Both were clearly drilled in the Paleo style.”
The chin tusk is one of three thus far uncovered at Lower Blue Licks – two this year, one a year ago. Only one has been worked into an art object, which Gramly is eager to study further when he returns to the comforts of home. At first glance, he noticed interesting lines carved into the surface. He hopes to understand them better under closer inspection.
Gramly believes the tusk carving has the characteristics of European Upper Paleolithic Gravettian art, which goes back at least 30,000 years and, he believes, came to this continent across the Bering Strait with the earliest human migrations from northeastern Asia. The bead also screams Gravettian to him, he said; shell beads were common in that ancient culture.
So, Gramly now has two more esoteric artifacts to sink his anthropological teeth into. And that doesn’t even address what he may yet find among the other bits and pieces his team collected. Those items he’ll clean, organize, catalog, and ponder – taking time out to bounce his latest observations and hypotheses off his network of friends.
The most enticing specimens – like the bead and carved chin tusk – will go to his trusted artist friend Steve Wallmann, who’ll sketch them for posterity and future publication in print and digital media. Such visuals motivate thought and discussion into the esoteric Paleoindian spiritual realm. Nothing provides more valuable insight into ancient cultural beliefs and lifeways than artistic expression – be it petroglyphs, pictographs, or stone, bone and ivory carvings and adornments with hidden spiritual meaning.
Gramly has been mired deep in that rabbit hole ever since his first mastodon dig 11 years ago at Bowser Road in Middletown, New York. It seems like yesterday he was calling in to report his findings there.
Now, more than a decade later, his sights are set on Vienna, Austria, where he’ll share some of his recent findings during a 30-minute presentation for European scholars.
They’ll be eager listeners.