Lovelock Cave excavations and the duck decoys
Guano miners in 1911, then archaeologists L.L. Loud (1912) and Loud with Mark Harrington (1924), dug Lovelock Cave in Nevada, the site later tied to tales of red-haired 'giants'.
1924 CE · 39.96, -118.56 · status: official
The account
The dry cave preserved thousands of objects left by Great Basin peoples over several thousand years: baskets, nets, a woven sling and, in 1924, a cache of eleven tule duck decoys covered in feathers and paint. Radiocarbon dates obtained in 1984 put two decoys at roughly 300 and 130 BC. The early digs were rough and much stratigraphy was lost to the guano miners.
The sceptical view
The excavated human remains were of ordinary size. Archaeologists explain the 'red hair' as ancient dark hair that changes colour after death, and the 'giant' bones as mammoth and cave-bear fossils, which are common about 160 km to the north.
Connections in the atlas
- The San Pedro Mountains mummy
- Wind Cave and the Lakota emergence
- Sarah Winnemucca and the Saiduka story
- Lovelock Cave 'giants'