The ceiling of an Alabama cave has been found to be carved with giant figures more than a thousand years ago.
The figures, three of which were humanoid in shape, are among the biggest ever uncovered in the Northern Americas. Some of the studies presented in the journal are more than 6 feet long.
The carvings carved in the mud on the ceiling of the cave could provide clues into the traditions of Native American peoples in the southeastern US.
We know that Native Americans have certain ideas in their religious concepts that they share. Archeologist Jan Simek said they believe in a tiered universe.
He said that they believed that there were spirit worlds all around them.
The paper's authors, Jan Simek and Alan Cressler, have been working on the project for decades.
The cave ceiling is so close to the floor that it was impossible to take good pictures of the carvings.
The images were so faint that he tried to document them as a photographer.
I feel like there are stories that I can give to you.
hi-tech 3D photogrammetry would be the key to capturing the glyphs. The minute variation in light between two images can be read by it.
It took more than 16,000 pictures to map out the entire cave ceiling.
It took a long time for my knees to recover. It is just kneeling and stooping for hours and hours on end.
They first glimpsed the enormous humanoid glyphs when they were able to digitally lower the cave floor.
Simek said that the glyph depicts figures that could either represent humans in costumes and masks or humanoid spirits.
Simek said that these characters were ingrained in the culture of the people living near the cave so that they could understand who they were from only a part of them.
The style of the drawings in the Alabama cave is similar to those seen in the midwest and western US. They are large with square shoulders and face the viewer directly. According to the study, these figures represent inhabitants of the supernatural world.
The Barrier Canyon in Utah has an example of a similar animal.
The study authors were unable to link the Alabama figures to recognizable characters recorded in southeast Native American stories.
They clearly represent a character or a set of characters that we have never seen before.
Philip Carr, a professor of Native American Studies and Anthropology at the University of South Alabama who was not involved in the study, was complimentary of the work.
He told Insider that the work of archaeological teams such as this one provides rare glimpse into past ideologies that leave us wanting to know more.
Are these figures related to the underworld, and what was the relationship of the people who drew them to it?
We don't know much about the people who lived around that cave 1,000 and 1,500 years ago.
Simek said that they don't have the kind of documentation about artwork that we have for later time periods.
These findings are relevant to Native American communities, which see these traditions as part of their heritage.
The descendants of the native people of the southeast that were in the region when Europeans arrived are the Cherokees, the Creeks, Muscogee people, and the Choctaws.
These people and their culture are alive and well. Europeans moved them out of the Southeast to reservations in Oklahoma. He said that they still maintain their connection.
Simek said that archeology is not always about the dead.
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