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| I went to Hell Creek and did NOT make the most important scientific breakthrough of my time. Humph! |
The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The pull of this book for me was, of course, the ancient Native American and Ancient Egypt content, but I actually found myself invested in all the mysteries.
“The Clovis Point Con” chapter is on a topic that I haven’t really read about before, ie. Clovis points, but now I’m fascinated, especially because the chapter is about Clovis points, and also about a con man, and ALSO about an eccentric rich guy who made a hidden treasure clue hunt. As with some of his other articles, Preston comes to this subject because he was apparently good buddies with the eccentric rich guy in question, Forrest Fenn, and so was able to have boots on the ground as soon as Fenn started to have suspicions about the magically perfect Clovis points he was being sold. Interestingly to me, a lot of Fenn’s own collections have uncertain, sometimes downright suspicious provenance, but he sailed through a genuine FBI investigation scott-free, so who am I to judge?
I like that Preston spills a lot of interesting tea, but none of it is salacious. Here’s a nice bit from “The Clovis Point Con,” when he’s tracing the chain of provenance of the faked Clovis points from their maker, Woody Blackwell, to Fenn through an elderly antiques dealer who was friends with Blackwell: “Everyone agrees that the antique dealer was duped by Blackwell; the man has a severe heart condition, and I was asked not to mention his name in the article for fear of giving him a heart attack.”
Like, I’m even madder at Blackwell now. Dude got a guy with a HEART CONDITION wrapped up in his criminal caper!
“The Mystery of Hell Creek” is my favorite chapter, because once upon a time, I got to do my own paleontological excavation in Hell Creek. Although if I’d found something important in my own dig, I’d have immediately been booted off of it, lol!
Since these articles are several years (and sometimes several decades!) old and not re-edited to reflect the current time, you get a snapshot of what it looks like to have a mystery in progress, which I think is especially interesting after it’s been solved. The Tanis fossil site written about in “The Mystery of Hell Creek,” for instance, is now generally accepted to be what DePalma originally theorized that it was, a snapshot of the hours after the asteroid that would kill the dinosaurs hit our planet, but Preston’s article about it was written in 2019, the same year that the original 2019 paper describing the discovery was published. You should read that article, by the way, because it has pictures of the site! So the article describes not just DePalma’s discovery and what he says about it, but also the controversy surrounding it at the time and the skepticism of many in the paleontology community. Academics seriously can be the worst for political machinations and power brokering and defending their own personal intellectual fiefdoms, ugh.
Preston digs into even more political machinations in his couple of articles that have to do with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. I have complicated feelings about that act, mostly for selfish reasons because I want to see more of the artifacts from Spiro Mound, but most are not on display because of various connotations of that act. In thinking about that and other artifacts found at ancient Native American sites, my reasoning has always been that since we don’t know what peoples their descendants are, we should be able to study them, because Knowledge. Preston, though, in “Skeletons in the Closet,” an article actually written before that act was passed, makes a point that I have to respect: “The real issue, it seems to me, is that most Native Americans feel deeply about reburial, for whatever reason. It is not for us to judge the legitimacy of this feeling.”
FINE! I will respect the feelings of most Native Americans and continue to express my irritation only silently inside my head!
Tangent: if I ever get the chance to have any superpower I want, I will choose the superpower of knowing anything that I want to know. Like, I ask a specific question, and the answer will simply come to me. I’ll have a lot of missing person cases to get through first, but as soon as those are solved I’ll get right to the mystery of Spiro Mound.
The chapter “The Skeleton in the Riverbank” carries the point of NAGPRA further, in that Kennewick Man, a skeleton of huge archaeological importance, caused a huge custody battle that contrasted its worth to science with the desire of the native peoples of the area to rebury it. At first, it was ruled that Kennewick Man wasn’t related to any of the local native peoples so it was okay to study it, but then further study proved that it WAS related to them, so it was eventually relinquished and reburied.
Which means that it’s no longer available for further study, but I’m officially not griping about that anymore.
Another ethically complicated and very interesting issue that Preston explores includes the whole can of worms that evidence of cannibalism by historical Native Americans in the American Southwest opened up among the academic and native communities. People have a lot of feelings when you accuse their ancestors of eating each other! Even more so when you provide archaeological evidence that said ancestors smashed open the skulls of women and children, cut off their heads, roasted those heads on a fire, and then ate their roasted brains out of their skulls. To be fair to the horrified descendents, that feels kind of extreme even for cannibals…
You know I love myself some Ancient Egyptian tomb mysteries, so the titular chapter, “The Lost Tomb,” is my second favorite. It’s so bonkers to me that Egyptian tombs are still being rediscovered, and that they’re then not excavated and explored IMMEDIATELY! As I’ve previously mentioned, I want to know All The Things. This chapter introduced me to the Theban Mapping Project, which somehow in all my reading about Ancient Egypt I’ve never previously learned about. Now when I read about burials and tombs, I can finally visualize where they are! There’s another first-person connection in this chapter, as Preston actually goes to visit KV5 during its excavation season, and, charmingly, wheedles the workers a couple of different times into boosting him into newly opened chambers so he can be the first to have a look since they were buried.
The weakest chapter is the last one, “In Search of the Seven Cities of Gold.” The tone is very different, and the subject is a poorly-contextualized horseback riding trip that Preston and his buddy, Walter, took through Arizona and New Mexico in an attempt to follow Coronado’s path. This is the only passage that I loved, and found hilarious, because I, too, am, in the eyes of my immediate family, infamously obsessed with Bag Balm:
“Fortunately, in our medicine chest we found a tube of a substance called Bag Balm. Billed as an “Antiseptic Emollient Treatment for Horses & Cattle, Other Livestock, Small Animals,” this marvelous embrocation was for “Hoofs, Body & Legs, Udder & Teats.” It was also ideal for sore hands and butts. During the course of our journey we went through three large tubes of the stuff, very little of which was applied to the horses.”
I don’t know about its use as an antiseptic or a liniment, but it makes an EXCELLENT lotion for my chronically dry elbows! It smells kind of nasty, but we must all decide the price we’re willing to pay to be well-moisturized.
Even though I didn’t love that chapter, reading it made me crave a re-watch of Esteban and the Mysterious Cities of Gold. I’ve ALWAYS loved a good ancient mystery!
P.S. View all my reviews P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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