In the summer of 1889 a crew boring an artesian well at Nampa, in the Snake River plain of what was then Idaho Territory, brought up a small human figure of baked clay, about an inch and a half long. If it really came from where the well was said to have reached, beneath a sheet of lava and some three hundred feet of sand and clay, it would have pushed the human story in the Americas back by an enormous span. For more than a century it has been cited as proof of exactly that, and dismissed as a joke, a child’s toy or an object that fell where it did not belong.
The find
The figure was picked up by Mark A. Kurtz, a Nampa businessman supervising the well. In a memorandum taken down shortly afterward by Charles Francis Adams Jr., president of the Union Pacific Railroad, the boring was said to have passed through about sixty feet of soil, a dozen or so feet of lava rock, and then alternating beds of quicksand and clay before reaching coarse sand at around 320 feet, from which the image came up with the pump’s discharge around the first of August.
Kurtz described the moment in letters to the geologist and theologian George Frederick Wright of Oberlin College. He had been running the sand pump’s output through his hand for days, he wrote, when he picked out what he took to be a twig, rinsed it in a barrel of water and saw it was a figure. A fellow townsman, Alexander Duffes, was standing by, and only the driller and his helper were otherwise present. Kurtz insisted the well was lined with six-inch iron pipe from the top, that the drill had not been used below the lava, and that anything dropped down the hole from above would have floated on the water and been ground up by the pump. Clay balls, crusted with iron oxide like the figure, had come up from the same level.
The scientists divide
Wright presented the correspondence to the Boston Society of Natural History in January 1890 and treated the figurine as genuine evidence of very ancient human presence in the region. The Harvard archaeologist Frederic Ward Putnam pointed to patches of red iron oxide on its surface as a sign of long burial.
John Wesley Powell, director of the U.S. Geological Survey and of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, saw it differently. Writing in Popular Science Monthly in 1893, he recalled being shown the figure in a Boise hotel in the fall of 1889 and taking it for a prank. He had seen local Native children play with clay figures just like it and assumed this one had recently belonged to such a child; he said the hotel crowd treated the whole thing as a joke on newcomers. He found it absurd that something more delicate than a clay pipestem could survive burial under hundreds of feet of debris and lava, and then a pump drill and a sand pump, intact.
The Smithsonian’s William Henry Holmes took a more measured line in his 1919 Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities. Noting that the beds were of late Tertiary or early Quaternary age according to the geologist Samuel F. Emmons, he wrote that the object may have come up as reported but need not have been sealed beneath the lava from the start; it might have worked its way down through a crevice or watercourse and been carried along in creeping quicksand to where the pump found it. He set out four possibilities: a rare piece by a recent local tribe, a modern piece by some distant Native people, a plant by someone intending to deceive, or a genuinely ancient work. The last, he said, could not be accepted without further confirmation.
Where it stands
Nothing else made by human hands in the Americas is remotely as old as the deepest reading would make the figurine. The Bad Archaeology website, run by the archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews and a colleague, argues that the figure need not have lain where the pump found it: it could have been driven down by the boring, or have sunk through the loose, waterlogged deposits along with the clay balls. The site also notes that the slender Nampa figure looks nothing like the full-bodied female figurines of Ice Age Europe to which it has been compared. The figurine, now in the collections of the Idaho State Historical Society, is a real object, and Kurtz’s account was never shown to be a lie. What the record does not support is the claim that it lay buried for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Whether it was a planted toy, a joke that got out of hand or an accident of geology, its great age has never been demonstrated.