The Fairfield Gorget: The little white disk with a big, big history
04-22-08 - North America — , Missouri
One steamy afternoon 50 years ago on a bluff top in Benton County, Ray Wood was digging in a pile of dirt and rocks. The autumn sun beat down as he cleared away earth from the sides of stones. It was a hot day for digging.
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Wood lifted a rock and turned it over. In a few moments, he would uncover an ancient object, no bigger than a coaster, that would perplex archaeologists and would become, arguably, the most unique thing ever dug up in Missouri. Wood, now a professor emeritus at MU, wasn’t your average guy with a shovel, and this mound was far more than just a pile of stones. A rookie archaeologist, Wood was excavating a rock-and-earth burial cairn left behind by an ancient group that flourished long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue or pioneers swept across the Midwest.
There it was. Lying upside down in the dirt where the rock once rested, a white curved object caught Wood’s attention.
“It was upside down in there, so I took my camel’s hair brush — it wasn’t really camel’s hair, but it’s called that — and I very carefully lifted and exposed half of it, and it was broken in two,” Wood said.
It was Wood’s field assistant and friend, Rolland Pangborn, who noticed something unusual on the first piece.
“I handed it to him, and he turned it over and says, ‘Hey! There’s writing on it,’” Wood recalled. “Then, we brushed it off and saw it wasn’t really writing.”
They cautiously lifted the second half from the ground, pieced the two sides together and realized that the etchings weren’t text but an elaborate engraving of a jaguar.
What Wood and Pangborn discovered was a gorget, a flat or slightly curved ornament generally made from metal, polished stone or shell. Gorgets typically have holes at the top, leading archaeologists to believe they were possibly worn as pendants around the neck. Archaeologists have unearthed many gorgets produced by American Indians from the Mississippian time period, A.D. 900 to 1500.
Missouri’s geography is peppered with Mississippian-era sites, so Wood’s discovery wouldn’t have been too surprising or strange if the mound he was excavating wasn’t from “a distinctly Late Woodland context.” The Late Woodland period, A.D. 450 to 900, shared much in common with the Mississippian era — after all, people from the Mississippian period descended from Woodland peoples — but, Wood said, no one had ever found a gorget from the Late Woodland period.
“That evening, we just stared at this thing because neither of us had ever seen anything like it before,” Wood said.
Wood soon would find that no one else had seen anything like it, either. "
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