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Native American history

• Originally published 06/11/2013

  Oldest cave art discovered in U.S. shows prehistoric southern living

  The oldest and most widespread collection of prehistoric cave and rock art in the United States has been found in and around Tennessee, according to a new paper in the journal Antiquity that documents the art. It provides intriguing clues about what life was like for Native American societies more than 6,000 years ago. That is the age of the newly discovered cave art, one of which is seen here, showing what appears to be a human hunting. Other images are of a more direct spiritual/mythological nature.Lead author Jan Simek, president emeritus and a distinguished professor of science at the University of Tennessee’s Department of Anthropology, told Discovery News, “The discoveries tell us that prehistoric peoples in the Cumberland Plateau used this rather distinctive upland environment for a variety of purposes and that religion was part of that broader sense of place.” Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood/Antiquity Publications Ltd.A very large polychrome pictograph depicts humans, serpents and circles. The image, from the same overall site, but extending into Alabama, likely illustrated a myth spread across generations via word of mouth, with such permanent imagery further preserving its meaning, lost to history....

• Originally published 06/04/2013

  The battle for Jim Thorpe’s body

  On May 28, 1888, Jim Thorpe was born in a one-room cabin in Prague, Oklahoma. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe—an Olympic champion and football and baseball star—was perhaps the greatest all-around athlete America has ever produced. Nearly a year following his death in 1953, his widow transported his body to a small Pennsylvania hamlet that agreed to rename itself in his honor. Now amid a family feud, Thorpe’s two surviving sons are seeking to re-inter his remains on tribal lands in his native Oklahoma, and a federal judge has ruled in their favor....

• Originally published 05/07/2013

  George P. Horse Capture, curator at Indian museum, dies at 75

  When Native American activists from around the United States took over Alcatraz in 1969, George P. Horse Capture was a steel inspector for the California Department of Water Resources — a young man on his way to a solid career and ever further away from any sense of pride in his Montana reservation roots.“I was very happy climbing that white mountain of success,” he once said. “But then I looked down over the top, and there was nothing there.”The solution was to switch mountains. Joining the protesters for short periods over their 19-month stay, Mr. Horse Capture went on to become a passionate advocate for Native American culture and a museum curator who helped give his people an unprecedented voice in how their heritage would be presented and their artifacts displayed.“He was profoundly important in contemporary American Indian history,” said Herman Viola, a longtime friend and curator emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington....