RARE ANGLO-SAXON GRAVE FOUND

A very exciting find from the UK was reported in The Times. 140 graves were discovered on an F-15 base in England, one dating back to 550 and contained a nobleman and his horse. The find has been compared to the Sutton Hoo find earlier this century. For the actual article and perhaps more information as it develops (click here). You'll have to subscribe, free of charge, by choosing a password and view the back issue for the 7th of October. Or you can try Angelcynn.

Ragnar Added 17 October

WOTAN'S KINDRED WORKSHOPS

I wanted to inform everyone about some interesting workshops that will be held in the replica Icelandic Hof (under construction) during the 1998 calendar year:

1. Native Celtic Shamanism Two Day Workshop With Tom Cowan

January 10th and 11th. Internationally known author and Celtic Shaman Tom Cowan whose book "Fire In The Mind" topped the best seller list, will present a two day hands on workshop focusing on the native shamanic practices of the Celts. This will be the first in an ongoing series of native shamanic workships will assist Asatru in reviving the native shamanistic practices of the Northlands. Having authentic native shamans in our folk communities in the coming century is one of the major goals of Wotan's Kindred. The workshop is $100.00 for the two days. Includes meals. All interested persons should contact me for more details.

2. Three Day Intensive Rune Workshop with Edred Thorsson

May 15th, 16th and 17th. Few will dispute that Edred Thorsson is the greatest Runemaster of this era. This workship is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn advanced runic wisdom from this renowned teacher. The workshop is $100.00 for the three days. Includes meals. All interested persons should contact me regarding more details.

Reinhold Clinton

For those who wish to contact Reinhold via email, he can be reached at: [email protected]

Added 31 October 1997

ANCIENT KINSMEN IN NEVADA

I recently returned home from another visit to Nevada. Though I had much less free time than during my visit there in August, I was able to do some exploring nonetheless.

I journeyed at times only in search of solitude in the wilds, wandering in the desert near Sand Springs (where I spent some time at the ruins of a Pony Express station) and at Sand Mountain. But mostly I was drawn to the sites associated with the prehistoric Caucasoid populations, an interest first aroused by the Asatru Folk Assembly's involvement in the Kennewick Man matter. As the popular press and scientific journals attest, we live in a time of paradigmatic changes in archaeological and anthropological theory on the earliest inhabitants of the Americas. In contradiction to the long-established belief that the ancestors of today's American Indians, Mongoloid populations, alone populated this land in prehistoric times, numerous Caucasoid remains dating back nine and a half millenia stand as evidence that kinsmen of our European ancestors were here.

I returned to Grimes Point, with its fields of ancient petroglyphs. Here in 1939 a burial in a small rock shelter was found. Not until 1995, when the matting found within was recognized as similar to that in Spirit Cave, did scientists know precisely what they had. Associated with the matting were the remains of a child who had died at about ten years of age, and of an older individual. The University of California at Riverside radiocarbon lab dated the matting at around 9,500 years old. Richard Jantz and Douglas Owsley will publish their findings when they've completed their study of the remains at the Nevada State Museum. The child's cranium was cracked by the guano miners who discovered the remains, but is otherwise intact and could provide further information on our ancient kinsmen.

I was able also to enter Hidden Cave. In order to prevent looting it is kept locked. The Bureau of Land Management provides tours free of charge on a regular basis (contact them or the Churchill County Museum). Entry is gained through a small opening and it is necessary to crouch for the first few feet, then it opens up into a roomy, if stale, interior, in which the dig has been left as it was at the conclusion of the latest excavation. The layers are dated and the locations of significant finds are tagged. The shaft of a 3,000 year old spear juts from the dirt. Thus far, no human remains have been found there, and it seems to have been used as a place where stores and tools were cached. It also doesn't have the human antiquity of other local sites, perhaps only 4,000 years of use are proven though who can say what the next dig will find?

I had spent some time driving the Battlehyundai across the dirt roads along the desert and hills of the Sweetwater Range near Grimes Point, knowing that Spirit Cave was in the vicinity.

In Hidden Cave I had spoken briefly with the man who had done the pollen work there (giving a good discussion on when Pinyon Pine came to the area) and who was also involved in the research of Spirit Cave. In order to foil would-be profiteers and the curious from damaging the site, the precise location of Spirit Cave is not publicized.

Discovered in 1940, Spirit Cave had yielded not only a number of objects of archaeological interest, but also the mummified remains of one individual, two skeletons and the cremated remains of two other individuals. "Burial #1" included the disarticulated bones of an adult female, dated to 9,300 or so years ago, and the much more recent remains of a young male (about 4,600 years old). "Burial #2" is the famous Spirit Cave Mummy. An undisturbed burial directly beneath Burial #1, the remains were partially mummified. Variously described as 35-55 years, or 40-44 years of age when he died, he was wrapped in a rabbit skin blanket and wore "moccasins" of hide. His hair, at least shoulder length, is medium brown with reddish highlights, though it was said to be darker prior to exposure to the sun. Spirit Cave Man lived more than 9,400 years ago. The cremated individuals were in a pair of woven bags, lying on top of each other. Both were around 9,000 years old.

I also made the drive up beyond the paved road to the northwest corner of Pyramid Lake on Paiute land, near the striking formations called the Needles, where in 1968 two skeletons and an isolated femur were found during a low water phase at Wizard's Beach. Burial A was dated to almost 6,000 years, while Burial B- Wizard's Beach Man- was the remains of a kinsman who walked the shores of the lake (part of the network of modern lakes which once comprised the ancient Lake Lahontan) 9,200 years ago.

I additionally enjoyed a visit to the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, which includes a Mammoth skeleton, Clovis points from Nevada's Great Basin (there are some who associate the Clovis point with the ancient Caucasoid population), and even recreations within the museum of an Old West town and a mine shaft. The bookstore in itself is a treasure-trove.

There I picked up a copy of the Spring 1997 issue of the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, which includes a number of interesting articles.

In Holocene Burials in Nevada: Overview, Amy Dansie, the Museum's anthropologist, writes, "The recent find of the Kennewick Man skeleton, about 9,000 years old, on the Columbia River is directly relevant to these early Nevada burials. Although Kennewick Man was found after the passage of NAGPRA, and hence falls under different provisions of the law, the question of affiliation of these ancient people, with compellingly Caucasoid traits, will be a topic of debate, and court action, for some time."

With Donald Tuohy, the Curator of Anthropology at the Museum, Dansie writes in the article New Information, "The Spirit Cave mummy, Wizard's Beach Man, and the Kennewick Man...all exhibit 'Caucasoid traits', particularly on features of the skull....[T]here may be a relationship between these ancient Americans and the ancient Ainu of Japan, a Caucasoid group predating the arrival of oriental traits of the modern Japanese. Modern American Indians have distinctly 'Mongoloid genes' expressed in their make-up."

R.L.Jantz, an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, and Douglas Owsley, an anthropolgist with the National Museum of Natural History, a part of the Smithsonian Institute, contributed the article Pathology, Taphonomy, and Cranial Morphometrics of the Spirit Cave Mummy, which includes a sketch of the skull. The article focuses primary on craniometric data, particularly comparative analysis with 34 skulls of peoples from around the world. "The final stage in the analysis", they write, " is to obtain an overall assessment....Two of the three closest populations (Norse and Zalavar) are European. Ainu, the second closest, shares some of the same morphometric features attributed to Europeans." It must be noted that they add, "...the major conclusion is that the skull falls outside the range of variation of any modern population represented by currently available samples", explaining elsewhere that "this is mainly due to its greater length...."

More to the point they note, "In the general analysis, the vault profile, facial forwardness and prognathism components dominate, resulting in Norse and Ainu as the two populations to which Spirit Cave [Man] is most similar....The Spirit Cave male does not show affinity to any Amerindian sample used here." (Such samples include Arikara, Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Eskimo, Pawnee, Peruvian, Sioux, and Numic, the latter being related to the Paiute inhabitants of the area at the time of the arrival of our immediate European ancestors a couple of centuries ago).

Given questions raised in studies published a few years ago concerning the issue of likeness to South Asian populations, and due to the easily refuted claims of various universalists that the term "Caucasoid" has nothing to do with similarities to Europeans, the following is an important statement as well. "The Spirit Cave Mummy bears a number of similarites to European populations, as Steele and Powell (1992) observed in their sample. The South Asian similarity observed by Steele and Powell is weaker in the Spirit Cave individual, though the similarity to Ainu, which shares morphometric features with Polynesians (Brace and Hunt, 1990), might be viewed in this way."

Interestingly, from a global perspective, they note, "It is fairly well established that the late Pleistocene populations of eastern Asia were not morphologically similar to the populations of the present who occupy the area. The Spirit Cave mummy's morphology shows little resemblance to any of the modern Mongoloids."

Asatruar believe that our faith arises from our very spirit as a people (I am not speaking for the universalists), that regardless of the form it has taken across the millenia and around the world, the faith that we today call Asatru expresses the same spirit as did the indigenous faiths of all the branches of our people.

As Steve McNallen put it in the Spring 1997 issue of The Runestone, concerning the Kennewick Man, the Far-travelling One, "The Mighty Powers didn't spring into existence with the beginning of the Viking Age, or with the first band of Germans. Wotan and Frigg are at least as old as our branch of the human race. They have evolved, continually revealing themselves with new names and new attributes as our ability to understand them grows. Kennewick Man would not have known the name of Tyr, but he would have recognized the Shining One in the sky, later revealed to us as Tiwaz, and later as Tyr.

"Beyond this, Kennewick Man is kin. Not literally an ancestor- none of us are his descendants- but clearly a cousin. He represents a branch of our people, a limb of the family tree that grew through America's back door long before our own forebears ever dreamed of sailing the Atlantic. That fact that we are biologically related is enough to provide a spiritual link. We share the same Folksoul, the same essence, the same corner of the collective unconscious."

As I stood in those places where 9,000 and more years ago such kinsmen stood, missing my wife with a love they would have known, in wonder with the beauty of a lake, the grandeur of the sky, or sensing the protectiveness of the cave as they must once have felt, I wondered how they came to be there. I imagined the lives they lived, the laughter of their children, the beauty of their women, the courage of the men. And I wondered, too, why none were left to greet the Europeans who came so many thousands of years later.

Hnikar The AFA's Kennewick Man page, filled with valuable info and links

Pyramid Lake, Nevada

�1997crawa@webtv

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