{"it":{"id":"ART016","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","name":"Nampa figurine","place":"Ica","date":"claimed Pliocene/Pleistocene; context doubtful","mat":"fired clay","dims":"38 mm","loc":"Idaho State Historical Society Museum","acc":"Idaho State Historical Society Museum","flag":"genuine ancient","src":[147,148],"lat":-14.065,"lon":-75.729,"tags":[],"sum":"In August 1889 a well-boring crew near Nampa, Idaho, brought up a small baked-clay figure of a woman from 320 feet down. It is about an inch and a half long. The pump, the story went, had passed through lava and 100 feet of quicksand before the figure appeared.\n\nThe account rests on a single volume: letters gathered by the geologist G. Frederick Wright for the Boston Society of Natural History in January 1890 (single source). The driller was M. A. Kurtz. Charles F. Adams wrote a memorandum of the find, and the chemist F. F. Jewett thought the figure of considerable age.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the depth. If it truly lay under 12 to 15 feet of lava and a thick bed of sand, it would be among the oldest human works in America. Wright and H. W. Haynes both called it important evidence for the great antiquity of man there.\n\nThe doubts are in the same volume. Albert Allen Wright of Oberlin made a duplicate in a few hours and found \"no satisfactory marks of the tooth of time\". Samuel Scudder warned how easily natural forms are taken for artificial ones, and no one who wrote saw the figure come out of the ground in place.\n\nHow much should one well bore and a few letters be allowed to change?","why":"A clay figure said to come from 320 feet down a well bore in Idaho rests on letters from 1890.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Check the drilling records.","rel":["W11A07"],"hook":"A clay figure was said to come from 320 feet down an Idaho well in 1889."},"S":{"147":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nampa_figurine"],"148":["doi.org","https://doi.org/10.3406/bmsap.1892.3995"]},"rec":{"id":"ART016","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"find_circumstances","r":"not in staged/legacy artifact record (free sources)"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA095","a":"Human figurine far older than humans in Americas","who":"popular AA literature/TV","main":"Recovery from well bore unverifiable; 19th c. skeptics (Nadaillac 1892)","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nampa_figurine ; https://doi.org/10.3406/bmsap.1892.3995","st":"unresolved","n":"status from artifacts row; no new lab rows this batch","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"Human figurine far older than humans in Americas","mainstream_reading":"Recovery from well bore unverifiable; 19th c. skeptics (Nadaillac 1892)","provenance_flag":"genuine ancient","current_location":"","find_circumstances":"","claimant":"","status":"","dimensions":"38 mm","material":"fired clay","date":"claimed Pliocene/Pleistocene; context doubtful","culture":"unknown (Idaho)","museum_accession":"Idaho State Historical Society Museum","b":"S","s":[]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0552","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nampa_figurine"},{"id":"S0080","t":"doi.org","u":"https://doi.org/10.3406/bmsap.1892.3995"},{"id":"VART016-3","t":"Wright et al., The Nampa Image: correspondence relating to its discovery (Internet Archive)","u":"https://archive.org/details/nampimagecorresp00wrigrich"}],"qs":["How much should one well bore and a few letters be allowed to change?","A doubter made a copy in a few hours. What does that prove, and what does it not?"],"sum":"In the summer of 1889, on the dry plain of southern Idaho, a crew boring for water near the young town of Nampa had pushed their pipe more than three hundred feet into the earth. The pump was bringing up heavy, coarse sand. Then, among the sand, something came up that was not sand at all. It was a tiny figure of baked clay, about an inch and a half long, small enough to close in a fist. It had a head, arms and a body. It was, unmistakably, a woman.\n\nIf it really came from where the pipe said it did, it was one of the oldest human-made things ever found in the Americas. That \"if\" has never been settled, and the whole case still rests on a bundle of letters from 1890.\n\nThe figure is known as the Nampa image, or the Nampa figurine. It measures about 38 millimetres. Faint marks around the chest and neck may show clothing or jewellery, and one leg is broken off. Its surface carries patches of red, which drew the attention of everyone who examined it. Today it is held by the Idaho State Historical Society Museum.\n\nThe story of its discovery was set down by Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, in a memorandum he wrote while examining the figure. It was found, he recorded, about the first of August 1889, while M. A. Kurtz was boring an artesian well. The image came up through the pipe \"in the usual way\" among coarse sand, from a depth of 320 feet. Then Adams set out the layers the drill had passed through, and that list is what made the find explosive. Sixty feet of soil. Twelve to fifteen feet of lava rock. A hundred feet of quicksand. Then thin bands of clay and more quicksand, then clay balls mixed with sand, and finally the coarse sand in which the image appeared.\n\nTo understand why that mattered, picture a sealed box. A layer of solid lava is a lid. Anything found beneath it, if it truly lay there undisturbed, must be older than the lava that poured over it. Here was a human figure apparently lying beneath a lid of volcanic rock and more than two hundred feet of sand and clay.\n\nAdams passed the matter to the geologist G. Frederick Wright, who gathered every letter he could, from the driller, the engineer, the railway men and the professors, and presented the whole file to the Boston Society of Natural History in January 1890. Kurtz wrote that a large clay ball had stuck to the bottom of the sand pump, found at about the same time as the image. He also admitted, with disarming honesty, that the image had been dropped and its head broken, and that they had fastened it back on as well as they could. The engineer, H. B. Grumbley, wrote that he had been present: \"Circumstances were such that there could have been no mistake.\"\n\nThen came the men of reputation, and the story becomes one about power as much as clay. Adams vouched for a railway manager, George Cumming, as a Harvard man whose word was as good as a scientist's. Cumming, who had seen the figure the day after the find but had not been at the well, vouched in turn for the character of Kurtz and his partner. Each witness leaned on the standing of the next. It was a chain of trust, built by respectable people, and it was strong exactly as far as no one asked for anything more than trust.\n\nSome of the science seemed to support them. The chemist F. F. Jewett studied iron oxide on sand grains caught between the body and the arms and concluded the image \"must be of considerable age\". At the Boston meeting Frederic Ward Putnam pointed to iron cementing quartz grains under the right arm. Professor H. W. Haynes called the figure \"a most important evidence of the great antiquity of man in America\", and Wright himself accepted it.\n\nBut the doubts were bound into the very same volume, and they were serious. Albert Allen Wright, a natural historian at Oberlin, was given the figure to examine and made a duplicate in a few hours. Nearly every surface feature, he wrote, was reproduced. The only real difference was a deeper red at one or two points on the original, and he showed that even deeper reds could be made with a few drops of hydrochloric acid and a second firing. He could find \"no satisfactory marks of the tooth of time\" on it. At the same meeting Samuel Scudder warned how easily natural forms are mistaken for artificial ones, showing a piece of ancient rock that looked remarkably like a fossil beetle.\n\nLater critics were harsher. The geologist John Wesley Powell called it a hoax and said it closely resembled dolls made by local Native American people. Daniel Garrison Brinton called it a hoax in 1892. The archaeologist William Henry Holmes offered a quieter explanation: even if it came up as reported, it might have slipped down from the surface through a crack or watercourse in the lava, then been carried by creeping quicksand and underground water to the spot the drill happened to tap. The consensus today is that the figure is not ancient.\n\nThat is the mainstream view, and it is a fair one. A single well bore, a broken-and-mended object and a set of letters cannot by themselves overturn the history of a continent.\n\nAnd yet the file leaves something unresolved. Nobody saw the figure lying in its layer; it came up through a pipe, and every account of where it came from depends on that. The red crust that Jewett could not account for by simple heating is still part of the record, and so is the engineer's flat statement that there could have been no mistake. Was it a modern doll that fell a very long way, a deliberate fake, or an object far older than our timeline allows? The evidence, such as it is, can be arranged to support all three.\n\nThe question the Nampa image asks is less about one clay woman than about us. How much should one well bore and a handful of letters be allowed to change, and how much should they be allowed to be dismissed?"},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/ART016-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Nampa figurine, Ica — Front, back, and side profiles of the Nampa Figurine","by":"George Frederick Wright","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nampa_Figurine_multiple_profiles.png","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/ART016.webp","by":"John W. Powell/Mark A. Kurtz","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nampa_figurine.jpg","cap":"Nampa figurine.jpg"}]},"hh":[{"v":"38 mm","h":"Recorded dimensions","s":[239]},{"v":"Fired clay","h":"Made of","s":[239]}],"hs":{"239":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nampa_figurine"]}}