Humboldt Cave

During a dig in a small dry cave above the Humboldt Sink, someone left a wool sweater lying on the ground. Pack rats found it. They tore it apart and hauled the scraps into a low hollow the excavators had named the South Alcove. When that alcove was dug out later, bits of the sweater turned up all the way down to the solid cave floor. That accident explained something the archaeologists had been struggling with. Rats had been living in the cave for a very long time, stuffing every available gap with whatever they gathered, including ancient artifacts. Anything buried deep was not necessarily old. Robert Heizer of the University of California, Berkeley ran the excavation in 1936. Crews sliced the cave into twelve narrow strips and dug down six inches at a time, removing roughly fourteen hundred cubic feet of deposit. His report on the work did not appear in print until 1956.