<< Text Pages >> Miwok Salt Basins - Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry in United States in The West

Submitted by bat400 on Tuesday, 05 January 2010  Page Views: 14339

Multi-periodSite Name: Miwok Salt Basins
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 66.695 km away from the location you searched for.
Region: The West Type: Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry

Latitude: 38.497000N  Longitude: 120.142W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 1 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 2

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Ancient Industry in Calaveras County, California.
A collection of over 350 circular basins ground into a granite terrace. Each is over a yard in diameter and several feet deep. These basins are near several salt water spring sources.

Geologists James Moore and Micheal Diggles of the United States Geologic Survey speculate that the hunter gatherer Miwok culture created the basins to collect salt. If the salinity of the current salt springs was similar in the past, Moore estimates that the basins could have produced 3 tons of salt a year.

Note: The location given is based on my deductions stemming Forest Service maps, the site description, and photographs published in a variety of news stories. The google earth view I have access to is inadequate to clearly see features as small as the described basins themselves.

Note: Geologists publish theory of a salt factory hunter-gatherers created for trade.
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"Miwok Salt Basins" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Re: Stone basins may be Miwok salt 'factory' by cerrig on Saturday, 16 January 2010
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Alfred Watkins of "ley line" fame had a theory,later dropped,that the alignments he detected were pathways of ancient man,some of which were used for trade routes,principally salt. he came to this conclusion because of the reoccurance of the word "salt" and its ancient equivalents in the places and roads on his pathways. it would be interesting to know if anything similar occurs in America,especially on old paths connected to this site.
[ Reply to This ]
    Tracks between salt sources by bat400 on Saturday, 16 January 2010
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    I'm pretty unfamiliar with this site and trails in the Sierra's, but there are examples of ancient sites and trails associated with salt sources (licks or springs) in the eastern half of what's now the United States.
    Specifically, a trade route between Angel Mounds the "Great Salt Spring" (that area also being a source of fluorite.) The Kincaid Mounds are also thought to have had a trading route to this same salt spring.
    [ Reply to This ]

Re: Miwok Salt Basins by Anonymous on Monday, 11 January 2010
Great work! Looks better in Bing Maps.

http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&where1=38.497%2C%20-120.142&encType=1
[ Reply to This ]

Stone basins may be Miwok salt 'factory' by bat400 on Tuesday, 05 January 2010
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Submitted by coldrum ---

Somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, a granite terrace the size of a football field holds hundreds of mysterious stone basins representing what geologists believe is one of the earliest known "factories" created and used by ancient Miwok Indians to make tons of salt to trade with tribes up and down California.

James G. Moore, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, learned of the strangely pitted terrace from detailed maps made more than a century ago and hiked the region in May to study what he determined were clearly hand-hewn objects.

He examined 369 of the circular artifacts only a few yards from two streams of saltwater fed by a nearby spring and a lake that was equally salty.

Moore and his colleague at the USGS, Michael F. Diggles, believe the circular basins were handmade by the Miwok people in an impressive display of early technology. They have published a detailed account of their findings in an official Geological Survey report, but because the area is now an "archaeologically sensitive" site and its location protected by law, Moore is permitted only to say that the basins are in a canyon somewhere within the Stanislaus National Forest.

Records show that early American Indians, including the Miwok people, lived for thousands of years as hunter-gatherers in that area of the Sierra, Moore said, and it is filled with evidence of old settlements, with abundant middens, arrowheads and small stone tools. But learning how long ago the basins were carved awaits high-tech dating.
The basins average more than a yard in diameter and are more than 2 feet deep.
To create them, Moor and Diggles said, Miwok tribe members built fires on the granite surface that heated the stone until it fractured. They then crumbled and pounded the fractures with stone tools and removed the debris, inch by inch, until the basins were formed.

Diggles estimated it took Miwok workers nearly a year to complete a single one. He calculated that each fire used to dig a single layer of rock deepened the granite by no more than a centimeter. The process, he said, must have been repeated 100 times to make a single basin.

Similar granite basins were discovered in 1891 by Henry W. Turner, a geologist exploring California's mountains in what is now Sequoia National Park, Moore said in the Geological Survey report. Moore has examined those, too.

Salt springs are extremely rare in the Sierra Nevada, but Moore said the salt in the nearby streams probably comes from a layer of ancient marine sediment formed many millions of years ago when the area was covered by an ocean.

He said he believes the Miwok people carried water from the streams in watertight woven baskets, poured it into the basins and let it evaporate in the summer heat until the dry salt could be scooped out. The salt content of the water and the rate of water flow indicate that the two streams probably yielded about 3 tons of salt each year, Moore said.

The people of the area, he said, "had a large and valuable surplus to trade with other tribes - an early example of commerce by hunter-gatherer people."


"Salt was an important commodity for Native Americans," UC Berkeley's Lightfoot said. "It is certainly possible that salt harvested from these basins could have been traded to other native groups in California and the Great Basin (east of the Sierra).

"Further work will be needed to develop a solid chronology for the basins."



Read more at http://www.sfgate.com.
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