The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 369: The Real Indiana Jones

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Deni Seymour, Janis Putelis, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: On the trail of the Coronado Expedition; sharpening flint knives with your teeth; the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola; brutality and removing body parts; pouring liquid gold down a guy's throat; finding sites and reconstructing the trail; rock art depicting figures with pointy shoes; genetic info and latrines; the power of metal detectors; more on why you shouldn't remove artifacts from the ground; finding the canon, the oldest gun discovered in the continental US; relative dating of rock art; embarking on adventure; how the site keeps on giving; bronze hats; how to support Deni's upcoming documentary film on the Coronado expedition; Steve Rinella, the antiquities looter; where to read Deni's publications, check out her webpage, and watch her fascinating educational videos; how to get a site named after you; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Alright everybody, we have such an interesting guest today that we're going to skip all the normal juvenile bullshit we talk about up top. Thank goodness. Yanni's like, I'm out. I'm leaving. No, this is my kind of podcast, actually. We're going to skip all the juvenilia. Set this up just for you, Yanni.

All the things about a guy that wrote in. All the stuff about falling into a pit toilet. What have you. Tough meat. I don't know. That made waves, though. That pit toilet story. Trying to get punt gun shells manufactured.

Like, none of that. None of that. The special guest I'm talking about is Denny J. Seymour, PhD. Who? Denny, I'm going to tell you how I know i know about you i'm gonna tee it up in two ways all right uh now and then something will happen in the news and five six ten people will all send me the same article okay the article about the discovery of a battle site of a fight a skirmish from the mid 1500s in southern Arizona between the members of the Coronado Expedition and native tribes in the area, a lot of my friends thought that would tickle my fancy. And I read the article and I sent it to Corinne. And I said, we need to find this person.

I thought you'd say no for some reason. You know why I thought you'd say no? Because you're being so secret-y in the article. That's how we archaeologists are, to protect the sites. No. It was a little tough to court you, but then, you know, then we talked and it was good. She's being too secret-y. Well, I'm still in the middle of research and normally I don't divulge until I'm done. So normally it would be

five years into the project, at least before I would, uh, tell anyone other than the crew about what we found. We'd all be dead by then. Well, in this case we did because we needed to raise money for the documentary film, uh, and also research. So, uh, so we decided to go ahead and announce it sooner. And so, with that comes a lot of, you know, awareness and people say, oh, you need to make sure people are not following you to the site. Well, so far, nobody's done that. You've still kept it under wraps. Oh, yeah. People don't know where it is yet, except for the crew, and they're sworn to secrecy. I mean.

Our guys will find out. Our audience will find out. It's a challenge. You won't be done recording this and they'll be there digging around well if you come you have to help dig so so here's the way i want to set up so someone might be sitting there and we've teased this episode uh on previous podcast episodes but i'm going to set up and then you're gonna you can you can take off and run i'm gonna set up to the best of my ability. Um,

why I'm interested in the Coronado expedition and it has to do with, and I want, and I want you to link this all together. I learned about the Coronado expedition when I was reading about what I view to be kind of like perhaps the craziest story in early American history, which is the saga of Cabeza de Vaca. Yep. Cabeza de Vaca. What year was that?

The Navarez expedition? Yeah. 1530s, early 1530s. Yeah. This guy goes up a lot of them, hundreds of them, Spaniards, go and land in Florida. And they eventually get in a shipwreck, get killed off, bad things happen to them, to the point where three of these guys walk, four of them? Yeah, four. course of years, spending time in captivity with tribes, spending time with tribes thinking that they're sort of like healers and semi-deities. They're eating milkshakes made out of people's ashes.

And they walk all the way to Mexico. They become slaves. But at one point, Cabeza de Vaca becomes the first European to lay eyes on a buffalo. Probably around Austin or Dallas, Texas. That's why,

that was my intersection with him because I was researching that subject. That led me to some passages from the coronado expedition where they make it up into kansas um and they're describing not only the hunters they encounter and and out of the coronado expedition comes the only reference to something that I've ever read in my entire life. They describe people, they describe buffalo hunters who are skinning buffalo and sharpening their flint knives on their teeth.

I've never read that anywhere. downwind end of a lake, the bank being formed by just bones of stuff that would drown or whatever in the lake and wind up being there. Or like various members of that expedition. And that's really as much as I knew about the whole thing. I didn't know where they were, but I remember being shocked by the fact that Coronado

was on the American great plains 240 years prior to Lewis and Clark, which would be the difference between us standing here now and the French and Indian war. That really puts it in perspective, doesn't it? And what in the hell, right? Were they doing up there? Exactly. So your job now is to, like, what were they doing up there?

And if you don't mind, like, a little bit make the connection between how the Conquistador rumor mill spins. Like, how Cabeza de Vaca could starve his way across america and somehow this turns into like oh yeah but cities of gold if i had just gone another day's journey to the blank you know well you know the connection uh between cabezas de vaca and and the three people with him and the Coronado expedition is that when they got back, they had this incredible story to tell. And they had heard of people to the north who had cotton and multi-story buildings

and metal bells and so on. And there were already rumors in European society and also in the Mexico area and so on, about seven cities and the origin place of the Aztecs. And then in European society, there were stories about places of riches and so on. Cabeza de Vaca never actually said there was gold or didn't expect that there would be. But there were rumors in, you know, how rumors developed because basically they had found gold, lots of it in the Inca area and in the Aztec area in central Mexico and in

Peru. And so they kind of expected that there would be riches elsewhere on the continent. So it really wasn't that unexpected that that kind of imagination would start going wild and that rumors would start. Now, Esteban, the black Moor slave at the time, was with Cabeza de Vaca. And he was the one that was selected. Apparently, he was the one that was selected. Apparently, he was freed before going. He was selected to lead Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539 north to do a reconnaissance. And Coronado himself, Vesquez de Coronado, was responsible for outfitting him. And the idea is he was supposed to go ahead and see what was up there and see if the rumors about gold and the seven cities of Sibla and so on were true.

Can you tell me what that seven cities of Sibla, you encounter that, what does that mean? Well, there were rumors of seven cities. And of course, seven is important in the Christian religion for a variety of reasons. And the Aztecs and others had stories from ancient times about having originated from the north. Okay. And so everybody had a little piece of the rumor, the story, the imaginative myth to put together. And so basically it was connected to Cibola or Zuni. They first went to Hawiku, which is among the Zuni Pueblos. And that's where they thought it was.

So that was the focus. So they got there and realized there was no gold. And then they kept pursuing it elsewhere. They were looking for gold. They were looking for other things as well. And when they say looking for, I mean, they were fixing to go take it. Yes, they were. Just like in Central Mexico and in South America.

But see, they weren't just looking for gold either. So they were looking for a high enough native population, one, so that they could convert them. That's what the priests wanted to do. And that was kind of one of the things that they were charged with. But they wanted a high enough native population that they could exploit them for tribute. That's how they were going to get

rich and they were going to set up encomiendas. And that's one of the reasons that the expedition was considered a failure because there weren't enough, high enough densities of natives for all of the high ranking Spaniards who went along to have an encomienda, have a large enough area with high enough native population that could support them with tribute payments and so on. Another reason, apparently, is they thought that this was connected, that our part of the world was connected to Asia, and so they hoped to find a route through so they could establish markets there. One of the interesting things is people have been focusing for ages on the gold aspect. So historians more recently have been saying, well, it's not really the gold they were after. But in fact, our main site, the first site we found is at a major gold source. So the people who got left behind,

what the first site we found is not only a battle site, but it was a, it's called the Via of San Geronimo. And it was the third rendition of that, where they left some of the Spaniards behind as a supply base, but also a via in Spanish's town. And so basically it was the formation of a town. And interestingly, it's at a gold source. Oh, it is. It's at one of the best gold sources in the area. Can you remember to talk a little bit about how sadistic the people that ran that? Oh, yeah.

I'll remember. If I don't remember, remind me. But here's one more thing about the gold. It turns out that we have the satellite of other Coronado artifacts around. They're not really sites, they're isolated things so far, but two of them are at other locations where gold was. So the people that got left behind may have actually got more gold out of this area than the people who went forward. And they were resentful that they got left behind because they wanted to go and find all these riches

and have all this success and be part of the exploration, the adventure, and so on. But they were working gold deposits. There was also a lot of stuff in their correspondence. They called buffalo cattle, or bison, they called them cattle. And they would throw out that there could be – they would throw out that that could be like an industry of exploitation. In fact, Juan Jaramillo in his account mentioned that and talked about how you could get back to New Spain back and forth via a shorter route to exploit that as a resource. And that is what he thought was the most valuable resource in the area,

other than all of these other things that I just mentioned. Yeah, they just encountered staggering numbers of them. Yes. So how many... Would it make sense, before we get too far into the actual Coronado expedition, just to back up, just to talk about the the Veracruz and like Spanish settlements down in Mexico and just really establish that before we move north? Uh, yeah. You mentioned that they had been striking it rich here and there. Oh, sure. So of course, when Cortez came into the Mexico area, he actually established a down site or via at Veracruz and used that as a base.

And what he did. And sorry, what year was that? That was 15. I can't remember exactly. 15, 19, 15, 20, something like that. So he established a town site and established a town council and everything. And the reason he did that was so that he could separate himself from his sponsor in Cuba. And that way they voted him as the leader and so on.

And he, as a result, was able to correspond directly with the king. And so that's how he was able. I mean, it was a political move, which was really kind of interesting. Self-promotion. Exactly. And so it worked out really well for him and it didn't work out well for the natives that were in the area. But bottom line is that was like incredibly rich. And, you know, you mentioned before about people being, where'd this rumor come from and so on well think about it the first

encounters in the central mexico area it was so rich people made i mean they were like billionaires all of a sudden overnight you know i mean within a few months just from ransacking the gold out of i mean it was just incredible and and also in uh peru the incan empire and they were like taking finished gold though they weren't taking i mean i'm sure they probably got into mining but they were like seizing like taking gold that had already been used to form form into totems and and monetary units and well that is true so first of all gold wasn't the only thing they got there was a lot of silver and other items of value. But with respect to the gold, yeah, they had idols. They had religious, I shouldn't use the word idols because that's a Catholic way of looking at, you know, native sacred objects and so on. but basically they took, there were rooms that were plastered with gold and they pulled that off. They took images that we would call saints today in the Catholic religion.

They took them out of the rooms and pyramids and so on and melted those down. But they also had people mining and, you know, even Columbus did that. And we see images of, you know, the Columbus did that. Uh, and we see images of, um, you know, uh, the, the miners working and so on. And, uh, there's actually one image that was created that shows, uh, an uprising, uh, by natives pouring liquid gold down a Spaniard's throat. Holy shit. I mean, because, and, and that's and that's brutal but the fact is is they were chopping off people's hands and noses down there uh for not either not producing enough gold or for rising up or for anything that they thought of as minor oh the amount of body like when you get into the

coronado expedition the amount of body parts getting removed from people as punishments is just staggering. It is. It really is. And normally, I thought that most of that happened down south, meaning south of the border, the current border. When Cortez and Columbus and so on were doing their thing and also in South America. But it's amazing how much of it occurred up here. And the thing that surprised me is that on our site, it actually occurred. Now that we know where this site is that's mentioned in the documents and we know where it is, it's amongst the O'odham, formerly known.

Some O'odham are called Pima. They were all called Pima or various other names in the past. But I work with the people there near Tucson at San Javier, the San Javier district of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and they are the direct descendants of the people who met Coronado at this site. tell somebody that their ancestors were treated so poorly. But it's also empowering in a way. It's a way for them to understand some of the trauma that they now experience and where that comes from and has much greater depth than even they thought, perhaps. Because nobody thought that Coronado actually had much of an encounter with the O'odham in southern Arizona.

It's kind of a backwater area that you don't read about it. If you read Coronado documents, basically they just pass through their stories. They always pretty much go up to Cebu or Zunia and skip this whole area. Well, it turns out that the area where this site is, this first site I found, is one of the most important Coronado sites. And like I said, it's called the Villa

San Jeronimo. And the O'odham were able to successfully repel the Spaniards. So it really is the first successful Native American rebellion in the continental U.S. Because they didn't come back. The Spaniards didn't come back for 140 years. That was enough time that you thought you really whooped them. For sure. I mean, think about it. Yeah, they came and we ran them off and now they're gone. Well, and it was only 12 years for the Pueblo revolt, which is considered the most successful one up to this point.

But the amount of pride, like the Otham are considered later in time, they're discussed as being peaceful and docile. And I've always asked my Otham friends, do you think that's because of colonialism? The answer is I don't know. Well, this shows that my other research that shows that they were the best warriors in the 1680s and 90s and so on shows that that extended even deeper in time. So they take incredible pride in knowing that their ancestors were phenomenal warriors the best warriors in the region they were respected by they were feared by the apache in the 1680s and 90s so yeah uh there's a thing i didn't realize until i was reading a book about coronado recently. I never quite put it together that these,

these people that we call conquistadors were kind of like semi freelance, like swashbucklers or pirates, right? Like they, they had, they reported to the King, but they had personal stuff to gain. It's not like if you imagine the U S military,

right. Goes and does some action it's entirely in service of the government meaning if you go and sack saddam hussein's palace you don't keep half the shit and send half of it right you don't get okay you guys will divvy it up you guys keep keep half, the government keeps half. Well, the Spanish government didn't keep half, they kept a fifth. That's, but these guys were like highly incentivized, right? Oh, they were, but understand that, first of all, they were incentivized. And that's one reason you had the muster rule at the beginning. And that's one reason why they put so many horses, livestock, armor, weapons, people into it because they were accounting. Sorry, what is that word that you used?

The muster roll. And what does that mean? So basically it's everybody lined up and said what they were going to bring along, okay? And that got recorded by a scribe. And the idea was that they were buying in in essence so in other words if they're investing they were investing so if they had another uh you know aztec or incan type uh discovery they would have uh partitioned the find the the wealth based on what they contributed okay so it really was an investment.

Yeah. Like, hey, we're going to ride up north, see what we can sack and locate and find and exploit and develop. And who wants in? And what are you willing to kick in on putting this trip together? Well, that's a somewhat irreverent, crude way to say it, but that's really what it came down to. But understand... No, no, yeah, they draped

it in... Okay, I don't want to go down the revisionist path too much. Right, right, right. Okay, I'm interested in context. They draped it in God and country. However, I think it was a much thinner with the conquistadors, and you can correct me if you don't agree with this.

I think the conquistadors, there was a much thinner veneer than there were with other God and country actions that happened on the continent years later. Like right now with our oil and gas pursuits in other countries. I mean. Yeah. I think a thinner veneer. Yeah. So, so the thing is, keep in mind that we can look at it that way because we have 480, 500 years between us and them.

Right. But understand, and this is really important to understand, and I'm not being an apologist by any means, but they were following the rules, okay? So, they were charged by the viceroy and the king to go and convert people. They wanted to convert all the natives to Catholicism, and also the idea was to expand the territory that was under the king's charge. Okay? So expand the Spanish Empire. So those really were their goals.

And in the meantime, since it was privately funded, they wanted to get a return for their investment. And then, of course, the crown would get a percentage of that. But they were following the rules the whole time. Okay? So part of the rules. Well, I mean, but then a lot of them got put on trial later. They did, but only one got actually convicted. Is that right?

Yeah. And the reason he did is because he didn't follow the rules. So when they went into a native village, they read the requirement, the request or whatever, and it had a specific set of statements that part of which are, and I can read a little bit if you want, but basically, you need to acquiesce to our desires. You have to accept our king, our pope, and our way of life, and you have to do what we want you to do, including giving tribute. And if you don't, then we're going to come and take your wives and daughters. We're going to kill you. We're going to enslave you. And it's all your fault.

That's basically what it says. And so, first of all, they probably didn't fully understand, but you've got the promise. Your problems with your enemies will be over. Yeah. Yes,

exactly. So they, so what they promised was that they would be converted, they would be protected against their enemies and so on. And I'm forgetting something there too, but bottom line is

the trade-off wasn't favorable at all to the natives. They were doing fine how they were. But the Spaniards wanted to slip themselves in this higher level echelon, just like they pretty much did in Mexico, for example. And they took Montezuma captive and kind of used him to rule the people for a while and to control it so they could get as much as they want and basically use a hostage. And they tried that in the Cebu area and it didn't work for, actually in the Albuquerque

area and it didn't work too well. But they felt that they were following the rules. And the one guy that got convicted, he didn't follow the rules. Like, for example, he suggested that the Pueblo, they had a siege and he suggested that the people surrender and he promised them favorable passage. In other words, he wasn't going to kill them all. Well, he ended up burning something like a hundred of them at the stake and stabbing, lancing other ones. I think he made them drive the, I think he made them place their own stakes. I don't remember for sure about that.

And then tied it to him and burned him alive. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's pretty nasty, but that's why he was, that's why he was the only one that got basically jailed. In essence, it really wasn't jail because he got a pretty light sentence for everything he did. So how many people are on this? How many people are on this group of folks that end up, like the group that ends up winding up in Kansas and, you know, through Texas and Kansas? What kind of like, what's this look like coming across the landscape?

Well, that's the really interesting thing about this. The latest numbers historians have come up with is about 2,800 people, maybe 350 or 400 Spaniards, Europeans. And then their support people, slaves and domestic servants. And then 1,300, 1,500 or so native Mexican Indians. OK, native Mexicans. So basically 2,000, 2,800 people going across the landscape, which is huge. I mean, it's just, but what they think it looks like in the documents that if you read them a certain way and very carefully, it actually says that first they sent the advance guard ahead with Coronado.

That included, I think it was 80 or so Spaniards and their support people, including some Native Mexicans. And then the second group came two weeks later so that water and pasture wouldn't run out and so they wouldn't overrun Native communities. But they also had a bunch of captains and it looks like they were broken up into smaller groups. And we have now, two years ago, there were no Coronado sites between Sinaloa, Culiacan, and so on, and Ceibola. Now I have four in Southern Arizona. Can you just tell us real quick where those, the two sites that you just mentioned are in like in current day town terms in the U.S.? So one of them is kind of by Nogales, south of Tucson, Arizona on the Santa Cruz River, which is west of where everybody thinks the route came up.

So I'll address that too. I want to get into that, that debate. Yeah. So let me go over there first and then remind me. So everybody for years, like 99% of historians and archaeologists have thought that Coronado came up the Sonora River in Mexico and then up to the left or to the west, and the first site we found is on the Santa Cruz River to the west. The second site, not the second one we found, but the second on the trail, is on an intervening drainage. So we have two sites now to the west of that center line of the page where the San Pedro and Sonora rivers are. And then you go further east, southeast actually, still in the United States, still in Arizona. And there's two sites in the San Bernardino Valley, which is the farthest, furthest southeast you can go and still be in Arizona. So my job is to try to figure out how do those fit? And right now we're at the point of intersecting with the San Pedro River. So the question is, did they go north? Did they go south? Or did they go east? And I don't know yet. I'm in the process of figuring that out. That's the next discovery we're going to make. But now we have four sites in an area where we had none at the beginning of COVID, basically. Okay.

You got to do his. How far apart are all those sites? The first one and the ones way to the east, as the crow flies, are about 100 miles apart. But they went like, you know, zigzag and stuff. So it'd be, you know, many days in between. So, um, you know, one thing we forgot to talk about when we were talking about how many people, can you describe the amount of livestock these guys carried with them? Yes, exactly. So there were something like 1100 or 1500 horses. They had, uh, cattle,

they had pigs, they had sheep. So thousands ahead of livestock. So honestly, that's- We just have to look insane to people, especially when they get to the nomadic hunters. And all of a sudden, who had never encountered this, all of a, it'd be like during the Civil War, you'd have natives sitting on these hillsides watching this, you know, parade go by. But, you know, it was broken probably into distinct groups moving across the landscape. But one of the ways that I've been able to find some of these sites is think about it. And people have thought about this before, but you got to have a reliable source, a huge reliable source of water and pasture, right? Because if you don't stop and allow your livestock to eat every couple of days, according

to ranchers, they're going to fall over. You just can't go that far. Now, they did mistreat their animals for sure. Many of them died along the way. But bottom line is the kinds of water sources that I need to look for that they would need to have found to survive are in limited areas. Although there's enough of them that it could take me years to find more sites. I mean, it's pretty phenomenal that we have four now and we're on the verge of finding the fifth. Do people still – do your peers still think you're barking up the wrong tree?

Everybody who is a professional archaeologist and most historians agree that I have Coronado. There's no question. We have more crossbow bolt heads, which are diagnostic of Coronado and go out long before the next European expedition or big group of people is in the area. We have more of those than any other Coronado site known. Okay. So the crossbow bolt heads, the crossbow arrow heads, we have 72 or something now. So that's indisputable.

We have other Coronado artifacts, including the cannon. So we have Coronado. There's no question. What they're questioning without actually seeing the data is kind of the problem I have with it is that they're questioning how I'm putting the route together. And as an archaeologist, I go, okay, I have four sites, so you connect the dots. And if I can connect those with a trail, well, that's one trail. But what they don't understand is I am trying to consider every option available

as to how the route might have gone. So I'm backing up with the documentary record and geography and stuff, and I'm plotting it out and trying to figure out what is every single option of the way they could go. And then I'm checking those areas on the ground. And so basically right now, like I said, I'm at the San Pedro. Did they go north? Did they go south or did they go east? And I don't know the answer yet. But if they go north, that means that we have two trails because it doesn't connect with the ones way far southeast in the San Bernardino Valley. See, isn't that kind of cool? If they don't go north, then that means they probably went east and then southeast and it connects

to this zigzag trail that just goes all over and then goes up. And so that's the point I'm at now. So the next, not the next site, if I find the next site where I think it is, then it won't answer that question. I'm going to have to find one more to figure out whether they went north, because we know where the water was on the surface, and that's likely where they can't. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy my goodness do we

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I want to talk about how you find this stuff and what you're looking for and sort of like what's there and I have a million questions about that but let's do a quick if you don't mind a quick walkthrough on what happened to the expedition like they they they get up to the seven cities of gold which are seven cities of that, it winds up being what, like six cities of not gold. And then they get led on this wild goose chase. Yes. Well, one tactic was for natives to try to push the people on to the next place. So when Europeans first arrived,

even when Cabeza de Vaca went through native settlements, when they were walking back to New Spain from Florida, they were welcomed at first. There's this continent-wide, actually it's universal throughout the world, hospitality. When somebody new comes, if they're not warlike, if they're not hostile, you welcome them in, you give them food, you celebrate with them and so on, and then you send them on your way. And what we know from Cabeza de Vaca is that hundreds of people sometimes from those villages would go along with them until they got to the edge of their territory, and they'd stop and then Cabeza de Vaca would go on from there. And that actually happened on

the Coronado expedition as well as some of these people would serve as porters, some would just escort them and so on. Do you think those folks were getting paid or I mean, like, why were they going along? In some cases, they were kidnapped by the Spaniards. In some cases, they went along because when you wanted to go a long distance, it helped to go in a large group so you didn't get attacked. And also, some of them, like the native Mexicans, were in some cases paid. That is kind of an interesting thing because some of them went along because they, the native Mexicans, because their tribute that they owed the Spaniards was reduced or eliminated. That was kind of a payment to the community. Some of them were paid cash. Imposed tribute. Exactly. Some of them were paid cash. Some of them, scholars think that they were paid in the sense of that they got to take slaves or capt and secondly, because then they would sacrifice them ceremonially, and that was how they gained status, and that was also part of their culture and so on.

So there's a whole range of reasons why native Mexicans went along, but it seems that when you get up here into southern Arizona, like there were 200 principals that went along with Marcos de Niza, for example, in 1639. And they wanted to go to help him carry stuff, but also they wanted to go up to see Cibla, to see Zuni. And they pretty much wanted to go with the group. It would be an exciting thing. I mean, that's kind of why one of the reasons all these Spaniards went too. I mean, think about it. It's an adventure. You know, it would have been an adventure maybe in the first 200 miles. And then can you imagine the drudgery of just knowing that you can't turn back on your own because it's too dangerous and you get lost. But you have to keep going forward. Can you imagine waking up every morning after sleeping on a rock on your back all night and realizing, what did I get myself into?

Oh, yeah. And the next thing you know, you're in Kansas. Oh, I know. Incredible. Like fighting the whole way in. Yes. You and I, I think, can have these thoughts. But I don't know if they had those thoughts because maybe they slept on a rock every you know, every day of their lives. Dude, they had a rough go, man.

Just like we were- And they were just have people dying left and right too, you know. Right. But that was the norm, right? Well, but not really. I mean, for some, yes, no question. For the domestic servants and slaves and, you know, people like that, for sure. But some of these were noblemen. There were some really high status people there. And those are the ones that mostly went with Coronado and his advance guard. But these were, you know, people who wore silks most of the time and shoes with no soles and stuff. In fact, I disagree with one of the historians who claims that they would have worn silks on the whole trip. And it's like, I've walked through that. You can see scratches on my arms right now because I was just out earlier this week.

I mean, I don't wear silks and my clothes get ruined, you know? So, and I have to wear boots with soles on them so the thorns don't go through them and stuff. So they were, they had a very rude awakening, I think. And think about it. They went through in the summer. So they went through southern Arizona in June. Marcos Niza was May.

But June is the hottest month and there's no rain. And I went out to one of the sites, the latest one I found, in June, about the time they would have been there. And it was one of the coolest days. And I was just about sick from the humidity and the heat, uh, because I was trying to find more evidence of our site. So, you know, it's, it would, but everybody says that it would have been cooler then and wetter then. And I'm going to research that more because I'm not a hundred percent convinced of that. I don't know. We'll see. Um, but, uh, you got to do when you're researching it, you got to put one of them brass helmets on. There you go.

Yeah. It's like instant tinfoil. Is that what you're suggesting? So talk about the wild goose chase, though, because this is an interesting story. Like it kind of involves like a guy says, oh, I saw a bracelet made of gold. He had it. And so they take those guys captive and like, where's the bracelet? And then one of them tells them some crazy ass story about how they should go to Kansas. That part of the story really brings home to me how greedy they were at that point, how desperate they were. I mean, they hear the story about a gold bracelet that was probably copper, who knows what it was, and something else I can't remember.

And they like pursue this with such doggedness. It's like they take the guys and put them in chains and collars and keep them kidnapped for six months in there, you know, during the winter. Where's the bracelet? And then end up garroting one guy. And I mean, it just it's phenomenal what they do over a stinking little bracelet. But they thought that was the key to where they were going to find more. Yeah, the guy that garroted. Explain garroted.

You know, like in Godfather 2, I think it is when they kill the guy by just putting a cable around his neck. And then you twist it with a stick or something. Piano wire. Yeah. his neck and then you twist it with a stick or something piano wire yeah so this dude this dude is like oh man the really good stuff is like up and you know out in the buffalo land and they he's they get there and he's like oh no no i think about it it's a little more over that way right well eventually they just get fed up they're, this guy's full of shit. Let's kill him. And they had some disagreements amongst their guides. But here's the fun thing.

Some scholars, about three and maybe growing, think that one of their guides was actually trying to take them over to the Mississippian area where there are large canoes, large fish, or at least alligators, and copper artifacts and other things. And so it makes sense. Now, just here's another aside. There's a Texas site known, Coronado site. It's been known for some time, the Jimmy Owen site. It looks like we may have one on either side of that now. So we have a partial trail there that still needs to be proved up, which I will be doing in the next couple of years. But that's very exciting because the route trajectory of those, if they turn out, they have artifacts that seem to be Coronado, but we just need to prove it up for sure. I'm pretty cautious about these types of things. But anyway, if this is the case, it does look like what they did was really went in a circuitous type route, not only probably to get them lost, but also to

starve them out there. But also it looks like maybe he was trying to take them to the Mississippian area where the descriptions actually match. They don't for the Kivera area. Hold on, purposely to get them lost and to starve them. The guides were doing this to just mess these conquistadors up. There's a, like, there's a, the guy they garroted, the guy they killed for misinformation is like celebrated, right, by some of the tribes because he got them out. He was, it's, you know, the, like a contemporary interpretation, correct me if I'm wrong, is that he was like going to lead them out onto the Buffalo Plains and lead them out into the state plains of Texas and hopefully they'd all. Perish. They'd die out there. Well, and he actually said, according to the Spanish, the Spaniards and the one document is that he told the people at Kivera that if you don't feed them and their horses, they're already weak and you can kill them.

And apparently admitted that he was going around about way to get lost and stuff. Who knows what's going on? Because bottom line, there was this rivalry between the guides. And we'll never know for sure. But I will say that one of our sites, two of our sites in the San Bernardino Valley, that is such a remote area. It's like a moonscape, okay? It's got volcanic rock, Malpais, just out in the middle of stinking nowhere. And the campsite that we have, it actually has some incredible rock art, Coronado rock art. It's very cool. Anyway, and two Coronado artifacts and some clearings. So we don't know how big a group was there, but it's the first actual campsite.

The other one's a town site, right? And the other ones are artifacts that we haven't identified, clearings yet and stuff. But this one has clearings, artifacts, and rock art. And it is in such a remote area. One of the guys on the rock art is reaching out in front of him and it almost looks like he's saying to people who might try this route go west get out of here this is not a good area i don't know that's my interpretation you can interpret it interpret rock art a number of ways but you mean rock you mean you found rock art that was made by people who were accompanying the expedition?

Yes. And no one knew this was there until now? Well, the rancher knew it was there. And basically what we have is a volcanic rock that is weathered and has figures pecked into it. And one is wearing a hat. One is wearing a helmet-like hat. And I think it is a domed hat rather than a helmet. Yeah, I'm looking at it now, yeah.

And if you look real carefully, I actually do a presentation on this. It looks like the guy has a beard. He has a gown on that was typical of the time. They have pointy shoes on, which was typical of the time. They have a collar like the collars they used to wear at the time and something else. I forget what else. But anyway, I'm not looking at it right now.

But we have Coronado artifacts with it. So, you know, it's pretty darn good evidence. I mean, like one of my volunteers said, I said, well, it looks like it is. And he goes, well, the rock says it is. Let me see, Steve. So, okay, I want to, I want to get into how you like ever begin to find this stuff, but.

Well, that and too, I think what, like your work, where the personal passion for this project comes from. I want to first wrap up the expedition. Okay. They go on the wild goose chase, get up into Kansas.

A subset of them got up into Kansas. In Texas, they realize that there's no way that we can support this many people out here on the plains. We're about ready to starve. There's not enough water. So they send most of the people back to Albuquerque to re-inhabit Albuquerque again, Albuquerque, Bernalillo area for another winter. And a subset goes north to Kansas. They stay there, I think it's, you know, 25 days or something like that

before they come back after realizing there was nothing up there that they were interested in. And then they all go back to the Albuquerque area, spend the winter there before they leave. Coronado gets kicked in the head by a horse. Yes. Starts acting peculiar.

Well. You don't buy that. I think that was the second concussion he got. The first one was at Cibla where they threw a slab down and he was in full armor, including a helmet, but it hit him on the head. And I think even if you had a helmet on, that's going to cause a pretty big problem. So your second concussion is always the worst. So I think he was in really bad shape. In fact, when the settlement that I found got attacked, someone was heading south to return to New Spain and then ultimately Spain, saw that the place had been attacked, went all the way back to the Albuquerque area, and didn't tell Coronado right away because of his concussion. So it must have been really bad. So I think he basically was, I think he was pretty bad off. But I think that the fact that they had not found anything, the fact that he had a second concussion, the fact that the site I found, San Geronimo 3, was

attacked and destroyed, and what was the other thing I was going to say? I forget. But anyway, all of those factors together, I think, were the reasons that they ended the expedition. Now Castaneda, one of the chroniclers for the expedition who wrote some 20 years later, he said that he missed his wife and also, you know, his estates and so on. Well, part of the thing, he was governor of Nueva Galicia. And so he had responsibilities down there and the Mishtan War had already started. So like that area was in unrest. He had responsibilities for that. Here he was way up there and nothing was turning out like it should. So he was like 1,400, 1,500 miles away and nothing was happening.

They weren't getting wealthy. People were starting to cause problems. People were dying. You know, things, it just bad energy. Yeah. It got like, got like mutinous and they come home penniless, then they all get to finger pointing and.

Exactly. Fighting and it wasn't, it wasn't like sack and it wasn't like getting Montezuma's gold at all. No. So out of those 25 or 2,800, how many do you think ended up back dealing, like back where they came from or started from and then, and then went on and lived um

not that many spaniards died some died of hunger some died being on the way up uh by being uh killed by natives as they were going north uh some died from poisonous plants they were eating because they were so hungry and then some died in the battles that they had in the Albuquerque, Bernalillo area. Do you believe that they were getting shot by poison arrows? Oh, for sure. Because they felt that they were. Oh, no question. In fact, this gets back to the indigenous people that I have studied for 40 years, the Sabipri O'odham, the ancestors of the people there in the Tucson area, the Otham. Their ancestors used poison arrows. In fact, I studied a battle from 1698 when the Jesuit Eusebio Quino was there.

A battle occurred. 500 Apache and their allies attacked this 80-person Sabipri Oatam village on the San Pedro River, that middle river again. Anyway, they ended up prevailing despite that. It's a long story and it's an incredible story. It's absolutely fabulous. But anyway, they used poison arrows against their enemies and so while only 54 i think it was enemies were actually killed on the site that day they pursued them into the mountains and over 360 i think died uh on the way to the mountains because they'd been pierced by those arrows yeah yanni these guys would talk about getting like

a superficial wound yep on your wrist say and then it'd be that they'd talk of like everything would rot away and you could just see the sinews and the bones. They'd get into excruciating pain. And die. Yep. Because they were like, because they got some kind of crazy thing. They're dipping these little arrows in and they just sit and ambush them and just try to just prick them with the arrow. Yeah, it's actually, interestingly, I identified what plant it is.

It's a sap of a Mexican jumping bean. I can't remember the scientific name because it was in the process of changing when I studied it. But here's the fun thing. My site, the villa or the town site of San Geronimo III, that was my first Coronado site I found where the battle occurred. The documentary record from a few years later, from 24 years later, talks about it again from a survivor. And part of what the story is, it's really fascinating. It's a fascinating story, which I won't go through unless you want me to. But part of the story is that the captain was sleeping with the wives and daughters of the native villagers, the Sabipriathim. And that really

ticked the locals off as well as the fact that they were taking more than they said they were going to take in terms of food stuff and resources to tribute and stuff. And they were chopping the hands and noses off the residents, probably for terrorism, but also probably for minor offenses like, you know, complaining that you took my daughter, you know, or my wife. So, but anyway, so they saw lights in the mountains, apparently, the night before the attack occurred. And that was unusual. So they doubled the guard.

And we have six lookout stations, by the way, around our via, and three of them with evidence of having been attacked so they doubled the guard but the attack didn't occur until the morning when everybody kind of uh got lazy you know that happens they attacked they snuck in probably with clubs first and clubbed people in their houses and such um the captain was killed and he was the one responsible for all of this stuff. In fact, he was sleeping with two. Yeah, he had six slaves with him, right? Yeah, um, two.

And what those women did is they took a poison arrowhead and pricked him on the side between the folds of his weepio, which is a kind of clothing. And he died from that. And I love telling that story because, you know, the yellow rose of Texas is during the Sam Houston was able to overrun Santa Ana because he had a mulatto woman there who was distracting him in his tent at the time. Okay. So that's the story. And that's wonderful. Yeah.

And so here we've got the yellow, I mean, here we have the red roses of Suya who took a arrowhead and killed the captain during the battle. So you have these brave women, women are rarely mentioned in the historic record. And, uh, here they are central figures in killing One of the main perpetrators Of violence in the area It's just phenomenal There's that other poison they made In reading about it I don't really understand it

It would be that they would take deer liver And have a rattlesnake And like pester a rattlesnake With the deer liver Until the rattlesnake struck the deer liver Then they'd pace that Does that seem like legit uh um that isn't a that was one of the apache tribes way of doing it there's a variety of different kinds of poison that one can use yeah i've studied some

of it not because i have any intense using it but i find poison fascinating the same reason other people do but because it plays such an important role in the historic record and also in warfare in the historic record. Because when you start using poison, you're trying to kill people. It's not you're just having this ritualized warfare like some small societies do so that you don't have to kill a number of people. When you start using poison, you're trying to kill people. You know, you're trying to kill as many as you can. There's a, I don't want to take this too far afield, but there's a, I think he just passed away.

Geist, did Valerius Geist just die? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it was him. Apologies to his survivors if I'm wrong about this, but in looking at the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, I feel like he held it because people are like, oh, how would they have

killed them you know we just don't have that many projectile points associated with mammoths and he wrote this thing about well how do we know that they weren't hunting with poison and then he talked about because poison is not like we know in south america poisons use we know in africa they hunt big game with poison. But he was making the case of why have we just ignored the role of poison in hunting when we know that poison was used in warfare? Well, we also know it was used in food acquisition and stuff like some, I think it's South American groups, put poison in the water, all the fish come to the surface kind of thing. So, I mean, poison plays a role in all kinds of food acquisition strategies. So that's not too surprising. Although I don't know how to respond to that other than one thought is that one of the reasons those fluted points are fluted is so that the blood flows.

And that doesn't make sense with trying to get the poison to enter the bloodstream. Oh, I got it. But they could have been using other weapons to get the poison in. Right. So. One might think, why would anyone give a shit what route they took? But I'm starting to put it together. If you find the route, you can find the stuff.

Well. And like, and put it in, solve the mystery. Right. Well, solving the mystery is a huge part of it. That's where part of my passion comes from, right? But for me as an archaeologist, I love finding things. I love piecing the story together using archaeology, the historic record, and a variety of other things, geography, ethnography, and so on.

But I also have gotten to the point in my career many, many years ago, probably a couple of decades ago, where I realized that it's more than just an academic pursuit for me. I like it when it becomes relevant to the people that I'm studying. So that's why I work with the O'odham, the direct descendants of not only the Mission and Presidio sites and Sub-Iberi O'odham sites that I studied, the native sites, but also this Coronado story, because now that we know where the route is, we know that they were impacted. Everybody has thought that it was the Opata, a different group,

further east in Sonora, that Coronado, et cetera, we're talking about. Those were the ones who were impacted. No, it turns out it's the O'odham. The O'odham had some of the earliest negative encounters with Europeans. So it matters to them not only, like I said before, so they can understand the history of trauma, where some of their cultural changes occurred. You know, they probably had, you know, kids who were mixed race because of this rape that occurred. I mean, all of these groups did. In fact, probably also Esteban was sleeping with all kinds of Native women. So there were probably African-American intermixture. There's European intermixture and stuff. So that, can you imagine being a Native woman in one of these towns that got raped by one of these men and then having this white-looking kid that you have to deal with and explain? There's all kinds of repercussions along those lines.

But also, like I said before, now we know that the Otham were the bravest. They were the valiant ones. They were the ones that made the whole, I mean, that was the final nail in the coffin for the expedition. Once that happened, there's, you know, that intermediate supply base basically was gone. And so the distance between, quote, Spanish civilization and where they were at just doubled in size. And so it made it almost impossible. But that's the thing. It allows us to put later ethnography with earlier ethnography as well. There are so many reasons it's important.

With archaeology too, and this is what a lot of people don't understand, when I find a site, like I can answer a whole range of other questions, like at our town site, San Geronimo, people have said that it's just a supply base, that there were only men there, so it wasn't a settlement. Well, first of all, you can have settlements just of men.

You could have settlements of men of just age 15, you know, and it's still a settlement. But the point is, is we, there were some women and children along on the expedition. We don't know how many. But I will be able to tell maybe in the archaeological record whether there were women and children at our site. That's just one of the kinds of things that we can examine. One of the questions that we can examine with the archaeological record that are silent in the historic record.

If you find latrine sites, can you guys do genetic stuff off that? Probably, but who would you compare it to? You'd have to find the descendant populations and stuff, which would be- Could you tell male, female off latrine, like off of latrine site? I don't know. I've never done that. You know who you got to team up with who uh dr beth shapiro okay you guys be best friends is she full of shit listen man she's the coolest she's the coolest she's far from full of person on the planet when it comes to genetics and stuff.

Cool. You got to talk to her. Yeah. Well, I'm hoping, you know. Man, you find on the Treen site and get Beth Shapiro on there, she'll figure out what's going on. We're expecting maybe to find bodies on this site. No O'Otham were killed. No Sabipri were killed.

None of the natives were killed. None of the local natives. But some of the Spaniards were killed. But the problem is in an archaeologist, if we find a body, we have to stop digging. So we don't want to find them of the local natives. But some of the Spaniards were killed. But the problem is, in an archaeologist, if we find a body, we have to stop digging. So we don't want to find them until the very end. So I'm not looking. Don't go look over there.

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the first site i found uh is i found it very in a very unique way. So I was working on trying to find campsites along the Anza Trail because nobody's found any campsites along the Anza Trail. We know where the route is, but nobody's actually found any campsites. Historians have guessed where they are. What's that? What's the Anza Trail? Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774, 75, went out and founded San Francisco, basically. Brought a colony out there, okay? So he left from Tubac Presidio in southern Arizona, south of Tucson.

And so being an archaeologist, I don't want to guess where the site is. I want to find evidence. So I found a cross, a petroglyph cross. And I thought, oh, maybe this is Marcos de Niza. Maybe this is Father Kino, or maybe this is Wamba Disa de Anza. So I finally figured out it's probably Anza because there's a campsite inferred to be near there. And then I found another petroglyph cross further up where we know another campsite. Like they're carving crosses into rocks.

Yeah, exactly. And they're probably, you know, they're at water sources, they're at passes and stuff like that. And we know they're probably, you know, they're at water sources or at passes and stuff like that. And we know there are long trails. I actually have a YouTube video that talks about the Anza Trail and shows the crosses and so on. So, but anyway, for a while I was thinking maybe it's Marcos de Niza and maybe this is the same route and so on. So I started looking into things and then I couldn't find any horseshoes related to Anza. And we think that maybe horseshoes weren't used later in time because they had the type of horses that had rougher hooves, like Spanish barbs, and they didn't need them.

Plus, horseshoes were very expensive. But we know that they were used in the Coronado period during the expedition, and I have a bunch of them. I do. I mean, I found that's more these other sites, many of them are defined in part by horseshoes or mule shoes. Oh, so when you guys talk about the nails, it's the horseshoe nails. Yes. But I also have a video on that.

Like a diagnostic nail. Yeah. So I have a video on that and that's one of the uses of them, but there's probably other uses for the nails as well. But they're gable headed or carrot head nails. I've started to call them gable headed nails because they're, you know, like gabled roof. And that makes a lot more sense. The carrot is an editing character, kind of because of that upside-down V shape. But anyway, where were we?

Horseshoes. Oh, so I was looking. I had worked at a Spanish Presidio, Santa Cruz de Taranate Presidio, before, excavated there for years and never found any horseshoes. So I wasn't hopeful, but I looked on the internet for, you know, what kind of horseshoes might have they had that I'm missing, or horseshoe nails. And then I found an image of these online.

And nobody knew where they were at, but we knew who found them. And so I guessed where he might've found them because I had been working on a site for years. I worked the whole area a lot, but I found a horse jangle, coscoho, jingle bob, some people call them, from the bridal bit on my Sabipri site. And I thought, this looks just like the one on the Jimmy Owens site there in Texas, a

known Coronado site. So I wondered like 20 years ago, could this be Coronado? But I had no way of proving it, right? Well, so when I guessed where these might have come from, I went back to that site after doing a terrain analysis. And within a couple hours, within less less than two hours had found Coronado. So. With a metal detector.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. When you say you had found Coronado, that doesn't mean you found. His body. No. No, he's buried. What was he buried?

He died. He found his trail. 10 something. Yeah. He died. He found his trail. Yeah. What I mean is that evidence of Coronado's trail and it turns out a town site. And now we have, like I said, four down here and there's a bunch in Albuquerque and so on and one for sure in Texas. So that's what I mean as an archaeologist when I found Coronado. Yeah. Hey, real quick before you go farther on, because I'm just still, like, you were saying earlier when Steve asked you, like, oh, if you find the path, then you unravel the mystery. But what is the, like, in real short form, what is the mystery still yet with this whole expedition?

Well, part of the thing is that nobody's been able to find it so that makes it the path yeah like how could thousands of people and thousands ahead of livestock have this rolling battle from mexico to kansas so the path is the mystery the path in the campsites and even 250 years or whatever it is ago father Father Kino and his military escort, in their documents they left, questioned where Coronado went and said, hey, he probably went here. Turns out Father Kino from 1690s actually stayed at one of the places where one of our sites are, and he didn't know it, which is really kind of cool, actually. So we have these layers of history and stuff, but it's been lost. It was lost afterward, partly because they didn't know it, which is really kind of cool, actually. So we have these layers of history and stuff, but it's been lost.

It was lost afterward partly because they didn't know where they were, right? They didn't know where they were on the train. They went back and forth several times so they could find their way, but they had no idea where they were. There's no surviving map of this part, so even if they did a map, even if they prepared a map, I don't think it would help much. When they were crossing the Llano Estacado, Stake Plains, they were leaving big mountains of buffalo chips so they could try to find their way back the way they came. Yeah.

And then also, yeah, true. And then also to find their way, they'd shoot arrows. They'd wait till the morning till the sun rose. They'd shoot a couple arrows and then keep shooting them over one another so they could stay on the trail. And my, what I imagine is when they got led astray by those guides, they shot them a little bit to the right each time, right? They knew exactly what they were doing. You guys found a, this is kind of the most surprising thing you've turned up. Um, one, the cross, like armaments, crossbow,

arrowhead, you know, projectile points from crossbows that they use when they fought, but you found a cannon. A cannon. Yep. So before I mentioned the cannon, what we have with regard to the crossbow bolt heads, we have a, I'll show you one, but also what I have here is a map that we plotted them out. it out more recently and um basically what you can see i'm not going to be able to find it now of course um what you can see is that the crossbow bolt heads cluster and in just a tour actually four different areas and in the first area with most of them including broken ones a lot of tips

and so on uh there are also subipriathum stone stone arrowheads. Oh, no shit. So like where there was little shootouts. Yeah. They came up the wash and that right in the heart of the town site. So you can see that. And that is one of the strong, like when I tell people how many crossbow bolt heads we have more than any other Coronado site, that's convincing. And then how they cluster, we can see where they went and such. But near where that occurred, we did find the cannon. And the cannon is, I'm still looking for this image, sorry.

The cannon was found metal detecting, but it was sitting on the floor. Are you pretty good with a metal detector? Obviously. Dude, I'd like to rent you for a couple of weeks, man, just to go metal detecting, but it was sitting on the floor. Are you pretty good with a metal detector? Obviously. Dude, I'd like to rent you for a couple of weeks, man, just to go metal detecting. Well, see. I got some real honey holes. I'd like to go have you show me how to work them over. Yeah, but see, as a professional archaeologist, what I have to say, and this is really, I think, important.

Metal detecting is an important tool, and I didn't use it much until recently. But this is one of the reasons Coronado hadn't been found because archaeologists were hesitant to use metal detectors because we did not want to lead the public

to the idea that you can just go out and loot, meaning take things out of context. Well, that's what I'm fixing to do with you. Yeah, there you go.

That's what you think, huh? So anyway, here's my point. And I want to make a point about this. I'm not trying to be arrogant because I know that one of the reasons my crew volunteers, and I have like 30 or 40 people volunteering with me. And one of the reasons they do it is they're totally passionate about finding this stuff. And they get to do it in a way that's professionally or you know responsible yeah they're they're like making history they're making history and they they knew from the beginning everybody's sworn to secrecy and certain rules we have and stuff

they can't keep anything but but here's the deal the reason this is important and i can't stress this enough remember i was talking about the sonora river and the san pedro where everybody thought they went up there and i have two sites to the west and there's two sites to the east. And now I'm at the San Pedro trying to decide whether they turn north, south, or went straight east. medieval horseshoe fragment there 50 years ago. The woman who allowed this person to look was given this and a few other artifacts. And I saw it in her display case. She didn't do the metal detecting. She doesn't know exactly where it was found, but she thinks it was found to the north. Now that's the problem. First of all, if I hadn't run into her, I ran into her through a friend who's on the project who I've known for some time. And I saw this, where'd you get this? So she doesn't really

know where it came from. So that's part of the problem. So I'm going to be on this wild goose chase. But if she knew exactly where it came from, then I could walk right there and know that that's where the site is. What if that's the only artifact that was thrown from a mule or horse or the only artifact left behind by the expedition in that location? Then it's erased and so many people pick these things up, they don't record where they're from, and that's the one key. And I was working on another site, the Apache Leader Who, where he killed Lieutenant Cushing in 1871, a hero of Tucson and so on. Nobody could find this place. I found it fairly quickly.

Train analysis again and understanding Apache ambush behavior. And the thing that we realized is that it had been metal detected and collected before. And what happened is it was somebody from Wisconsin in the Tucson Sierra Vista area. He collected all this stuff. He showed a local gun shop and they verified it. And that's how I know it happened because it's one of the people on my crew. And the guy has disappeared. He never came back.

He was going to come back. And the things probably ended up in the landfill. From Wisconsin. Yeah. His family probably ended up in the landfill. From Wisconsin. Yeah. His family probably didn't. Doug Dern. Relatives of his, nonetheless. Well, you know, I've called up there and tried to figure out maybe where they could be.

But the problem is when somebody dies, their collections just get tossed half the time because nobody recognizes. They think it's a bunch of trash and so with regard to coronado it's super important that they leave so little these are overnight encampments for the most part and you find one thing in some cases but if you find one thing artifacts can move they can get there by other reasons a native could have picked it up or whatever but the fact is if you find an alignment of them, then you know you got the trail. When somebody takes one of those out, it's harder to find the next one. Or you could erase whole segments of the trail. I totally understand and I'm on board with what you're saying.

It took me a while to get there. And again, I've been on. I got to spend time with archaeologists. We found Ice Age projectile points that they would just shove back into the ground. It was painful for me. I would fantasize about going back there and getting them all. Never did. You aren't working with me.

I get it. I understand. And when I point it out, I'm just pointing out because it's what, like a, a people, people like things, people like me to walk around looking at the ground thinking you're going to find some cool shit laying there. Right.

It's like they often view it as why is that archeologist finding it? Like, why is that? Okay okay but it's bad for me to find it yeah no and that's a it's like they're like what are they they're better than me you know what is it i've heard that story too and i understand it i certainly do what are you laughing about well you think you're better than me Just because you're an archaeologist No I'm saying It's a widely held sentence Ask Clay It's like a little kid who has something taken away from them Go volunteer with Denny I'm not talking about me

Oh you're not No I'm putting myself I'm articulating a thing Do this test Go on Go on Instagram And test go on um go on instagram and and just go on instagram take take a projectile point okay and go on instagram and put in the palm of your hand and say i found this uh indian arrowhead too bad i couldn't keep it and then look in the comment

section a couple days later oh yeah i've read I've read those. Okay. So, like, this is a widely held viewpoint. Yeah, I know. That, like, what are the odds someone's going to find it? It's been here this long. No one's found it yet. Whatever. And this shit winds up in coffee cans on people's windowsills. Or on the wall right there of our podcast.

Oh, no. I gotta leave. I there of our podcast. Oh, no. I gotta go. I gotta leave. I gotta leave. No, no, no. I gotta go. People send us that shit. I got a stack of stuff.

I get it. People try to give me stuff all the time. But here's the thing. The fact is, is that this site where the first big, the first site I found, the biggest one, the town site where the battle occurred. People had metal detected there before. They had. Yeah. But they had no idea what they were looking at.

Well, they had worse metal detectors. They didn't know what they were looking at. And they're all out of context. And the fact is, is what I would say to people who have that view is I understand it. It's the thrill. It's the thrill of the chase. It's the adventure. It's finding something cool and old.

But Americans are kind of unique in that way is that we got to keep things for some reason we want to put them on our mantle uh other people say so when people come over you can go see that yeah exactly and we like to collect well and also people have collected and said i collected this for you so that nobody else would take it and i said you just took it you know but the point i tell you something though this is gonna trip you up this is a tony baker story the late tony baker are you talking bad about the dead no they found tony baker no i don't know where it and when i just remember him telling me the story they found out they were at a pueblo archaeologists working a pueblo site a Pueblo site had found where the Puebloan people had a stash of Folsom points. They found it and thought that's cool.

Yeah. No shit. They're separated by 10,000 years. We find that in archaeological sites is often things were picked up to put in medicine bags or picked up as curios or also picked up to reuse. So that's quite common. They're like, these people are from a long, long time ago. Let's throw them in jail.

Oh, no, no. I'm saying the viewpoint. Be like, they, in their time, like a thousand years ago or whatever, recognized that like, wow. Yeah. Here's a weird thing from a long time ago. And see, I think there's people who just don't care about history and the past, but there's a huge number of people,

I'd say maybe half the population or more, that find a fascination with the past, with history, with people who've gone before. It's a connection. Artifacts provide that tangible connection to the past. And that's why people are enthralled by it. But what I will say is getting back to our site and our project. Yeah, I want to get, I haven't asked you my biggest question yet,

and it has to do with the cannon. Okay. So the reason that it's important is what if somebody had come in and collected all these crossbow bolt heads, if they had, you know, done it and found this or the cannon, the bolt heads, we wouldn't have been able to see the pattern. Right. We wouldn't have known that this is the most important historic site potentially in the region, in the Southern Arizona, at least.

If they had found the cannon, you know where I'd be right now in some Saudi's basement in his private collection. That's right on. Some of my kids would be beating a rock with it. Oh, yeah, exactly. See, so the way I look at this is, this is all of our histories, right? This is not just my find, and that's why I'm sharing it in the film,

in the documentary film. But I also see that as an archaeologist, I could go out and find this stuff and not tell anybody, right? I mean, I could do it just like the public does. But I don't because I recognize that this is our collective history and most other countries have a sensibility about that. about it this way. Because once we take something out of context, the context is everything. Once we take it out of its context in the field, we lose the story. The story about Coronado and this town site of San Geronimo, the interaction with the natives, and all of this is just so phenomenal. It's the story itself that we can tell from the artifacts and where we found them on the ground and the relationship to each other and the features, the structures and so on that we're finding. If people just collected that, we would lose that.

So we have this whole story that we're able to develop because people didn't get in there and destroy the evidence. And that's why I keep the place secret, because I can only work so much. See, I can only work so fast. I almost killed myself last season trying to get certain things done before the end of the, before it got too hot and before the rains and stuff. But if people find out where it is, they're going to come in and metal detect and then it's going to mess up our distribution. So at least until we're done metal detecting, I've been going over some areas five times to get everything out so that people don't feel the need to go. Right. Um, we've got to figure out how to protect it. Uh, but if you want to see it, you'll have to wait until it's

in a museum. Yeah. We'll probably end up doing site tours and stuff. Uh, but they're going to, it's going to be consultation with various landowners and agencies and, you know, the whole range because it's even when I extract what I extract, I'm only going to do a subset of the evidence there. The ethic is to save a lot of it for the future. And so I'll do that. But also the landowners don't want to be overrun. It's probably going to be turned in hopefully to a monument or landmark so that people can go just like they do to a national park. It's such a big thing, such a big find, so important to our history and to the history of underrepresented populations, native populations, the O'odham, and also the Hispanics

in the area. It's going to be a matter of pride for them, and they're going to want to have their interpretations. In fact, the O'odham that we've brought out so far are really proud to be part of it so that they can start telling their story for a change. So, I mean, it has social implications, the fact that we've been able to find this stuff intact, that it hasn't been collected before. I'll stop harping. That's enough. No, you got it. You got it covered. I want to ask you my biggest question. Okay. You can describe the cannon within this thing, but you found the oldest gun to ever turn

up in the U.S., okay? Yep. It's been sitting there for, I can't really do the math, 500 years? 480 years when we found it, yeah. It's been sitting there for 480 years. Yeah.

And you find it kind of like built into an adobe wall. No. No. Sitting inside a structure.

So the structure walls were made of adobe and rock No, sitting inside a structure. So the structure walls were made of adobe and rock and they had collapsed on it to protect it. Okay. But I haven't done my question yet. Okay. What in the hell did someone think that wall was? Who's been looking at it for since, like, are there that many walls out there that you're like, oh, I didn't know that the Coronado Expedition built that wall in my backyard. Oh, okay.

Like, what was it regarded, like, how is it perceived by the people who are occupying that area now? Okay, so first of all, it's ranch land. But secondly, there's no walls visible on the surface. So what happened is it was partially burned and collapsed at the end and it's melted into the surface and my heart was somehow picturing that they're like oh i don't know what that old wall was no no people passing it by for 480 years just a wall archaeologists are not that big brass thing okay so subsurface. Yeah, and so... That was my biggest question. Yeah, so my entire career has been spent on identifying Apache, Sabipri, all these groups that are difficult to define, hard to see the archaeological evidence. And this is just as difficult, just as hard, because

it's a type of structure. The structure I'm digging now is unlike the prehistoric stuff and unlike the later historic stuff, and that's what's so cool about it so i've been digging it very carefully to try not to ruin it because there's only one structure in the entire world that has coronado's canon in it as far as we know so so i i have this responsibility which almost paralyzed me you know It's like indecision. What do I do? Because I have a responsibility as a professional to be as careful as I can and to preserve as much of it as possible. So tell how you guys found this thing. The cannon? Yeah.

Like what was it doing and how did you find it? Okay. It was laying there kind of smoking a cigarette. No, only two of us were out in the field that day so uh i it was in uh september of 2020 we were uh i i had just laid out we lay out these tape lines so that we can systematically metal detect right and uh chris went ahead and got started and I finished laying out the lines and then I got started in like five yards or meters into the first line. I got a hit. It wasn't very strong.

So I started digging it. Are you set for a specific type of metal? No, the detectors that I use are all metals. I got them set for all metals, intentionally so, because most people looking for treasures and stuff or looking for gold or looking for, you know, old coins and stuff,

we're just as interested in the iron artifacts, the ferrous artifacts, as we are other things, like the nails are iron, right? I have the hardest time explaining to my kids that they're not going to find

stone arrowheads with their metal detector. No, no, you won't. I've explained it to them 20 times, but it just doesn't click. They think it's an old thing detector. Oh, cool. Walk up on the street, find old people, right? No. So all metals. In fact, I've had a hard time convincing my crew at times.

Look, we can't discriminate. You got to find everything. So you're digging through old 22 shell casings and pull tabs off beer cans. I want to tell all the hunters out there, please, please. We have so many. In fact, people yell out shotgun because we find so many shotgun shells. It's just absolutely incredible. A little BB size shot.

We get that too. Oh, you're finding that stuff? Oh, yeah. Our detectors are good and our crews are good. So we find really tiny stuff. You know,.22s, all kinds of stuff. A lead shot. Oh, she should pair up with Chris Parrish.

It's like a lead cleanup at the same time as like an archaeological dig. Well, what we do is we collect that kind of stuff and then we dump it. But I always check my crew's pockets because a couple of times. Oh.

No, no, no, no. Because a couple of times they don't take anything, but a couple of times something that was of value, we thought, they thought was a piece of wire and it wasn't.

Okay. Oh, okay. I see. So like what we have is we have fish hooks, was of value, we thought, they thought was a piece of wire and it wasn't. Okay. Oh, okay. I see. So like what we have is we have fish hooks, like size number six fish hooks. We have several of those and one with a weight. We have little spring things that went inside, matchlocks and wheel lock guns. We have-

Coronado Expedition had fish hooks? Yeah. So they were fishing at our site because it's near water. Oh, that's so cool. Isn't that cool? We have several. I wouldn't have believed it

if we just found one. You got a picture of that old ass fish hook? I'll see. We'll get it from you. Yeah. And then, okay, but I interrupted you. Tell me, you found the cannon.

So there you are. Yeah. So there you are. Yeah. So I got a hit and I started digging down and it was about a foot under the ground. And I thought, this is really weird. What is this? And so I called Chris because anytime we find something cool, we call the other person over. So he comes over and, what is that? And I said, I don't know.

Maybe it's a bell because it had that cassock bell on top, you know. And we kept digging. Finally, he takes the metal detector and he goes, it's long. I wonder if it's an irrigation pipe. I said, it's not an irrigation pipe. Oh, what is it? You know, there's no irrigation out here. Anyway, so we kept digging it and realized, started realizing what it was.

And so the thing is, I sent you something that shows the roots wrapped around the gun. So I called a couple other crew members who were the main crew members at the time. I said, you got to get out here. We found this, I sent them a picture of it. And I said, you got to bring a sawzall or something because we got these roots wrapped around it. So one of the people where he was able to come out and he brought a sawzall and we were we knew by that point that it was pretty cool and that it was probably a cannon or something we didn't we never seen one like that so we didn't how much of it were you looking at that at that point in time like two inches of this thing or

you're already looking at 20 inches of it um when i called people people? When you were realizing that you had something. Pretty cool. Well, I realized it was pretty darn awesome when I first dug down and only saw, let's say, six inches of it because enough of the cascabel was exposed and I could tell it was a bronze-like material. I didn't know it was bronze, but, you know, something like that. And something unusual. And so I kept exposing it. But while I was digging it, I was also trying to figure out whether it was in some kind of pit or something. Because the context, once again, is critical. So it turns out it wasn't. It was sitting on the floor of a destroyed structure from the battle.

But Chris took the metal detector and figured out it was real long, so we dug the whole thing and cleaned it out and stuff. And then the guy came out with a sawzall, and we were so protective. I was really glad I found it because I know how to dig the thing, so I didn't put any dings or anything on it. I mean, that's kind of a source of pride. But also, here's this rare artifact, and I didn't want to damage it anyway. So when we were using the sawzalls, we were putting our hands to protect the cannon. I can't believe we did that. Finally, I said, no, don't do that. Put your glove down. I mean, that's how crazy it was.

It was starting to get hot. It was only September, but September can be, it was already September, but September can still be hot. By the time we finished up, we were just dripping sweat and we were out of water. And there were three of us out there and we just, I mean, at that point it was just, man, we were just glad to get it out of there. But the reason we had to get it out that day is I've always had, I think all archaeologists do this, once you find something cool, you can't just bury it and come back the next day and finish it because you feel like all these eyes are on you, you know, like radio hosts following you out to the site. Sure, oh yeah. So you got to get it out.

Something that important you got to get out of the ground. So we stayed there until like two o'clock I think it was and we were just about to die and it was just about dying. It was hot. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

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and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Describe the cannon. How was it made? Where where was it made what would they use it for okay so uh we've called it a wall gun maybe a hack but or something there's a hook a gun with a hook on

the bottom that they would put on a wall or parapet or something or on a tripod usually is shot by two men one to light the match and the other one to hold it. Yeah, gun is a pretty liberal term, I think, for this thing. It is. But that's why that article that I gave you, I've written it with a weapons expert, and all of his buddies have read it who are familiar with historic cannons and guns and so on. So gun's a generic term. It is a cannon. But, yeah, just so the listener understands

a little bit more about what you're describing. I mean, it's basically like a, in simple terms, it's like a 40 inch. 42 inch bronze. What's the gauge roughly? I think you said seven gauge in the article. Yeah, yeah. I think it was like a 28 millimeter.

Was roughly what it translated to? I think that's 42 inches. The bore. Yeah, the bore of it. And surprisingly, it wasn't that heavy. I thought it was going to be a lot heavier, but I think it came. It's about 40 pounds.

40 pounds. Around 40 pounds. And it's actually heavier than that. When people, everybody who's picked it up, boy, this is really kind of heavy. In two sites in the Albuquerque-Bernalillo area, Everybody who's picked it up, boy, this is really kind of heavy. In two sites in the Albuquerque-Bernalillo area, they found some of the shot that probably went with it. But at our site, there's no walls to bombard with the larger shot.

So we think that they were shooting buckshot or swanshot, you know, smaller lead balls. It wasn't loaded, was it, when you found it? No, it wasn't. I wish you... You should have brought that thing here just for us to take a gander at. Oh, yeah. No stock either. No stock either. That was interesting, like that hook that you were just talking about.

They think they used to use that as a way to control the weapon, but also to manage the recoil a little bit. Exactly. Because it would be placed on the far side of a wall or the far, the hook would be on the far side of a wall or a branch. So when the gun would recoil, that hook would grab it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got you.

Yeah, exactly. And that's probably part of what the two people in the tripod are about too. Because it would have knocked somebody over otherwise. Been pretty powerful, depending on the charge that was put in there. But yes, so it's crude. It doesn't seem to have maker's marks. The pan is not dished out. There's no decoration.

We have history. You say the pan is not dished? No, it's flat. So when they put priming powder on it, it's like would lay that priming powder on a flat little surface. Yep. And take a match and touch it to it and boom. Do you think it hadn't occurred to them to pan it out?

Like were people panning out the arquebuses and stuff by then? Yeah. It's just, that's one reason we think it was made in Mexico because we know that Cortez made a bunch. In fact, I've cited, I think in that article, the quotations about how he made several. What we've discerned too is that this is actually a copper alloy rather than really bronze. So it's a copper alloy, but they would have considered it bronze. It's close enough. For some reason I thought when I read your paper, I thought you mentioned it being

dished out. It's just a flat little platform. Yeah. I'll show you a picture later, but it's just flat. And so there's a variety of reasons. Plus, it would have been, oh, here's the other thing. You can see how it was cast. You can see the sprue marks on there still. And as some of the experts have pointed out, no self-respecting foundry in Spain would have left those on there. You know, there's a matter of pride in making nice firearms. So there's a

variety of reasons. And several of the experts who we've sent that paper to agreed that it probably was made in Mexico, which is kind of cool. Who knows whether they made it specifically for this expedition or whether it was one of the ones that Cortez had. It certainly would have been, would not have been a Columbus one because his were iron as far as we know. Man. Yeah. The oldest, you know, even though Yianni said like gun, the oldest firearm, whatever.

We were trying to mix up the words because you can only use cannon or wall gun or hack butt so many times. But like the oldest gun found in the continental u.s and it's certainly the oldest bronze one uh and it's the only one from the coronado expedition i mean it's pretty phenomenal it's pretty cool uh we called it our trophy for a while so we didn't have to tell people what it was uh you know we're keeping it secret for a while so it really is our trophy artifact. Oh, yeah, it's the coolest thing in the world.

Yeah, it's kind of better than a helmet and a breastplate too, we decided. Have you found some of those? No, but we have found pieces of armor off those. And then there's two people in the area who found helmets, one of which has disappeared once again, and is probably thrown away now. And the other one, I went up to talk to the guy and he was so secretive, he wouldn't show it

to me. So I'm going to hopefully get a neighbor to go with me and we'll talk him into it. How does he, those are probably traded, right? Among the tribes. Well, here's the interesting thing. Given that there was a battle there and many people were killed and then everybody else dispersed, I suspect some were stashed in structures that the natives took. Some were possibly buried because that's how you did things when you wanted to store things at that time. You pretty much buried them if they were of value, and they might have gotten dug up later. In other cases, the natives killed some Spaniards and probably took them then. So some of them might have been ritually or ceremonially cached.

Some might have been destroyed in retaliation. Some might have been traded to other people. There are pieces of armor reported all around, some which occur in the Apache area and Hakome area, other natives of the time. So I suspect that they were in fact traded all over the place and ended up across the landscape. That's why we have a halo of stuff around our site. Are you familiar with the Charlton Heston movie called The Mountain Men? I should be. In this, it sort of takes place as the beaver getting diminished.

And Charlton Heston and his mountain man trapping partner go to a chief named Ironbelly, who is supposed to be passing along to them a hot tip about where there's still a lot of beaver left. And he is wearing Spanish armor. And that's kind of like a plot point. That Ironbelly has like old spanish armor and so it sort of alludes to this way that stuff from that era was passed around traded around and this being like up in wyoming but i have a very hot tip for you though oh good when you talk about the stat that there could be a stash of cornell helmets or whatever do you know there's a rumor that after the battle

of little bighorn a bunch of the stuff a bunch of the custer expedition stuff was stashed in the cave cool and somebody found it 100 years ago supposedly now it's in the now supposedly it's like still some saudi's basement no supposedly there's like a cache and some people have seen it or not of like stuff that was like pulled off of the custer's command and buried in a cave nearby well you know i will say you should go find that um if if i hear all kinds of stories like this in fact i actually have some people call me up and then i question them a little bit and then they get a rate that i won't do the research for them or go out and find it for them. The latest one is some supposed gold bars found up in the Superstition Mountains that are actually quite sizable.

And you can tell that they're painted gold and the earth around it is disturbed. I showed my brother, who's also an archaeologist, and I go, look at this. And he laughs. They're clearly not gold bars. They don't even look like gold bars from that period. And, and you can tell as an archaeologist that the ground looks like a garden, you know, it's all disturbed. And he's telling me all these other things and trying to get me to be his PI for some research project. And it's like, oh, you don't even need to do any work. And he doesn't understand. I don't just pass my authority around

like that. It's if I'm going to be your PI, I'm going to do the work, right? It's my reputation on the line. But anyway, I get requests all the time of people, lost Dutchman mine, gold, the iron door that's closing off a mine, the old Jesuit gold, paintings, religious paintings that have keys to where the gold is and all this. I mean, I get it all the time. And, you know, you can have a share of it or you can't have a share of it, but I'll give you this, you know, I mean, it's just like. I'm surprised Dan Brown hasn't reached out to you to do a book. But do you actually then ever work, as you're saying it's like a pi for somebody have you been hired out to do a project that you have accepted along those lines no not along those lines because i ask a lot of questions for i mean i had a professor one time who said i send all the

crackpots to you because i don't want to deal with them. And I said, you realize that one of these is going to come through one of these days. But what I do is I talk to people and usually I see through the story. Or I ask somebody questions that they just stop. Stop asking, stop communicating with me because if I'm going to waste my time, I want to make sure it's real. I don't do that kind of work anymore for anybody else. The only reason I would do it for the most part is if it was of a research interest to me. I have a couple projects going on now. One is actually paid and I retired years ago. I just sold my company and do research full time. I started that in my mid 40s. So right now I'm working on the Camino Real in the El Paso area, Las Cruces, El Paso area and interviewing natives

about the trail that became a Spanish trail and cultural patterns and landscape and stuff. And then this Coronado stuff. Anything I do other than Coronado distracts me from Coronado. And that's all I want to do right now. And you can tell that I'm really into what I do. And so anything that takes me away from that just is kind of, you know, go away. I don't want to deal with it. But if somebody calls me up and they have a legitimate find or if they think they do, I treat them with respect because people are interested

and there's a lot of people out there who have genuine interest or genuine finds. And I don't want to diminish those. In fact, we want to incorporate them into the record if they are real. But there's so many people. You know, one of the questions that I got asked earlier was, how did these people believe this wild stories about gold and stuff? Well, one is because in Mexico and Central America,

South America, excuse me, they had found gold. But the other thing is, even today, you look around and people believe the most outrageous things. And, you know, one person looks at the evidence

and says, that's BS. And another one looks at it and goes, wow, they have images of, you know, mountains of gold or whatever it is. And so it's just a matter of people have always been attracted to legends. People have always been attracted to the gold just beyond. You know, that's why so many people play the lottery and stuff and go to the dog track or the horse track. I mean, it's this chance of winning big. What is not to be exciting about that? I mean, that's just, you know, that's why people eat Lucky Charms for breakfast.

There you go. Do you feel that if you imagine the, the cannon location as the center of a circle what is the radius that you're interested in like after this battle I mean they probably whatever like dismembered some bodies buried them like stuff happened right I mean there was a lot of stuff well the site is a kilometer long as we understand it now okay so that's uh 10 football fields okay and and six of those wide including the lookout stations it's probably going to be a kilometer and a half long by the time we finish we just had to stop because of the heat. But we have evidence of occupation and battle throughout that area. In fact, one area we have what they called weapons of the land. We have

some of those. In other words, what the people who weren't shooting arquebuses and shooting crossbows were using. In other words, what they gathered, what the natives made for them or they made themselves. So we have these different areas. we can see the spaniards being chased across the landscape we can see the battle moving and so on um so i forget what your question was i'm sorry how big of an area i was asked like how big of an area because they're like stuff's got to be there. There is stuff there. Like crazy shit, right? Like bodies. Well, like I said, we're not looking for bodies right now.

Yeah. So. That's a whole different approach, right? You can't metal detect for them. Well, if they have knives in them and so on, you could. But no, remember she was saying, if you find a body, it's kind of.

Yeah. All right. Well, I'll go down there you find a body, it's kind of. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll go down there and take a look. Where's this place? Where's this place again? It's in South America. You know, Patagonia down there. How many years will you spend there, you think?

Probably five. And the reason I say five, I've been saying that since the beginning, is because it's going to take a lot. We're only about half done metal detecting. Plus we, in the part that we know about, and then we got to expand it to the north and south. I think it does go further. Uh, plus I want to keep digging this and a few other structures, but we want to leave some in place. And I think they're about five years. That's enough damage because what we do as archaeologists damages the site, whether we like to think that way or not. We know it does. I'm taking things out of context. What I'm doing is I'm putting markers down and using a global positioning system unit to mark where they're at so we can know exactly where they came from. And then the whole thing is gridded and stuff now. Not the whole thing, but where we're digging. So what my goal is, is to derive just enough information that I can convince all reasonable people, and maybe even some of the serious skeptics, that we actually have the town site of San Geronimo 3.

That it's actually a place where they built structures, where a lot of people lived, where other activities went on and so on. And then I'll stop and save it for the future. I want to explain to listeners a little bit of what you're talking about by saving it for the future. And it's just an archaeological site that I kind of the only one I have any real level of, you know, armchair authority on would be when the Folsom site where they found, it was kind of the smoking gun of humans in America during the ice age, where they found bison skeletons intermixed with projectile points.

When they originally dug it, they were just looking for big shit. They're looking for big bones. Later, people had to go back. Archaeologists later went back and had to go sift their debris pile for all the stuff they didn't think to look for, which is really helpful. Like no one thought pollen, right? No one thought about just like small chunks of wood little bits of charcoal whatever else and then later like now right they have this idea that man if we could have just found the the sort of plant matter

mixed in with that stuff it tells you something like what the climate was like you know time of year stuff and all that so I like like when like when you say like save some, like who knows, man, in a hundred years, you might go and take a little dirt and run it through some machine and it'll be like, no, there's women here. That's exactly my point. We cannot predict what future technologies are going to be able to tell us, what future analyses are going to be able to tell us. And that's what we have to be cognizant of.

I'm collecting as much data as I can while, you know, like I said, this is the only Coronado structure that we know of that has a cannon in it. So I have a responsibility there. Now I would only dig half of it if I could figure the structure out without digging the whole thing. But I need to dig the whole thing, unfortunately. And I'm going to dig some others that are associated with it. But for the most part, the town site's going to remain intact so that some other professional can come and ask new questions using new technologies, new types of analyses, and answer questions that I can't even fathom right now. But in terms of you demonstrating like, hey, this is something that needs to be paid attention to and needs to be protected. I mean, you got to be there, right?

Oh, we're there. I was there basically the first day. I mean, you know, the first day we had like a half a dozen of the gay boldheaded nails. And then the second day we had a crossbow bolt head with many more of them and other artifacts. And then it just kept building. And so we knew we had Coronado. At that time, I thought it was just an encampment. And then it got bigger and bigger. So even if it was just an encampment with just those things, it would be important because none had been found in Arizona. None had been found in

the 1500 miles between Compostela and Zuni, right? So in and of itself, that was important. And then after a while, I tried to explain the battle evidence away other ways, because that's what I'm supposed to do as an archaeologist is consider all of the possible explanations for what I'm finding. And finally, I had to settle on the battle. And then once we figured out it was a battle site, then I started backtracking through the records, recognizing that maybe not all battles were accounted for in the documents because they weren't supposed to be fighting the natives. But it started making sense with it being San Geronimo. So there's, I don't think anybody who's actually heard the data, seen the data and so on, and we've had lots of archaeologists and historians at the site, I don't think they question that it's Suya in the Suya Valley, San Geronimo 3 in the Suya Valley. I think the questions are is whether it was an actual official

town site, because that was a contractual thing with the king. And I'm arguing that I think there's enough evidence in the documentary record to say that it was. And then the other thing that some of the people are disputing is the way the route went. Well, I have four sites and they line up west-east at this point. I'm trying to check other possibilities, but right now that's what

it's suggesting, which might suggest a route that's a little further west, even in Sonora. But the reason I object to everybody insisting that it goes up the Sonora and then down the San Pedro, and it has to be that with a sidetrack, is because that's what everybody's thought, and they haven't found any evidence of Coronado and here i found evidence coronado because i haven't accepted that as god's truth i love the logic to be like yeah you found it but that's not the route yeah the route's over where there's nothing that's kind of my point that's how we archaeologists construct them and they think it's a side route i said well said, well, then you find the evidence there. So I'm trying to check every- Yeah, if this is a side route, I'd love to see the main route. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, that's the whole point here is

the thing that irritates me about that is they keep trying to pull me back into the rut of old thinking. And the only reason I'm finding this is I'm thinking outside the box. I'm considering all other possibilities that I can think of. And as I search and find things, the new possibilities come to mind and I check those out. So if they keep trying to pull me back into the, you know, it has to be Sonora River and it has to be San Pedro, then I start thinking like everybody's been thinking. And I need to think, okay, I've got four sites. How do I connect them? I have a fifth artifact that needs to somehow come into that. Plus this halo of things. How do those fit together? Well, we're trying to connect the two on the west to the two on the east, on the southeast. Is that one trail, or do we have two trails, or more trails?

You know, the funny thing about this rock art that I brought up earlier is there's a signature on the side of the rock, and it looks, it's scratched in, and it looks like it says t-o-b-a-r and that was one of the captain one of the lieutenants uh pedro de tovar and uh how does i i think people are going to want to know this how does one date stuff that's scratched into a rock you don't i mean if it's scratched in basically on the rock art that I showed you, you can see that some of it is older than others because some has regained some weathering on it, right? So if you have one rock, you can tell by some is older because it's more weathered and some is fresher. Some of it overlies older stuff. So that's one way.

It's all relative dating. But also, as I was kind of discussing earlier, if you analyze this rock art in relation to a codex from the Cortez period in Mexico, you can see that the dress, shoes, hat, and everything is just like what Cortez is wearing in one of the images. So basically, that's another way to date it as well. Now, that's not going to convince everybody, and not everybody's going to be convinced that the signature says Tobar. There's also a cross above it, which is what Spaniards did when they were signing their name in documents

and writing documents on paper. So, I mean, if we just had that, then I'd say, hmm, maybe some natives saw the expedition in a different valley and carved it when they got home. But we have Coronado artifacts associated with it. And we have these clearings, so it looks like it's a campsite. Now, it's possible that it's a side route or a second route. We know that Pedro de Tovar went on other side trips. He took a detachment and went and discovered other places or inspected other places and so on. People were already there, so it wasn't discovered.

So it's very likely that when they were coming through they were looking for an alternate route and he may have gone off so it's possible so that's the third possibility we have two routes we have a route that uh dips down to the southeast and connects them all or we have one route to the northeast from where we're at and this is a side trip where he went to look to see if there was gold or water, you know. We may be able to tell by the time I finish, but at a certain point, I'm going to stop looking and somebody else is going to have to fill in. And I get to tell the story the way I want if I'm the one looking for the sites and finding them. Will you stay on Coronado until you die or you think you'll get on to something else?

Well, I'm planning to live to 120. So I think by the time I get to 100, I'm probably going to stop looking. But you're going to stay on the Coronado deal. As long as it's interesting to me. That's how I do things. I don't have to do this. I do this because it's interesting. I feel like I'm at the top of my career. I've spent all this time learning how to do this well. And there's nothing I'd rather do in retirement. This is top of my career. I've spent all this time learning how to do this well. And there's nothing I'd rather do in retirement. This is kind of my golf game. And I'm not really, especially in the golf. So it's my way of entertaining myself, keeping my mind engaged,

staying healthy mentally when I'm out in the field. It keeps me healthy and physically, it's good exercise. And it's so intriguing. It's for me, you know, the people on the Coronado expedition, some of them went to get rich and everything, but everybody was kind of on an adventure, which is unfortunate for the native people. That's kind of what modern tourism is like in a way. We kind of damage cultures as we go and embark on our adventures. But in a way, this is an adventure for me. I'm discovering new things. Every day is an adventure. I mean, the crew keeps saying the site keeps giving. It's amazing what we thought it was and how it keeps growing and all this interesting knowledge and artifacts that keep coming out that allow us to enrich the story. And as long as it keeps doing that,

and as long as people keep giving me access, landowners, and as long as we keep finding things, and as long as I continue to have volunteers who are as enthusiastic and dedicated as they are, I'll just keep doing it until I get tired of it. Or I run out of money. This is all self-supported, although I did have a couple of donors recently donate to the research part. And then we've had some donors donate to the film, documentary film, but we need a lot more donors to make that happen. So tell, in conclusion, tell us how, you know, if someone wants to volunteer or lend support, like what's the best way to go learn about what you have going on, connect with you or your people if someone's like, hey, I got one of them bronze hats. Well, if they have one of those, they can talk to you guys and get my phone number directly. But it better be real, not one of those tinfoil ones.

Well, I have a webpage that has some contact information on there. And the film, documentary film, is by a professional documentary film crew, Francis Causey Films. And she has a webpage. Do you have a title for that yet? For the film? No, we haven't decided, but we have Coronado Films LLC. And there's ways that people can donate to that, either directly, if they don't need a tax deduction,

or through From the Heart Productions, which is a nonprofit, so you can get a tax credit for that. And then I have an organization that I'm working with that takes the money in for the research and would take sizable sums in or small sums for the film without taking anything off the top. So there's a variety of ways to do it. And I would appreciate it because, like I said, I'm totally self-funded, except for these more recent donations that have come in people are really getting thrilled about uh what we're finding and so on you gotta have some universities beating your door down now no no no they're jealous yeah um uh don't forget to mention you have a youtube channel with some interesting short films like

a little bit about dating like you're asking like how do you know when you're looking at whatever just kind of like cool stuff yeah just mention that and then also your academia web page with like all of your papers books i mean there's so much uh open information that we could where we can go to read your work right so on youtube it's just under my name you can find it and there's some corn auto and other stuff d-e-n-i and then s-e-y-m-o-u-r and then the academia page the same it's under independent uh researcher i think uh also with research gate same thing although that has fewer articles you can download articles for free on there you don't have to pay to get on.

And then I have a webpage that I'm just starting up. The old one I forgot to pay for, and it's kind of defunct, so I'm starting to do one. It needed to be updated anyway. Hotfinds.com? Yeah. And all you listeners, I will link to this in all of her – I'll link to all of this in the show notes. And, yeah, and the film is really what we're looking for funding for now. I just saw a rough cut of it the other day.

Any good? Oh, it was fabulous. I was scared because I, we archaeologists like to be behind the camera, not in front. And so I was prepared to be really embarrassed. They did a phenomenal job. I can see you kicking ass as a host. Seriously. Because you care, but not too much.

It's like a sweet spot, right? Well, thank you. I'll take that as a compliment. There's a sweet spot you've got to find. I've got one more last question. It might be the most important one, to be honest. I mean, in the film Indiana Jones

and the Last Crusade, that movie opens with River Phoenix as a young Indiana Jones stumbling on to some grave robbers, if you want to call them that, finding a crucifix from the Coronado expedition.

And then he has to, he tries to protect it and escapes. And I'm just wondering if you too have ever protected any of your finds by jumping onto a passing circus train

and falling into a pit of snakes leading into your lifelong phobia of snakes that will follow you for the rest of your life. I do have a lifelong phobia of rattlesnakes for good reason. Because I've run into probably a thousand of them since I was a little tiny girl. I did find Coronado's Cross on our site. One day, two of my crew members called me over and they had an ice chest right there. So I kind of knew something was up.

Metal detected and they had planted this Coronado's cross with fake jewels on it. That's funny. Look at this. This is sweet. Yeah. So normally we don't plant things like that because it can distract, you know, but I thought it was pretty funny. That's good. So I wrote to Harrison Ford asking if he would contribute because here's the real, you know.

Yeah. Real deal here. And I never heard back from his agent. But if you're out there, you know, we need funding for the film. We have an Emmy Award winning director, uh, and, uh, so on. So. That's great.

Yeah. So. Look forward to seeing it. Yeah. Me too. And good luck. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Yeah. Stay in touch with Corinne. So, uh, you know, we can have like an update in a year or two. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And then maybe, uh if steve decides to not claim artifacts from other dig sites then you can go volunteer with denny and that will satisfy your scratch your itch i'm like an antiquities looter we check those it's like you know some people have like a devil and a angel. I got like a antiquities looter on one shoulder and archaeologists on the other. You're so torn. You're so torn. And I got two dragons here going, and snakes, you know. None of that.

None of that. Well, thanks. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming out. I hope some people reach out and they might have a hot tip. Because I could picture some dude out hunting antelope or desert bighorns. And he'd be like, you know,

I seen something like that one time. Well, we'll name the site after somebody, if they come forward with something related to expedition. In fact, I've already promised that to one guy who. Now you're sweetening the deal.

There you go. You don't get to keep it, put on your mantle, but on the map, it'll be your name. Well, if they found it on private land, they do get to keep it.

But we'd hope that if they realize what it is, that upon their death or sooner, they would agree to put it somewhere where it can be available. You know, so. All right, everybody keep your eyes peeled. Brass helmets. Cannons. Crosses with jewels. Real jewels. A jewel-encrusted cross.

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