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Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 220
Shark
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Shark
Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 220
'For more than 50 years, 74-year-old rancher Waldo Wilcox kept most outsiders off his land and the secret under wraps: a string of ancient Indian settlements so remarkably well-preserved that arrowheads, beads and other artifacts are still lying out in the open.

Archaeologists are calling it one of the most spectacular finds in the West.

Hidden deep inside Utah's nearly inaccessible Book Cliffs region, 130 miles from Salt Lake City, the prehistoric villages run for 12 miles and include hundreds of rock art panels, cliffside granaries, stone houses built halfway underground, rock shelters, and the mummified remains of long-ago inhabitants.

The site had been occupied for at least 3,000 years until it was abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, when the Fremont people mysteriously vanished.

'It was just like walking into a different world,' said Utah state archaeologist Kevin Jones, who was overcome on his first visit in 2002.

The secret is only now coming to light, after the federal and state governments paid Wilcox $2.5 million for the 4,200-acre ranch, which is surrounded by wilderness study lands. The state took ownership earlier this year but has not yet decided how to control public access.

'It's a national treasure. There may not be another place like it in the continental 48 states,' Duncan Metcalfe, a curator with the Utah Museum of Natural History, said Thursday from the site.

Metcalfe said a team of researchers has documented about 200 pristine sites occupied as long as 4,500 years ago, 'and we've only looked in a few places.'

Wilcox said some skeletons are exposed. 'They were little people, the ones I've seen dug up. They were wrapped like Egyptians, in strips of beaver skin and cedar board, preserved as perfect,' he said.

The Fremont, a collection of hunter-gatherers and farmers, preceded more modern American Indian tribes on the Colorado Plateau.

Over the years, Wilcox -- whose parents bought the ranch in 1951 and installed a gate to the canyon -- occasionally welcomed archaeologists to inspect part of the canyon, 'but we'd watch 'em.'

Wilcox said he gave up the land on a promise of protection from the Trust for Public Land, which transferred the ranch to public ownership.

The promise barely assured Wilcox, but he said he knew one thing: 'I'm getting old and couldn't take care of it.'

villages


dubito ut intelligam
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Joined: Nov 2005
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Newbie
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The link in the previous post is broken. I found this article with photos and maps. What a wonderful find!!

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5334476


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