Fossil Legends of the First Americans

by Adrienne Mayor

Book Overview

The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691245614
• ISBN13: 9780691245614
• Release Date: April 2023
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 488 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.2" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Excavating Folklore

This work exceeds expectation created by Mayor's previous excavation, "The First Fossil Hunters", which digs out the solid remains of myths of the Classical ancient world. The research may not qualify as 'exhaustive'; but, it is certainly extensive, with shovels-full of previously unpublished Native American lore. The Appendix and Notes sections take about a fourth of the volume, but are as fascinating as the text itself. It is a companion milestone to her first project demonstrating that, contrary to the overconfident opinion of academic science, Human ancestors did not simply create their traditional histories out of their imaginations for entertainment purposes, as we tend to do nowadays; but, were usually quite genuine in observing, understanding, and explaining these undeniable pieces of the past in their own way, as is the tendancy of every culture. The reader will be further enlightened to find that the various folktales of the Native Americans contain common elements which preserve a knowlege of the remote past that exceeded the academic science of the time. You may even be inclined to think, after considering the 'former myths' of Troy, Ankor Wat, Irem, Ebla, and others, that the only true myth is "myth" itself: a pigeonhole term that was invented to safely and securely catagorize anything that does not immediately seem believable.

One of most interesting books aout fossils and people

This is really wonderful book! I recommend it to everybody interested in fossils although the book is more about people than about old bones. Tons of fascinating facts and legends. The book is also quite serious study of native american folklore as well.

America's First Fossil Collectors

I always wondered how Native Americans interpreted the huge fossil skeletons of extinct animals like giant sloths and mastodons, dinosaurs and Pterodactyls. Natural History Museums in the US never address this question, even though they often display dinosaur skeletons that were dug up on American Indian Reservations. Mayors book is based on an obvious fact: centuries before Europeans arrived, way before scientists started studying fossils, people in the Americas created stories to try to explain the weird remains of creatures that died out millions of years ago. I was amazed that she found the oldest recorded fossil legends from the Inkas and Aztecs; the book is well-researched and I liked her writing style, as she presents fossil legends told by the Iroquois, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Navaho,Apache, and many other tribes to account for the various kinds of fossils they found. My favorite were the exciting Lakota Sioux stories about the fossils of giant marine reptiles (Mosasaurs) and huge pterasaurs in the badlands and chalk hills of the west: they attributed the bones to wars between giant water serpents and thunderbirds. What really impressed me was the way Mayor shows how the Native American ideas about fossils were accurate about a lot of things that scientists would discover later. This is the idea behind geomythology, which has been in the news lately as scientists are beginning to see that the myths about fossils and volcanoes, earthquakes, etc, were based on real evidence and sometimes actually got some things right without modern scientific methods. The Native American tales of fossils talk about earth's first lifeforms in primeval times, changes of species, and extinctions. In a section at the end of the book, Mayor chronicles some entertaining misinformed accounts and deliberate hoaxes, such as claims that dinos and human beings existed at the same time.

A second first step

Following her innovative and informative study of fossils as roots for myths in the Mediterranean, Mayor brings her investigative talents to the Western Hemisphere. Here, she follows the pattern set in her earlier book, "Ancient Paleontologists" by examining the myths and legends of Native Americans. Did they, like their Eurasian counterparts in Greece, find ancient bones protruding from creek beds and bluffs? Did they also weave legends of fabulous creatures, human giants or spiritual entites from these unusual artefacts? In this account of tales and myths, Mayor's fluid style enlivens the legends, their tellers and the artefacts that inspired them. Dividing her quest into regional investigations, she surveys the East Coast of North America, skips South to the realm of the Incas, then returns to Great Plains and Pacific Slope. Mayor finds links from recorded stories to the bones of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammoths. She is hampered, of course, by the minimal direct information available. She must rely on those who recorded and interpreted the information often gathered from conquered peoples. And many of the earliest records were destroyed by the Christian conquerors. What remains of those records has been the subject of much dispute. In early New England, Puritan Cotton Mather rejected stories and fossils alike as the invalid heritage of the heathen "salvages". In modern times, renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson rejected the notion of Native American fossil finds and the legends surrounding them as lacking scientific value. Mayor, however, shows how narrow Simpson's view has proven. Taking the legends more seriously, she notes that even President Thomas Jefferson had enough faith in fossil finds to charge the Lewis and Clark expedition with searching for living specimens. It took one of the geniuses of the times, Georges Cuvier, to bestow validity on fossil bones by declaring them the remnants of actual ancient creatures. With so many of the artefacts representing large species, the underlying logic of Native American legends depicting giant people and creatures makes sense. The tales Mayor recounts are those of huge, terrifying animals or human-like creatures. Some raid the human settlements, only defeated by divine beings or the occasional heroic figure. Many of the stories have these beings eliminated by lightning or "fire from the sky". The powers of the giants were immense, but some felt the strength and size might be imparted to people. It remains unclear how many peoples used the bones for medicinal purposes - reminiscent of the "dragon bones" of apothecary shops in China. From Atlantic to Pacific, on the Plains or in the Andes, the bones emerged, launching fireside stories. The tales show how innovative individuals acquired special powers in the community through knowledge of fossils. These people could give the artefacts meaning or make them useful in various ways. There is a great similarity a