Mummy Cave
Wyoming
Between Cody and the east entrance to Yellowstone, the North Fork of the Shoshone River cuts through the Absaroka Range at an elevation of sixty-three hundred feet. On the face of a volcanic cliff above the river, a shallow rock shelter roughly one hundred fifty feet wide extends about forty feet back into the stone. This place is called Mummy Cave, and it contains one of the longest continuous records of human habitation ever documented in North America.
Archaeologists excavating the site from nineteen sixty-three to nineteen sixty-six found thirty-eight distinct cultural layers, each sealed by sterile sediment deposited between periods of use. The deepest layers date to approximately seventy-three hundred years before the common era, more than nine thousand years ago. The upper layers end around fifteen eighty. For nearly ninety-five hundred years, people returned to this overhang again and again, sheltering from the Absaroka winters, making tools, leaving behind the compressed evidence of their lives.
The cave is named for a discovery made about two meters below the surface, in a layer dated to roughly seven hundred twenty of the common era. Preserved by the extraordinary dryness of the Absaroka air, the remains of a person were found clothed in a sheepskin garment decorated with fur and feathers. Radiocarbon dating placed this individual's life at around seven hundred twenty of the common era, give or take about a century. Archaeologists named him Mummy Joe. Unlike the wet-soil sites across most of North America, where organic materials rot away within decades, Mummy Cave preserved wood, hide, and feathers alongside the stone tools, giving researchers a far more complete picture of what daily life actually looked like across those many centuries.
The site was excavated by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is visible from the highway between Cody and Yellowstone, a dark slot in the cliff face that has been a human address for longer than most civilizations have existed.
