Posted on 11/23/2003 6:48:27 PM PST by blam
WHO WERE THE SI-TE-CAH?
Note the cranial similarities between this Lovelock Cave skull discovered in the 1920's and the Kennewick Man sketch by Jamie Chatters (Click on the site) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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This 1995 article by Steve McNallen was written months before the discovery of the Kennewick Man or the current controversy over ancient Caucasians in North America. In retrospect, it seems hauntingly prophetic.
The history of the European peoples in the are we call California is generally assumed to have begun with the Spanish in the 1500's, followed later by the English (represented by Sir Francis Drake) and by the Russians. Our history books tell us all about these explorations, and we European-Californians should be knowledgeable about this part of our heritage. However, the books WON'T tell you about some of the more apocryphal reports of our kind of people in the American West, long ago...
Lovelock, Nevada, is about eighty miles northeast of Reno. It was in a cave near here, in 1911, that guano miners found mummies, bones, and artifacts buried under four feet of bat excrement. The desiccated bodies belonged to a very tall people - with red hair.
This is not the physical profile of your typical American Indian, to put it mildly. And in fact, the local Paiutes had legends about these towering troublemakers, whom they called the "Si-Te-Cah." According to them the redheads were a warlike people, and a number of the Indian tribes joined together in a long war against them. Eventually, the Paiutes and their allies forced the Si-Te-Cah back to their home acres, near Mount Shasta in our own California.
Mining engineer and amateur archeologist John T. Reid took an interest in the remains of the Si-Te-Cah and did his best to document the finds as they were unearthed. He also interviewed many locals who had knowledge of the affair. His memoirs can be found in the Nevada Historical Society Archives, located in Reno.
Official archeology refused to take an interest. According to reports, two investigators were sent to the scene. One was from the University of California, and the other from New York. Rather than unearthing facts, they seemed more interested in burying them - literally; we are told the New Yorker ordered a mummy reburied on at least once occasion. Nor was anything published about the anomalies until 1929, seventeen years after their visit.
So how did the mummies get in the cave, anyway? The way the Paiutes tell it, the Si-Te-Cah lived on a lake in the basin overlooked by the cave. When I say on the lake, that's just what I mean - they dwelled on rafts to escape harassment from the Paiutes. The rafts, like many other things in Si-Te-Cah society, were made of a fibrous water plant called tule; in fact, the name Si-Te-Cah means "tule eaters."
The Paiutes and the long-legged redheads did not get along well. The Indians accused the Si-Te-Cah of being cannibals, and waged war against them. The Si-Te-Cah fought back. After a long struggle, a coalition of tribes trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah in what is now called Lovelock Cave. When they refused to come out, the Indians piled brush before the cave mouth and set it aflame. The Si-Te-Cah were annihilated.
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of Paiute Chief Winnemucca, related many stories about the Si-Te-Cah in her book Life Among the Paiutes. On page 75, she relates, "My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with the reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family."
All of this could be dismissed as another tall tale, but the case for the Si-Te-Cah does not rest on one man's research, or on remains found in one guano-filled cave. In 1931, mummies wee discovered in the Humboldt Lake bed. Eight years later, a mystery skeleton was unearthed on a ranch in the region. In each case, the skeletons or mummies were exceptionally tall and appeared to be connected with the strange lost race of redheads.
According to the Indians, the Si-Te-Cah built a pyramidal stone structure in New York Canyon, some miles away in Churchill County. Unfortunately, the area is riven with earthquakes and the rocky ruins have largely tumbled over the years.
Not much has survived from the Si-Te-Cah. When the archeological establishment refused to take their existence seriously, a number of small, private museums arose to fill the gap. A fire in one of these destroyed an irreplaceable collection of bones, mummified remains, feathered artifacts, and shells carved with mysterious symbols. Today there is a museum in Lovelock with a display describing the cave finds, but it ignores allegations that the Si-Te-Cah were anything other than Indians. The Nevada State Historical Society has some artifacts from the cave, but again, there is not even a hint of controversy.
Today, the basin that held the lake is a dry and dusty desert, its water usually limited to a few alkali pool, and the tule is as gone as the mysterious people who once ate it and floated on rafts made from its stalks. But the cave is still there, looming darkly above the desert floor, accessible by a short climb up a winding trail. It is a natural defensive position; it the Paiutes tried attacking the Si-Te-Cah from this direction, they must have taken considerable losses.
On the day we were there, there were no Paiutes in sight - nor tourists, nor prospectors, nor anyone else. Our eyes soon grew accustomed to the cave's gloom, and within minutes we had explored the extent of the sheltering rock. I scrambled out a secondary entrance/exit, a hole that opened a few yards to one side. Pausing to admire the endless desert view, I walked back to the main entrance. There, far from water of any kind, was a knot made of two strands of fibrous water plant - tule. It hadn't been buried; no mud or clods clung to it. It looked as though someone had placed it there moments before. Had it been there when we entered the cave? Well, I hadn't seen it, though admittedly I was focused on the cave itself.
So who were the Si-Te-Cah? We may never know. From John Reid's journals, it is clear he was researching the occurrence of other "White tribes" throughout what is now the United States. We have tales of Celtic settlements that preceded Columbus, but they were presumably on the other side of the continent and it's hard to see how they would have gotten to Nevada. Could bands of our people have migrated across the Bering Strait at the same time as the ancestors of the Indians? Our kind do have a propensity to wander...
The existence of early, previously unknown Eurofolk in the Nevada-California region indicates that our roots here may be even deeper than we suspected. We need to recover what we can of our lost heritage, and transmit it to our children as part of their birthright. Maybe the Si-Te-Cah were a transitory phenomenon - but this time, we're here to stay!
While agricultural people tend to stay put for a while, herding or hunting peoples would tend to migrate, looking for good fields for their flocks, or good hunting.
People who had mastered making strong bows would have found the midwest, with its herds of bison, an excellent place to be.
Those were the Jomon and Ainu...some think they may be the ancestors to all the Europeans and Asians. There are still about 10-50k Ainu still in Japan. They were also the original Japanese Samurai.
LOL Seatac - Seattle - Tacoma airport.
No, never have. I'd like to get some DNA from that red hair...that could probably tell a tale.
The Cherokee legends talk about very tall people with red hair who live to the west. I guess maybe these were those people.
Ainu
Likely...and related to Spirit Cave Man And Kennewick Man
Origins of the Ainu
by Gary Crawford
The ringing telephone broke the evening silence. It was the fall of 1983, and my research partner, Professor Masakazu Yoshizaki, was calling from Japan.
"Gary, I have some news," Yoshi said. "We have a few grains of barley from a site on the Hokkaido University campus. I think you should come and look at them."
The Japanese language is notorious for its ambiguity, so I wasn't quite sure of the full meaning of what I had just heard. But I didn't need to know much more. Though it may sound like a trivial piece of news to you, I knew something was up, and it deserved closer scrutiny. My teaching schedule at the University of Toronto kept me from hopping on a plane for several months, but when I finally got to the lab on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, I realized the full import of Yoshi's news - namely, that the history of Hokkaido's indigenous people, the Ainu, was about to be rewritten.
Since the mid-1970s I had been investigating the relationship between plants and people in prehistoric northeastern Japan, particularly Hokkaido, using an archeological tool called flotation. The widespread use of this technique beginning in the 1960s sparked a quiet revolution in archeology. Flotation facilitates the collection of plant remains, mainly seeds and charcoal, preserved by burning in oxygen-poor environments such as the depths of a fireplace. Under these circumstances, seeds don't oxidize to ashy dust. One can recover the resulting carbonized seeds by sampling soil from ancient hearths, floors, pits, garbage dumps, and the like. One places the soil gently in water, stirs it so the carbonized material floats to the surface, and then decants the water and its floating contents through a fine mesh, which traps the floating plant material while allowing the water to pass through.
A flotation screen with a recovered sample. |
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An early Jomon pit house. |
It didn't look to new agey to me when I did a utility survey down the main street a few months ago...
Findings by American anthropologist C. Loring Brace, University of Michigan, will surely be controversial in race conscious Japan. The eye of the predicted storm will be the Ainu, a "racially different" group of some 18,000 people now living on the northern island of Hokkaido. Pure-blooded Ainu are easy to spot: they have lighter skin, more body hair, and higher-bridged noses than most Japanese. Most Japanese tend to look down on the Ainu.
Brace has studied the skeletons of about 1,100 Japanese, Ainu, and other Asian ethnic groups and has concluded that the revered samurai of Japan are actually descendants of the Ainu, not of the Yayoi from whom most modern Japanese are descended. In fact, Brace threw more fuel on the fire with:
"Dr. Brace said this interpretation also explains why the facial features of the Japanese ruling class are so often unlike those of typical modern Japanese. The Ainu-related samurai achieved such power and prestige in medieval Japan that they intermarried with royality and nobility, passing on Jomon-Ainu blood in the upper classes, while other Japanese were primarily descended from the Yoyoi." The reactions of Japanese scientists have been muted so. One Japanese anthropologist did say to Brace," I hope you are wrong."
The Ainu and their origin have always been rather mysterious, with some people claiming that the Ainu are really Caucasian or proto-Caucasian - in other words, "white." At present, Brace's study denies this interpretation.
Cord-pottery has been found in the Olmec ruins in Mexico.
That's something else. I never heard such a theory but the guy is prolly at least 50% right. Thanks much! Island people means insular people. This applies to all of Japan back then. You hear about the Palestinians and Arabs being clannish. The Japs of the past were many times more so. All due to being on islands. Brits are the same to a lesser extent. Most real Brits are blood related even if just a bit. All comes from being on an island. A few islands.
Island = isolated= insular= inbred
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