What They Found In The Cave

In the spring of 1940, two archaeologists crawled into a small, dry cave in the middle of the Nevada desert and found something they were not prepared for.

Georgia and Sidney Wheeler were husband and wife, and they had been conducting systematic surveys of Nevada’s caves and rock shelters under the auspices of the Nevada State Parks Commission.

The work was methodical and often unremarkable — the Great Basin desert was peppered with caves that had served various purposes over thousands of years, and many yielded little more than charcoal, bone fragments, and the accumulated debris of ancient campfires.

Spirit Cave was different.

The cave was small — not much more than a rocky alcove, really, a narrow sheltered space formed by the natural geology of the Churchill County landscape in northwestern Nevada.

It sat on a hillside not far from the shores of what had once been a much larger body of water, in country that now appears dry and remote but that once, in a different climate, had been considerably more productive.

The Wheelers had documented other caves in the region, and Spirit Cave would have seemed, at first, like another routine stop on their survey.

But what they found inside was not routine.

Wrapped in a burial shroud constructed from animal skins and tule mats — the woven plant material made from bulrushes that grow in wetland environments — was a human body.

It was not skeletal.

It was mummified, preserved by the extreme dryness of the Great Basin desert in a state that left tissue intact.

The body lay on its side in a flexed position, knees drawn up, the posture of careful interment rather than accident or abandonment.

Moccasins covered the feet.

The Wheelers documented what they found with the care typical of mid-twentieth-century archaeology.

The burial was excavated, catalogued, and eventually transferred to the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, where it would remain for the next five decades.

Before leaving, they made an estimate of the burial’s age.

They were off by more than eight thousand years.