Simek and his colleagues have been steadily documenting these sites over the past several decades-and, in a new study published today in the journal Antiquity, they report that the 19th boasts even more images than are visible to the naked eye. The 19th Unnamed Cave is the most extensive of all known cave art sites in the Southeastern United States. “If the wet clay dried out all the way, it would almost certainly simply blow away, even in the very light air currents that occur underground,” says Jan Simek, an archaeologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Fog sometimes forms in the cave’s cool, damp air this wet environment helped the artwork survive for more than 1,000 years. The artwork continues well into the cave’s dark zone, where visitors can only see a hand in front of their face with the assistance of artificial light. Abstract shapes and swirling lines appear alongside rattlesnakes, bears, insects, birds and humanlike figures created by Native American artists under the flickering light of river-cane torches sometime between 660 and 949 C.E. Hundreds of images are etched into mud across roughly 4,300 square feet of the cave’s ceiling. When you’re a long way from the entrance but can still see some daylight, that’s where the artwork begins. Big pools of water are scattered everywhere. You can’t quite stand up, but you don’t need to crawl, says photographer Stephen Alvarez, founder of the Ancient Art Archive and co-author of a new paper on the cave. An 80-foot-wide, east-facing mouth leads to a long tunnel where the ceiling and floor draw closer and closer together. What’s inside is too precious to risk destruction. The exact location of the 19th Unnamed Cave, somewhere on private land in northern Alabama, is a closely guarded secret.
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