On the Feces of the Gods

More than 85 percent of the meteors that fall to the Earth are stony.  These objects are mostly chondritic, that is, made from brecciated grains of rock in which so-called chondrules are interspersed.  Chondrules are particles or bubbles of fused silica.  About five percent of all known stony meteorites are achondritic – that is, without beads of fused silica.  These achondritic stony meteorites are thought to be older and more primitive in structure than the chondritic species, believed to originate in the fragmentation of asteroids colliding with one another.  The remaining fifteen percent of meteorites are iron; the diagnostic criterion for an iron meteorite, paradoxically, is that some part of the artifact is comprised of nickel.  The scientific vocabulary that has developed around the study of meteoritics (as opposed to meteorology which is about weather) is daunting and very complex.  Scholars spend their lives examining, testing, and categorizing meteorites.  There seem to be about as many breeds of meteorites as there are types of dogs.

Iron meteorites are dark brown and peppered with embedded stony matter.  The Plains Indians called them the feces of the gods.  From their obdurate and intensely hard surface, the Indians inferred the presence of giants in the sky with rectums even denser and more metallic than the meteors that they excreted.  These giants ate stone and shit iron that, sometimes, falls onto the earth.  (In the jargon of meteoritics, a “fall” is a meteor-strike on earth that is witnessed.)  The substance of iron meteorites was greatly prized by ancient people.  Beads of meteorite iron have been found in a necklace, together with other precious gems, on the breast of a mummy excavated from the Gerzeh cemetery 43 miles south of Cairo.  The iron from the meteor was painstakingly worked into tubular beads.  Nickel content in the beads establishes that the source of this adornment was an iron meteorite.  

One of the most famous relics in Tutankhamun’s tomb is an iron dagger with golden sheath.  The dagger and sheath, are perfectly preserved – they look like something you could buy at a Cabela’s or Walmart today (if these places carried gold tools) – and made from iron with nickel and cobalt mixed into the alloy.  The dagger dates to 1350 BC, a date in which smelting was either rare or unknown (scholars differ on the question of when people began to make iron alloys).  The presence of nickel and cobalt in the dagger blade solves the question of how it was made: the dagger wasn’t smelted or forged but rather carved from an iron meteorite.  Archaeologists think the dagger was laid across the lips of Tutankhamun’s mummy in an “opening of the mouth” ceremony – this was a ritual by which the spirit within the dead person was liberated from the corpse by ceremonially opening the mouth.  (Relics of this ceremony, well-documented in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, as well as in mortuary inscriptions, exist in Psalm 51 – presumably a Jewish scribe who had lived in Egypt remembered that ceremony when the song of praise was written: “O Lord open my lips...” at Psalm 51, verse 8.)

Because stony meteorites tend to look just like metamorphic terrestrial rocks, ancient people didn’t collect them except in cases in which they witnessed a fall.  Iron meteorites by contrast don’t seem to be of ordinary earthly origin, had unique physical qualities (that is, they were metal in a world in which tools were lithic), and could be visually differentiated from other rocks.  A number of iron meteorites have been discovered in Native American cultural contexts.  Exactly how these objects were used or what they represented is unclear.  Native sources, mostly Hopi, have ritual traditions relating to meteorites, but they aren’t willing to share these with ethnologists.  

About two-thousand years ago, Indians put an iron meteorite on which is described an altar at a Hopewell site in Ohio.  (The rock has been traced to an iron meteorite found in Kansas although another Hopewell meteorite artifact may have come from as far away as northeastern Arizona.)  The largest iron meteorite with cultural significance was found near Willamette, Oregon.  The 15.6 ton chunk of iron is the Marilyn Monroe of meteorites, famous and charismatic, an excoriated fossil-brown chunk of metal twisted around deep hollows and indentations that look the eye-sockets of a skull or, perhaps, a sculpture by Henry Moore.  The thing sits in New York’s Museum of Natural History to which it was transported after ninety days of intensive effort in the first decades of the 20th century.  The meteorite was not associated with any crater and, so, is thought to have been a glacial erratic, that is, a boulder rolled south from Canada to what is now Willamette by a glacier.  The transportation and display of the meteorite at the New York museum, the result of heroic measures, is blemished by one significant problem: the meteorite is sacred to the Clackamas Chinook Indians, the members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde of Oregon.  (The meteorite was located on land owned by the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, a metal smelting firm; however, a pioneer named Ellis Hughes stole the meteorite, itself a herculean effort, resulting in litigation in 1920 that reached the Oregon Supreme Court.  The meteorite was repatriated to Oregon Iron and Steel which, thereafter, sold the boulder to the Museum of Natural History where it remains to this day.  In terms used in archaeology, the Willamette meteorite is now a manuport – that is, an object transported by human beings to its present location.)  In 1996, the Clackamas Indians through the Confederated Tribes sued the Natural History Museum demanding that the boulder be returned to them.  (They have a name for the boulder; to the Clackamas, it’s called Tomanowas.)  Litigation under the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was arduous, but, ultimately, settled.  The compromise reached between the tribes and the museum was that the museum would pay for the production of an exact laser-milled replica of the stone for display at the Clackamas museum in Oregon and that, one day a year, the room in which the meteorite is displayed would be closed to the public so representatives of the tribes could perform ceremonies venerating Tomanowas.

Other meteorites associated with Native American sites are the large Casa Grandes artifact, discovered wrapped in a mummy shroud at the huge pueblo site in the Sonoran desert in northern Mexico.  Casa Grandes is 140 miles south of Juarez in the State of Chihuahua.  This relic, a lens-shaped iron meteor  weighs 3500 pounds.  It seems unlikely to me that this enormously heavy iron mass would have been transported to the site.  Therefore, it may be that the town was established around the place where the meteorite was discovered. The Pojoaque meteorite is a small rock found in an Indian’s medicine pouch.  The Red River meteorite is a big, unwieldy iron rock once venerated by the Pawnee in north central Texas.  The 1600 pound meteorite was thought to be solid platinum or some other precious metal and so it was stolen in 1808 and, after great hardship, transported to Yale at New Haven, Connecticut.  The explorers who sought to exploit the rock ended up fighting each other but it was all in vain.  The meteorite is iron and, except for its remarkable origin among the stars, has no intrinsic value.  Some Irish workmen were  about to bury the big stone in 1833 when it was fished out a hole that had been dug and, after some later transactions, ended up in the Peabody Museum of Geology on the Yale campus.  

A number of meteorites had cultural significance to the Ancestral Pueblo living in northeastern Arizona.  (These lands are now part of the Navajo nation – the Ancestral Pueblo migrated to northen New Mexico after the collapse of the Chaco civilization around 1200; however, their pueblos are everywhere in the Four Corners area.)  The so-called Navajo meteorite now located in Chicago’s Field Museum was unearthed by Europeans in 1921 in northern Arizona.  The Navajo were long aware of the existence of this big iron meteorite but, associated it with their ancient enemies, the Ancestral Pueblo and, in fact, had buried the stone at the base of a cliff to keep it from causing trouble – Ancestral Puebloan ruins are thought to ghost-ridden and accursed by the Navajo.  The most famous of these relics is the Winona meteorite. This stony meteorite was found in slab-lined cist or crypt in an Ancestral Pueblo ruin – the ruin is said to be the Elden Pueblo, but, in fact, the meteorite was found at another nearby site.  The Winona meteorite is renowned among meteoritic scholars as the type-specimen for a very rare kind of celestial mineral –that is Winonaite, a primitive achondritic meteorite.  (Ken Zoll, who lectured on the topic of meteorite use among the ancient people of central Arizona, the source for much of this essay, claims that Winonaite was secreted in the Big Bang that created the Universe – this seems a picturesque exaggeration: Winonaite is a planetissimal mineral, that is, a condensation of debris existing in the earliest phases of the Solar System that is 4.6 billion years ago; the Big Bang is thought to have occurred 13.8 billion years ago – although this notion is a little problematic since time as we know it didn’t exist before the Big Bang singularity.)  Twenty-five examples of Winonaite meteorites are known to exist, but the so-called Winona meteorite, weighing 53 pounds, is the largest specimen.  (Meteorites are identified by the nearest named place to where they were found; the pueblo ruins where this specimen was discovered in 1927 were near a tiny village, now non-existent, at the foot of Mount Elden; this is a place on a railroad line near Flagstaff, Arizona – the ghost town was variously called Walnut or Darling.  Wikipedia gives the ghost town an entry claiming that the name of the place as made famous in the list of places recited in “(Get your kicks on) Route 66" and because the singer Wynnona Judd is named after the village.  The author of this Wikipedia entry doesn’t seem to know about Winona, Minnesota, nor about Winona Ryder born in Winona County, Minnesota.  To be fair, in context, the lyrics of “Route 66" seem to refer to the Arizona town.)  When the Winona meteorite, said to have been a heavily eroded egg-shaped stone, was lifted out of its cist, the rock crumbled into many fragments.  The meteorite was probably interred in its small stone crypt between 1050 and 1215 AD.

The Camp Verde meteorite was also found in stone-lined cist capped with rock lid.  The structure was discovered in the ruins of a large pueblo with the iron meteorite draped in a turkey-feather blanket.  The cist was under the floor in Room 32, probably a ceremonial kiva, facing east into the town’s plaza.  This iron meteorite is fairly large, two feet wide and 12 inches thick.  It’s associated with the Canyon Diablo meteor crater, the very large and impressive feature near Winslow, Arizona in northeast Arizona.  This iron meteor fell about 50,000 years ago and blasted a beautifully round crater into the rocks about 7/10ths of a mile wide; the crater is 560 feet deep and ringed by debris blown out of the hole forming a lip or ridge around the pit that is 140 feet tall.  The Canyon Diablo meteor fell 53 miles to the northeast raising the question as to how the artifact interred in the pueblo ruins 800 years ago got to that place.  (Canyon Diablo is a ghost-town associated with the construction of the Gallup to Flagstaff railroad.  The village where workers were housed was located at a place where a long railroad trestle had to be built over a canyon.  After the railroad workers finished the bridge, they departed and the town deteriorated into a noxious hellhole full of gunfighters and whores; the dying village was the site of a famous gun battle between robbers and the county sheriff in 1906; nothing remains today except a Boot Hill cemetery and some indentations in the desert at the end of forty miles of terrible dirt road.)

The Fossil Springs meteorite weighs 10.5 pounds and is associated with a number of Ancestral Puebloan ruins running along the rim of a cliff above the stream where the iron stone was found.  This meteorite is also made of the same material as the Canyon Diablo meteor; Fossil Springs is 59 miles to the southwest of the crater at Canyon Diablo.  Another find, nearby, is the Strawberry meteorite found on Dead Man’s mesa, 54 miles to the southwest of Meteor Crater near Canyon Diablo.  This stone is small and seems to have been used as a scraper – it has a natural indentation at its base into which the thumb fits neatly.  There’s no evidence that the Strawberry iron meteor, with a composition identical to the fragments at Canyon Diablo, was worked into this form; the convenient thumb-sized indentation seems to have been a natural feature.  Another iron meteorite composed from Canyon Diablo fragments is the so-called Bloody Basin meteorite.  This meteorite is said to have been found by an eight-year old girl at the Red Creek Ruin, 78 miles as the crow flies over rough country from the meteor crater at Canyon Diablo.  Carbon dating establishes that the pueblo at Red Creek flourished around 1270.  The exact provenance of the large Bloody Basin meteorite is unclear – the child was with her father who was probably engaged in illegal pot-hunting (looting) when the artifact was found.  Remarkably, the mineral composition of the Bloody Basin meteorite, which derives from the impact crater at Canyon Diablo has been correlated to another iron meteorite said to be found on an altar at a Hopewell site in Ohio 1700 miles away.

Early pioneer accounts describe no fewer than four Ancestral Pueblo ruins at the foot of the ramparts of detritus cast up by the Canyon Diablo meteor.  The question arises whether these sites were engaged in trade involving iron meteoritic debris around the huge crater.   With respect to these settlements, enigma is compounded by mystery and, in fact, it may be that the most important archaeological endeavors in the future will involve work unearthing documents already existing in archives.  In 1970, a writer at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque wrote a paper mentioning a 1950 excavation conducted by Ohio State archaeologists at the sites adjacent to Canyon Diablo.  The paper publishes a map showing the location of the Meteor Crater ruins.  Using the map, scholars have searched for the pueblo ruins.  One of them was at a location now occupied by a silica or sand mine – nothing remains.  Two other sites near the south rim of the crater have vanished.  A fourth ruin was located to the immediate east of the great circular crater.  But this site is unprepossessing, an adobe wall in the shelter of an eight foot outcropping with some steps carved into the spine of the heap of jagged boulders.  Some Tusayan era white ceramic was found there dating the location to about 1250.  These ruins are too small to be a pueblo or, even, permanently inhabited, house.  It’s likely that the wall and the outlook on the pile of rocks accessed by the steps was a hunting blind.  

The University of New Mexico article (by a man named Lincoln La Paz) published in 1970 references the Ohio State work at the four sites near the crater as well as field notes and photographs.  But no one has been able to locate these materials.  Therefore, it’s unknown what, if anything, the researchers from Ohio State found. 

Meteoritic studies are persuasive that the event that blasted out the crater near Canyon Diablo arose from a vast cloud of iron raking across the landscape from southwest to northeast fifty-thousand years ago.  The epicenter of the blast is at the crater where the bulk of the iron meteor was concentrated, but, it is now believed, that many fragments (or shrapnel) from this celestial howitzer shell came to earth along the so-called equatorial path leading to the giant hole scooped out of the plateau.  If the locations of iron meteorites found in ruins in northeastern Arizona are plotted, it becomes clear that the objects were not moved great distances to the pueblo ruins where they were venerated and, later, found.  To the contrary, the meteorites were discovered in situ, part of the cloud of falling iron debris that blasted out the crater near Canyon Diablo.  Accordingly, the meteorites discovered in ruins at Fossil Springs, Strawberry, Bloody Basin, and Camp Verde were not manuports – that is, objects carried across great distances to the villages where they were found.  Rather, they were parts of the original deposit of iron meteorites flaming out of the sky from southwest to northeast as part of the original meteor swarm.  Events of this sort are not unknown.  Indeed, in Holbrook, Arizona, about forty miles from Canyon Diablo on the railroad (and freeway) route to Flagstaff thousands of stony meteorites fell to earth in July 1912.  People heard a thunderous crack in the sky and, then, swarms of meteors crashed into the earth in the desert.  Thus, archaeologists now believe that the iron meteorites discovered in cultural contexts in north central Arizona weren’t acquired by trade and not transported long distances.  Rather, people found them, may have tugged or wrestled the rocks a few hundred yards to their dwellings and, then, kept them there as objects of worship or, perhaps, curiosity.

(Much of the information contained in this essay derives from a lecture given by Ken Zoll of the Verde Valley Archaeological Center called “Meteoritic Use Among the Ancient People of Central Arizona” – this lecture was presented under the auspices of the Archaeological Conservancy on October 26, 2023 and will be posted on Conservancy’s You-Tube channel.)