Ceremonial Cave

In the sun-baked Hueco Mountains near El Paso, a deep cave in a limestone cliff holds a haunting story that can never be fully told. Within its dark recesses, the cave walls and ceiling are coated with heavy soot, yet faint symbols and figures—the remains of ancient rock art—can still be traced through the distortions of smoke and modern graffiti. A deep shaft—the work of bat guano miners—cuts through the center of the chamber, leaving mine tailings heaped amid the backdirt piles shoveled out by looters.

Save for a few scraps of fiber and flint chips amid the more-modern refuse, there is little evidence on the surface to tell us what might have transpired in this cave in the ancient past. And yet we know that sometime during a period of some 600 years, a number of objects apparently were placed there deliberately, their richness and diversity as a group unparalleled in this region. Along with ornaments of turquoise, shell, and obsidian, prayer sticks, and spears were more puzzling items and deposits. Some of these, no doubt, are the day-to day trappings and debris left behind by much earlier peoples who visited and perhaps stayed briefly in the cave. These visits—long before the cave's more specialized use—probably spanned thousands of years.

Much of what we know of the site we call Ceremonial Cave harks back to accounts from the 1920s and 1930s. The story, as we know it, is told largely in the artifacts that were amassed by looters and archeologists alike. And based on these objects, the site must have had, at one time, special significance to peoples of the distant past.