Tales of unusual discoveries made in the limestone caverns of Tennessee and Kentucky began to circulate in the first decade of the nineteenth century. According to Samuel Brown, a doctor based in Lexington, the underground realms presented “scenes so uncommon and so romantic, that the most stupid beholder cannot contemplate them without expressions of the greatest astonishment.” Rather than scholars, however, those delving in the depths were typically miners seeking saltpeter for gunpowder production and other minerals, in the process exposing evidence of earlier visitors to the caves, animal and human. Exploration and exploitation were thus inextricably linked. Brown’s dispatch from the West was accompanied by the bones of fossil mammals and, as if by afterthought, “also an earthen cup, probably Indian, (broken in the carriage).” The significance of fragmentary ground sloths and “the bones of the head of the peccary of South America” found in the caves was debated, but the slight traces of human presence in those subterranean realms also provoked comment. John Clifford, another resident of Lexington, interpreted such ephemeral signs at one location as suggesting that the cave to had . . . been inhabited either by a horde of troglodytes or . . . the scene of some religious mysteries . . . Dead bodies have been found which when first seen were apparently as perfect as at the period when deposited there. . . . “It would be a great desideratum,” he concluded, “to see one of these bodies.” And yet the value to scholarship of the discoveries made in western caves was debatable. The utility of relics as a means to understand the history of the American continent was not universally acknowledged. The scholarly apparatus for pursuing such investigations was meager as well. In particular, the ephemeral character of the community of inquiry interested in the material past—dispersed, divided by class and association, subject to disruption through constant mobility, poor communication, and personal rivalries—had a profound impact on how such relics might be used.
Uma breve introdução a discussão sobre as pinturas rupestres brasileiras
