My girlfriend and I went to do the “adventure tour” of Moaning Caverns, a cave in Northern California. Now the tour was really cool and was much more adventurous than we expected. We crawled and wiggled through extremely tight places that until I was in them seemed to go nowhere. Overall it was a great experience, but not recommended for those with claustrophobia. Here’s the link: http://www.caverntours.com/MoCavRt.htm
At the top of the cave they had a gift shop and tiny museum. The first oddity is that they had a number of bones in display cases some of which were human and this included a mostly intact skull which they claimed was American Indian. During the adventure tour in the tight chambers we crawled through there were bone fragments in several places just sitting around. I even picked up some teeth that definitely looked human. There were about five of them near each other on a small rock ledge. This wasn’t on display but deep down in the caverns where the only light was from our helmets.
The staff said that over a hundred human remains were found at the bottom of the cave and many were from native children who would play around the hole and fall the several hundred feet down the many chamber to the floor below. On a horror story note, the claim was that some survived the fall and spent days injured crawling chambers in complete darkness through the chambers in search for an escape.
Now I am a bit skeptical of the story they’re telling. It seems extremely casual treatment of human remains and I know that American Indians are pretty serious about how remains of their distant ancestors are treated. If I had wanted I could have pocked the whole lot of teeth and no one would have known.
Can any of you give me more factual information about this cave in particular? If not, what information about this kind of situation do you have.
I would be really surprised if those are actual Native American remains. Maybe recreations or some bones they bought off the Net, but not real NA remains.
NAGPRA only applies to Native American remains found on federal land. Kennewick Man was found on property administered by the Corps of Engineers and was, thus, subject to NAGPRA. Moaning Cavern is private property and, therefore, not subject to NAGPRA. Further, the remains on display at the cavern were found prior to 1 January 1988 and therefore not subject to the Cultural and Sacred Sites Act cited by Duckster.
I have some familiarity with the situation at Moaning Cavern and, believe me, the local Native American community is well aware of what the proprietors have on display.
They generally think its appalling but they, currently, have little recourse. Requests have been made to take the display down but have been either ignored or rebuffed. However, their political influence is slowly growing and I would expect that in the near future they will have additional lines of pressure to place on the cavern proprietors.
Sounds like a public boycott, with an information picket line just outside the property entrance might be in order. During a busy weekend. With the media notified in advance.
Thank you for the information. I am shocked that real remains are treated thus.
I thought the most likely scenario was that these were fake stories that they’d created to get more tourists with bones brought in for effect. I also was under the impression that remains on private land were still belonged to the native tribes of the area.
I have no doubt that the stories are fake. How on earth would they know if the children fell in or were interred postmortem? And how would you be able to tell if a child survived the fall and then wandered around looking for an escape?
Wouldn’t a proper burial, in a given body position and possibly with personal belongings, heirlooms, etc. look rather different from a lethal fall with broken bones, haphazard limb placement, etc.? And likewise, if the child wandered around down there with no way out and eventually died curled up in a ball in a series of winding passageways, well… I mean I guess the alternatives might be asphyxiation, suicide, dehydration, poisonous insects, etc., but I think they would all still fall (har) under the same “Jumped in, can’t get out!” syndrome, no?
Yeah, in a relatively recent, static environment that hadn’t been disturbed you could probably make those assessments. However, the remains in question are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. In the intervening timeframe between burial and removal, the cave was subject to numerous intrusional events which obscured the original context, whatever that may have been.
Just as background, the ethnographic native people living in that area at the time of contact didn’t use caves as burial areas which suggests that the cave burials (and there are others, not just at Moaning Cavern) pre-date their presence in that area.
Calling it fake might be going a little far. If you assume that there was not an intentional burial, then you have to assume an accidental entrance, with a fall being likely. If there are a hundred bodies, it makes sense to assume that at least some of the victims survived the fall. If you did survive, you’d only have two options: sit around under the opening and hope someone finds you, or crawl around looking for another exit.
So it seems like a reasonable assumption even if it’s the evidence could be interpreted in other ways.