Our Heartland facebook friend Emily Bailey Dayley has come up with an unusual and amazing possible anachronism for the Book of Mormon in North America. She posted the following:
Archeology & Book of Mormon Evidence Yesterday “Weird question for ya. After reading about how Zerahemna got scalped in Alma during the war chapters, I wondered if this is account was when scalping originated? A quick search online showed scalping was mostly a practiced by the American Native Americans, and wasn’t recorded having been done earlier than 1000 AD in Europe/Africa. It was mostly an American old world thing. Sorry for the gross question but I thought it was an interesting thought. Another “parallel” of sorts, maybe?”
Actually is was a great question that I had never even thought of, so I got busy and began finding out some interesting things. So far I can date scalping in North America to 1-359 AD in Utah. Wow, those are Book of Mormon times alright. Good find Emily.
Alma 44:12 “And now when Moroni had said these words, Zerahemnah retained his sword, and he was angry with Moroni, and he rushed forward that he might slay Moroni; but as he raised his sword, behold, one of Moroni’s soldiers smote it even to the earth, and it broke by the hilt; and he also smote Zerahemnah that he took off his scalp and it fell to the earth. And Zerahemnah withdrew from before them into the midst of his soldiers.”
Zerahemnah—
Lamanite commander [c. 74 B.C.]
- chief captain of Lamanite army, Alma 43:5, 44.
- inspires soldiers to fight, Alma 43:44.
- is struck with terror when surrounded, Alma 43:53.
- is commanded by Moroni1 to surrender, Alma 44:1–6.
- attempts to kill Moroni1, is scalped, Alma 44:12.
- begs for mercy, Alma 44:19.
From LDS Triple Index
Scalping in Nephite Time Frame
From the earliest years of conflict between Native Americans and Europeans, the object which most resonates to the present as emblematic of that conflict’s violence is the scalp. Scalping was an ancient practice in North America that predates European contact by centuries. It figures prominently in early European accounts. Beyond its simple description as a grisly souvenir or trophy of war, the scalp, and the practice of scalping, carried meanings, both symbolic and concrete. Taking a scalp represented the ultimate dominance of a warrior over an enemy. The scalp became a stand-in for the slain enemy in a celebratory ritual of further humiliation, many with gendered aspects. Europeans also included scalping in their imperialistic war-making practices. Their scalping, which began as an imitation or response to Indian scalping, in time created a new materialistic motivation for taking scalps.
Evidence for the antiquity of scalping on the North American continent takes three different forms: archaeological, historical, and linguistic. Each is compelling and the three, taken as a whole are comprehensive and convincing. The skeletal remains that form the basis for the archaeological argument for scalping as an ancient American practice are persuasive because they are perhaps the most concrete and least susceptible to semantics or interpretation, in the way that historical or linguistic arguments may be.[1] The cut marks found upon skulls that are consistent with scalping by a stone blade are among the key diagnostic attributes used by archaeologists to say with a degree of certainty that a set of skeletal remains represents a victim of interpersonal violence and “malevolent intent.” Other such attributes include bodies with multiple projectile point impacts, multiple crushing injuries, or a mass of bodies dumped together.[2] Another, related, category of skulls that corroborates the markings as being representative of ancient scalping are the skulls that show these marks but also signs of healing.[3] These individuals survived scalping, a not uncommon occurrence in historic times. An early American medical journal even published an article explaining how to care for the scalping survivor.[4] Absent the possibility of industrial mishap, it is hard to find another explanation for a person to be separated from their scalp.
In 1940, archaeologist Georg Neumann excavated and described the first set of remains widely accepted as showing evidence for scalping.[5] In his findings, Neumann reported finding the skull of a young man in an Illinois site that dated to the Middle Mississippian Period of the 11th to 16th century A.D. The skull showed that death was caused by four blows from a stone celt or club, furthermore, there was a series of cuts around the crown of the skull consistent with scalping with a stone blade.[6] Another, more dramatic site of prehistoric violence and scalping is the Crow Creek site in South Dakota, where, in the 14th century, enemy warriors destroyed an agricultural village. Here, archaeologists discovered 486 skeletons in two mass graves. Almost all of the bodies showed some form of post-mortem mutilation.[7] Nearly 90 percent of the skulls, male and female, showed the tell-tale cut-marks associated with scalping. [8] In addition to skulls that have had the scalp removed, in a few cases the scalps themselves have survived. A scalp, which included ears and eyebrows, attached to a basketry disk found in a Utah cave yielded a carbon-14 date of between 1 and 359 A.D.[9] [This is a time frame consistent with Alma 44 above] The earliest North American archaeological evidence for an Indian scalping a European is the skeletal remains of an English settler killed in Virginia in a 1622 attack.[10] His shattered skull speaks to a violent end and his cranium shows signs of being scalped with a metal knife, perhaps even an English one.
Scalping appears in the earliest historical accounts of European explorations of North America. On his second voyage to the continent, the French explorer Jacques Cartier wrote that the Indians of a village called Stadacona showed him the “the skin of five men’s heads”, which were spread out on a board “like parchments.”[11] In 1540, Indians killed and scalped Simon Rodrigues, a member of the de Soto Expedition to what is now the southeastern United States.[12] De Soto, in attempting to describe what happened, recounted that the natives took el pellejo de corona, the skin of the crown.[13] Jacques Le Moyne a Frenchman who visited Florida in 1564 described in graphic detail how members of the Timucua tribe scalped dead enemies, “they cut the skin of the head down to the skull with pieces of reed sharper than any steel blade, from the brow in a circle to the back of the head; and they pull it off whole, gathering the hair, which is still attached to it and more than a cubit long, into a knot at the crown; and what there is over the brow and back of the head they cut off in a circle to a length of two fingers.”[14] Not only was Le Moyne a vivid writer, he also drew what he saw, and later a Belgian engraver, Theodor de Bry produced lurid reproductions of his sketches.
In the above De Bry engraving, after Le Moyne’s drawing, of Timucuas mutilating dead enemies, the men at right are drying scalps over a fire. The figures in the background are returning to the village with scalps and other body parts on the ends of their lances. Le Moyne described how the trophies became a central part of a victory ceremony in which the whole village took part.[15]
[1] Phillip L. Walker, “A Bioarcheological Perspective on the History of Violence,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2001): doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.573., 574.
[2] Walker, 576
[3] James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping,” The William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1980): doi:10.2307/1923812. 468.
[4] James Robertson, “Remarks on the Management of the Scalped-Head,” The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal 2 (April 1806). 27-33
[5] Wolf D. Bueschgen and D. Troy Case, “Evidence of Prehistoric Scalping at Vosberg, Central Arizona,” International Journal of Osteoarcheology 6, no. 3 (1996): doi:10.1002/1099-12126:33.0, 231
[6] Georg K. Neumann, “Evidence for the Antiquity of Scalping from Central Illinois,” American Antiquity 5, no. 04 (1940): doi:10.2307/275199. 287.
[7] Patrick S. Willey, Prehistoric Warfare on the Great Plains: Skeletal Analysis of the Crow Creek Massacre Victims (New York: Garland, 1990), 105;
[8] P. Willey and Thomas E. Emerson, “The Osteology and Archaeology of The Crow Creek Massacre,” Plains Anthropologist 38, no. 145 (1993), doi:10.1080/2052546.1993.11931655., 257.
[9] Julie Howard and Joel Janetski, “Human Scalps from Eastern Utah,” Utah Archaeology 1992 5, no. 1 (1992) https://www.upaconline.org/journal/PDF/Utah%20Archaeology%201992. 128-130.
[10] Axtell and Sturtevant, 460.
[11] Stephen Leacock, The Mariner of St. Malo a Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier, vol. 2 (Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Company, 1915), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4077/4077-h/4077-h.htm. VII
[12] Thomas S. Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War,” Anthropologica 34, no. 1 (1992): doi:10.2307/25605630, 7.
[13] Axtell and Sturtevant, 457.
[14] Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues, Theodor De Bry, and Frederic B. Perkins, Narrative of Le Moyne an Artist Who Accompanied the French Expedition to Florida under Laudonnière, 1564 (Boston: J.R. Osgood and, 1875) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027064032;view=1up;seq=51. 7.
[15] Le Moyne, 7.
The Skin of the Crown: The Origins and Meanings of Scalping in Early America Phillip Lingle New Mexico State University January 2019
Late Archaic Scalping 3000 to 1000 BC
“Three individuals from Late Archaic period sites in the Kentucky Lake Reservoir exhibit cutmarks on their crania which are best interpreted as scalping. The likely scalping victims are the earliest examples of this warfarerelated trophy-taking practice in the eastern United States. The importance of this identification lies not just in establishing a great antiquity for an ethnohistorically well known practice, but in the informative potential trophy taking has in particular theories of cultural evolution. Certain paradigms stress the dynamic role of warfare in the genesis of social stratification. A primary motive for scalp taking is prestige enhancement. The temporal and spatial distribution of scalping and other trophy-taking practices among Late Archaic hunter-gatherers may provide useful clues to patterns of status differentiation.” Scalping in the Archaic Period: Evidence from the Western Tennessee Valley Maria O. Smith [The Late Archaic Period lasted from about 5,000 to 3,000 years ago]
Trophy Taking in the Central and Lower Mississippi Valley
NANCY A. ROSS-STALLINGS
“The purposes of this chapter are to first review the criteria for evaluating
whether or not a human remain should be considered as a legitimate trophy when found in an archaeological context. Second, some previously unpublished cases of decapitation and cannibalism from the central and lower Mississippi Valley, plus a site with one feature exhibiting multiple scalping and decapitation cases from southeastern Tennessee, will be presented. The final section is a review of sites in the continental United States where trophy taking and/or cannibalism has been verified, using the criteria established in the early part of the chapter. This review will demonstrate that trophy taking had two discrete origins in the United States, first from a temporal and second from a spatial standpoint, and that the practice spread across cultural areas on a timeline.”
Origins of Human Trophy Taking in California
“Scalps were taken in the greater part of California, brought home in triumph, and celebrated over, usually by a dance around a pole” (Kroeber 1976:843); thus concluded the great California ethnographer Alfred Kroeber on the human trophy taking in his lengthy treatise, Handbook of the Indians of California. At the time of his study of the cultural elements of California’s indigenous peoples, California was or had recently been occupied by over 50 tribal groups (Figure 4.1) Ethnographic and Linguistic Evidence for the Origins of Human Trophy Taking in California PATRICIA M. LAMBERT
Evidence for the Antiquity of Scalping from Central Illinois
Georg K. Neumann Published 1940 History JUST before the archaeological party of the University of Chicago moved camp to the extreme southeastern part of Fulton County, Illinois, during the summer of 1933, the writer visited the aboriginal site (designated FV896 by the archaeological survey) on the Norman Crable farm located on the high Illinois River bluff about two miles north of Bluff City. Here for several years Mr. Glenn McGirr, a local collector, had opened a large number of graves to secure artifacts, and on that afternoon had opened six of them.
The burials were extended on the back with the arms to the sides and accompanied by typical Middle Mississippi [800 to 1600 AD] pottery and other artifacts that were assigned to the Spoon River focus of the Monk’s Mound aspect after excavations had been carried on by the field party.368 Mr. McGirr was kind enough to let the writer have four of the skeletons for the University collections, and upon cleaning them it was found that one of them, that of an adult male (No. F896-101), exhibited evidences of a violent end, and had cuts on the vault of the skull that seemed to indicate that the individual had been scalped. Death had clearly been caused by four celt blows which had fractured the parietals and crushed in the right side of the skull. If one can judge by the distribution of the cuts, the victim probably had lain face down during the operation for most of the cuts, which look as if they had been made with a flint knife, are on the frontal bone and extend in a rough circle around the crown.
After the front end of the scalp had been cut loose in all probability it had been pulled backward and then cut free without making more than two cuts on the occipital bone. The presence of a small amount of calcium carbonate leached from the calcareous loess and deposited in some of the cuts attest to their antiquity. Here, then, there is direct evidence of a case of scalping of an individual who belonged to a group with a Middle Mississippi culture that was shown in Illinois to be pre-historic and by relative chronology to post-date Hopewellian manifestations. All evidences of culture, as well as of physical anthropology, point to the Muskhogean-speaking tribes of the Southeast, who, it may be noted, also practiced scalping when De Soto first visited them in 1540.
Old World Scalping
In England in 1036, Earl Godwin, father of Harold Godwinson, was reportedly responsible for scalping his enemies. According to the ancient Abingdon manuscript, ‘some of them were blinded, some maimed, some scalped. No more horrible deed was done in this country since the Danes came and made peace here’.[3]
Georg Frederici noted that “Herodotus provided the only clear and satisfactory portrayal of a scalping people in the old world” in his description of the Scythians, a nomadic people then located to the north and west of the Black Sea.[4] Herodotus related that Scythian warriors would behead the enemies they defeated in battle and present the heads to their king to claim their share of the plunder. Then, the warrior would skin the head “by making a circular cut round the ears and shaking out the skull; he then scrapes the flesh off the skin with the rib of an ox, and when it is clean works it with his fingers until it is supple, and fit to be used as a sort of handkerchief. He hangs these handkerchiefs on the bridle of his horse, and is very proud of them. The best man is the man who has the greatest number.”[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping
“Although American native peoples were all too often accused of being the sole practitioners of scalping, in reality they did nothing others had not done before. Herodotus found the practice among the Pontic Scythians, and, according to the Maccabees, the ancient Persians tore away the scalp of one of their prisoners. Orosius reports that Romans scalped during the battle on the Raudine plain. It is highly probable that Germanic tribes behaved similarly, for we know that they ascribed magical powers to a shock of human hair, regarding it as the symbol of the free man. In Germanic law, if a court demanded the guilty party’s head to be shaved it was considered an especially grievous sentence — in very serious cases the court could decree that the hair be ripped out with the skin.” Source
Setting the Record Straight About Native Peoples: Scalping
Q: Who invented scalping? My history book says it was the Indians but the tribe who lives near me says the colonists used to scalp them.
A: They’re both right. Scalping–cutting off the scalp of a dead enemy as proof of his demise– was common practice throughout North America before colonists got here. It is described in Indian oral histories, and preserved scalps were found at archaeological sites. Colonists learned to scalp enemies from the Indians. (The European custom was to cut off people’s heads for proof/trophies, originally, but scalps are easier to transport and preserve, so the colonists quickly switched to the Indian method.) Once they picked up the technique, the English did a tremendous amount of scalping, both of natives and of rival Frenchmen.
Below is a bounty notice from 1755 offering varying rewards for the scalps of Indian men, women, and children. (These scalps, incidentally, were commonly referred to as “redskins,” one reason why that is considered such a rude racial slur by many Native Americans today.) American and Canadian frontiersmen kept up the tradition of scalping until the turn of the 20th century, though in some places, like California, they reverted back to severed heads. There was actually still a law on the books in Canada as of the year 2000 promising bounties in exchange for Indian scalps, though the embarrassed Canadian government was hurrying to repeal it (here’s an article on that).
In other words, the scalping technique came from the American Indians, the idea of taking a piece of a dead enemy’s body as a war prize was well known to Indians and Europeans alike, and the idea of paying bounties for dead body parts came from the Europeans. http://www.native-languages.org/iaq12.htm
Scalping Proclamation
A 1755 proclamation (above) by one Spencer Phips, then lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The document declared the Penobscots “Enemies, Rebels, and Traitors to his Majesty King George the Second.” It “required” his Majesty’s Subjects “to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and Destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.” It further stated that a bounty had been voted by the General Court of the Province, promising 25 pounds for a female Penobscot of any age or a male Penobscot under age 12, and 50 pounds for a Penobscot male over age 12. Scalps of Penobscots under 12 would earn a little less, 20 pounds”. https://bangordailynews.com/2011/11/13/living/official-issued-proclamation-against-penobscot-indians-in-1755/
Who Invented Scalping?
In recent years many voices—both Native-American and white—have questioned whether Indians did in fact invent scalping. What is the evidence? James Axtell April 1977 Volume 28 Issue 3
Americans have always assumed that scalping and Indians were synonymous. Cutting the crown of hair from a fallen adversary has traditionally been viewed as an ancient Indian custom, performed to obtain tangible proof of the warrior’s valor. But in recent years many voices—Indian and white—have seriously questioned whether the Indians did in fact invent scalping. The latest suggestion is that the white colonists, in establishing bounties for enemy hair, introduced scalping to Indian allies innocent of the practice.
This theory presupposes two facts: one, that the white colonists who settled America in the seventeenth century knew how to scalp before they left Europe; and two, that the Indians did not know how to scalp before the white men arrived. But are these facts? And if they are not, who did invent scalping in America?
Total silence from both participants and historians casts doubt on the first proposition. For no one has ever insinuated, much less proved, that the European armies who fought so ruthlessly the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Wars of Religion ever scalped their victims. Even when they were combating a European form of “savagery” in Ireland, Queen Elizabeth’s forces were never scalped or ever took scalps. The grim, gray visages of severed heads lining the path to a commander’s tent were more terrible than impersonal shocks of hair and skin.
Nor does the second proposition fare much better. For there is abundant evidence from various sources that the Indians practiced scalping long before the white man arrived and that they continued to do so without the incentive of colonial cash.
The first and most familiar source of evidence is the written descriptions of the earliest European observers, who presumably saw the Indian cultures of the eastern seaboard in something like an aboriginal condition. When Jacques Cartier sailed down the St. Lawrence to what is now Quebec City in 1535, he met the Stadaconans, who showed him “the scalps of five Indians, stretched on hoops like parchment.” His host, Donnacona, told him they were from “Toudamans from the south, who waged war continually against his people.”
Twenty-nine years later, another Frenchman, artist Jacques Ie Moyne, witnessed the Timucuans’ practice of scalping on the St. Johns River in Florida:
They carried slips of reeds, sharper than any steel blade … they cut the skin of the head down to the bone from front to back and all the way around and pulled it off while the hair, more than a foot and a half long, was still attached to it. When they had done this, they dug a hole in the ground and made a fire, kindling it with a piece of smoldering ember. … Over the fire they dried the scalps until they looked like parchment. … They hung the bones and the scalps at the ends of their spears, carrying them home in triumph.
When they arrived at their village, they held a victory ceremony in which the legs, arms, and scalps of the vanquished were attached to poles with “great solemnities.”
The French were not alone in witnessing the Indian custom of scalping. When the English brazenly set themselves down amid the powerful Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia, the Indians used an old tactic to try to quash their audacity. In 1608 Powhatan launched a surprise attack on a village of “neare neighbours and subjects,” killing twenty-four men. When the victors retired from the scene of battle, they brought away “the long haire of the one side of their heades [the other being shaved] with the skinne cased off with shels or reeds.” The prisoners and scalps were then presented to the chief, who hung “the lockes of haire with their skinnes” on a line between two trees. “And thus,” wrote Captain John Smith, “he made ostentation … , shewing them to the English men that then came unto him, at his appointment.”
The first Dutchmen to penetrate the Iroquois country of upstate New York also found evidence of native scalping. When the surgeon of Fort Orange (Albany) journeyed into Mohawk and Oneida territory in the winter of 1634-35,ne saw atop a gate of the old Oneida castle on Oriskany Creek “three wooden images carved like men, and with them … three scalps fluttering in the wind.” On a smaller gate at the east end of the castle a scalp was also hanging, no doubt to impress white visitors as well as hostile neighbors…
The older English word scalp did not acquire its distinctly American meaning until 1675 when King Philip’s War brought the object renewed prominence in New England. Until then, the best expressions were compounds such as “hair-scalp” and “head-skin,” phrases such as “the skin and hair of the scalp of the head,” or the simple but ambiguous word “head.” Likewise, the only meaning of the verb to scalp meant “to carve, engrave, scrape, or scratch.” Consequently, English writers were forced to use “skin,” “flay,” or “excoriate” until 1676 when the American meaning became popular. French, Dutch, German, and Swedish speakers were also forced to resort to circumlocutions until they borrowed the English words in the eighteenth century.
On the other hand, the languages of the eastern Indians contained many words to describe the scalp, the act of scalping, and the victim of scalping. A Catholic priest among the Hurons in 1623 learned that an onontsira was a war trophy consisting of “the skin of the head with its hair.” The five languages of the Iroquois were especially rich in words to describe the act that has earned them, however unjustly, an enduring reputation for inhuman ferocity. To the Mohawks and Oneidas, the scalp was onnonra ; the act of taking it, kannonrackwan . Their western brothers at Onondaga spoke of hononksera , a variation of the Huron word. And although they were recorded after initial contact with the Europeans, the vocabularies of the other Iroquois nations and of the Delaware, Algonquin, Malecite, Micmac, and Montagnais all contained words for scalp, scalping, and the scalped that are closely related to the native words for hair, head, skull, and skin. That these words were obviously not borrowed from European languages lends further support to the notion that they were native to America and deeply rooted in Indian life…
Drawings reveal yet another piece of evidence damaging to the new theory of scalping, namely scalp locks. A small braid of hair on the crown, often decorated with paint or jewelry, the scalp lock was worn widely in both eastern and western America. Contrary to the notion of scalping as a recent and mercenary introduction, the scalp lock originally possessed ancient religious meaning in most tribes, symbolizing the warrior’s life-force. For anyone to touch it even lightly was regarded as a grave insult. If the white man had taught the Indians to scalp one another for money, it is highly unlikely that the Indians were also hoodwinked into making it easier for their enemies by growing hairy handles. Something far deeper in native culture and history must account for the practice.
The final and most conclusive evidence of scalping in pre-Columbian America comes from archaeology. Since Indian skulls of the requisite age can be found to show distinct and unambiguous marks made by the scalping knife, the Indians must have known of scalping before the arrival of the white man. A wealth of evidence, particularly from prehistoric sites along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and in the Southeast, indicates just such a conclusion…
But the second kind of evidence is more conclusive. In a number of prehistoric sites, circular lesions have been found on the skulls of victims who survived scalping long enough to allow the bone tissue to regenerate partially, leaving a telltale scar. Contrary to popular belief, scalping itself was not a fatal operation, and American history is full of survivors. Scalping is the only possible explanation for these lesions, which appear exactly where eyewitness descriptions and drawings indicate the scalp was traditionally cut.
In the light of such evidence, it is clear that Indians, not white men, introduced scalping to the New World. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the colonists encouraged the spread of scalping to many tribes unfamiliar with the practice by posting scalp bounties. Nor can it be forgotten that Americans of every stripe—from frontiersmen to ministers—were tainted by participating in the bloody market for human hair. Yet in the end, the American stereotype of scalping must stand as historical fact, whether we are comfortable with it or not.
https://www.americanheritage.com/who-invented-scalping#2
Hannah Duston Indian Captive
I have a grandmother named Cecilia Ellen Dustin (1895-1962) who married my grandfather, Alvin Christian Tueller (1898-1972) both from Bear Lake Idaho. I have been told the story about my 7th Great Grandmother Puritan Hannah Emerson Dustin for many years now. She has always been a hero to me as a woman of courage who was the first woman ever to have a statue created in her honor in the United States (1874). I have also always had a great love for the Native Americans (Abenaki in this instance) of this great country and honor those Lamanites whenever I get a chance. The story about Hannah and the Native Americans is a difficult story as one side kills the other, I however know that the Lord will sort all things out and hold a fair judgement of all concerned. I will let you read the story and come to your own conclusion.
Today, what she did to deserve a statue might be called, by some, a monument to an atrocity. What did Hannah do? Hannah scalped the ten Indians who had attacked her farm, dragged her from her bed, and burned her house down before taking her captive and killing her six-day-old infant.
About Hannah Webster (Emerson) Dustin, Indian Captive
Hannah Webster (Emerson) Dustin (1657 – 1736) – Hannah Dustin was a 40-year-old colonial Massachusetts Puritan mother of eight during King William’s War who was taken captive with her newborn daughter during an Indian raid on Haverhill. On 15 March 1697, Hannah witnessed the brutal killing of her baby and several of her neighbors. While held captive on an island in the Merrimack River in present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire, she and two other captives scalped ten members of the Indian family who were holding them hostage. More of my blog here:
Utah Archaeology Volume 5, Number 1, 1992
Published on Sep 4, 2018
UTAH ARCHAEOLOGY is an annual publication of USAS, UPAC and the Utah Division of State History. The purpose of this publication is to disseminate information relevant to archaeological research both historic and prehistoric in the state of Utah. Subscriptions are available through membership in the USAS, UPAC or the Publication Department of the Utah Division of State History. Authors interested in publishing contact the editors for manuscript guide.
INTRODUCTION Over the past several years the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Moab and the Museum of Peoples and Cultures at Brigham Young University (BYU) have obtained collections of prehistoric materials that include human scalps. These items have come from both the Uinta Basin and the Moab area of eastern Utah. Similarities in the scalps and associated material cultural suggest regional affinities, perhaps witli the Southwest. The function of these important but highly sensitive artifacts is unknown at the moment, although intriguing insights are available in the ethnographic literature on the Pueblos.
SCALPS WITH BASKETRY FROM THE UINTA BASIN In 1988 the Museum of Peoples and Cultures at BYU received a large collection of Ute ethnographic items from the heirs of Mildred Miles DiUman, a longlime resident of Vernal, Utah. Among the items were several prehistoric artifacts that, according to the notes with the collection, were from Nuie Mile Canyon in eastern Utah. Included in the Nine Mile Canyon material were two human scalps stretched over basketry disks or rosettes (Figures 1 and 2). Each of the disks is 14.5 cm in diameter.
Following Adovasio (1977) and Morris and Burgh (1954), the basketry was constructed with an open- or space-coiled, intricatestitch, interlocked on a one-rod foundation technique (basketry material is unknown). The rim finish is a form of false braid. One of the disks is completely painted red, while the other has a red band painted across it just below the center (Figure 1). Spots of red paint are also present on the leather thongs that tie the rosettes together. One of the scalps is secured to its disk with a fine, two-ply, s-twist type cordage of unidentified plant fibers. Each scalp has two perforations (perhaps three on one) at the lower end or neck portion. The perforations are elongated as if something were tied or hung from them at one point. The scalps are well worn and little hair remains. Each appears to be from a separate individual and approaches being a full scalp.
The hair is black and coarse and evidence of parasites is visible. Maximum hair length is about 15 cm. A hair whorl presumably from the back of the head is clearly visible on one of the scalps. The scalps have suffered some insect damage, but the disks are well preserved; however, both are extremely brittle and fragile. The two separate scalps along with the disks are bound together with leadier thongs suggesting they were paired for some reason. No details are known of the circumstances of the discovery of these scalps in Nine Mile Canyon.
SCALPS AND BASKETRY FROM THE MOAB AREA Five scalps are known from the North and the South Forks of Mill Creek Canyon, southeast of Moab. These artifacts are now in Moab in collections at the BLM office and the Dan O’Laurie Museum. Two of the scalps (Figure 3) were found during the spring of 1986 by a Salt Lake City couple who visited the North Fork of Mill Creek Canyon near Moab. While hiking, they explored several large alcove sites cmd in one found a woven mat protruding from the sand. Upon investigating, they found the scalps wrapped in the mat buried approximately 20 cm below the surface. Unaware of the antiquity laws, they collected die scalps and returned to Salt Lake. Their discovery was made approximately one week before the Calvin Black case was reported in the newspapers. The couple was concerned about having violated any federal law and subsequently turned the items over to the United States Attorney for the District of Utah. The attorney contacted a special agent who gave them to the Grand Resource Area, Bureau of Land Management archaeologist in Moab.
RADIOCARBON DATE FROM THE LEMA SCALP [Fig. 4 and 5]
An Accelerator Mass Spectrometric (AMS) radiocarbon date was obtained from the Lema scalp. The sample was taken from a small section of skin from the back of the neck. The sample yielded a raw date of 1845 ± 80 years (Beta Analytic sample number 31535). The tree ring calibration of this date following Stuiver and Reamer (1987) is A.D. 1-359 (two sigma range)
