A Cold Trail

In the quiet darkness of a nondescript, locked storage room in the Arizona Historical Society on 949 E. 2^nd St., 32 lead artifacts that appear to be of Roman origin lay still in Styrofoam trays, stacked tray upon tray on the bottom shelf of a bookcase containing nothing else but a few pieces of miscellaneous knick-knacks and scrap paper covered in dust.

Laraine Jones turns the key. She opens the door and turns on the light. I don't know what I'm expecting. But I don't see them anywhere.

Jones bends over the shelves in the corner of the room and lifts off the cover of the tray that lays separate from the rest. Inside are two large dark grey crosses that lay flat, side by side, lacking any of the special archival casings I had imagined. 'This seems odd,' I think to myself.

Jones tells me that once the artifacts laid in tightly fitted trays inside a wooden trunk specially designed by its owner for the pieces, but that an archivist advised the museum to find a new storage solution due to the damaging effects the wood was having on the lead.

Jones is the museum collections manager at the Arizona Historical Society. We are on the second floor of the building in a room with no pomp or circumstance, unlike other archive rooms on the same floor containing rows and rows of valuable remnants of history that are painstakingly organized and proudly displayed.

Jones had laughed a bit when I asked her over the phone to see the artifacts. For years, there was heated debate between the finders of the lead pieces and experts in the archeology field.

"What was their origin?" they asked. The theories ranged from claims that they were evidence of the Lost Tribe of Israel's presence in Tucson or that they were the creation of a young Mexican boy to claims even that they must have been planted in the ground by their discoverers.

The media of the twenties was flushed with these hypotheses, and news came not only from the Tucson Citizen and Arizona Daily Star but even from The New York Times.

As she lifts the smaller of the two crosses out of the tray and onto the folding table next to the shelves, she explains that she moved the trays to the lower shelves some time ago, a few inches off the floor, because about every six weeks or so, inevitably someone comes to the museum asking to see these pieces of mystery. She says that they were so heavy that it was difficult to constantly move them off of higher shelves.

She instructs me to place white cotton gloves on my hands before touching the cross. The cross weighs 20 pounds, unlike its partner that weighs 64 pounds, she says. I lean over, afraid to touch it. The subject of so much speculation seems to me something that should not be touched, but I say nothing, and inspect the carvings in the center of the cross.

It is Latin, carved in capital letter script, in what appears to be a child's handwriting. The letters are rounded, the lines slant downwards and all the words are squeezed together. My first thought is that they don't seem to be legitimate. The lines that make the letter B seem like those of a child who is practicing his penmanship, not the rigid forms of ancient Latin script. I mention this to Jones. She says that no one has ever said that to her before. But I'm sure that it has been noticed over and over again.

The cross itself is a steel-grey color; it is cool to the touch, even through gloves, perhaps due to the coldness of the room we are in. The edges are rough, but square. The side with the carvings is flat, appearing to be the side cast into the mold, and the back of the cross is rough, discolored and still bearing chunks of caliche.

The cross is one of 32 pieces of molded lead found in Tucson, most containing carvings of Latin, Hebrew, and drawings of temples, crosses, hieroglyphs and flying angels with swords. The cross I am peering at is half of the first find on September 13, 1924 by Charles Manier and his family.

According to Manier's friend, Thomas Bent, in a recount of the discovery, investigation and years long speculation about the pieces entitled "The Tucson Artifacts," is that Manier and family had been driving home from Picture Rocks and stopped at the limekiln ruins near Silverbell Road in Tucson.

Manier noticed something sticking out of the ground, kicked it and after it made a strange sound, tried to dig it out of the ground with his cane. But the object was held tightly into the earth by caliche, a calcium carbonate deposit hardened over time. Manier eventually used tools that he kept in his car, leftover from a war, to pry the object from its encasement.

Jones tells me that Manier recruited the help of Bent, a team of laborers and experts from the University of Arizona to remove the remaining artifacts. They uncovered more crosses, all with Latin carvings, swords containing words and pictographs, spears and spear tips, and intricately carved ceremonial pieces. Two of the pieces each have a snake, from an entirely separate mold, woven around their arms.

"What kind of snake is that?" I ask Jones. She has no answer and mentions that no one ever asked her about that either. I wonder if the flat, pointed head of each snake in any indication of the species, a marker for the origin of the pieces.

Jones tells me that in the 1920s, archeology began to become a credible discipline, and that the discovery of these artifacts coincided with the "Tut Mania" that had seized the imaginations of many after the November 4, 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter and his team in Egypt. She said that during this time there were several "major" archeological discoveries, some real and others hoaxes.

During this time period, "there's all kinds of stuff happening and some of it is a little shady," she says.

Jones says that the artifacts caused speculation in the archeology community because if they were "indeed thousands of years old, it meant people who could speak Latin and a little bit of Greek had somehow made it to the American southwest."

She says that if the pieces were legitimate, it would mean the history of the entire western world would need to be rewritten.

Jones tells me the theory that a young Mexican boy named Timitio Ohohui had created the artifacts while living on the homestead of the limekiln 40 years prior. Bent's recount of the story describes the same theory. Bent wrote that a craftsman in the area had recalled the boy, his love for sculpture of soft metals and his collection of books on foreign languages, and told the excavators this. Bent also wrote that the man, 40 years older at the time of the discovery, was never found.

Finding the artifacts was easy enough. A simple trip to the front desk of the Arizona State Museum, located on the University of Arizona campus, resulted in the index finger of the man at the front desk pointing to the Arizona Historical Society across the street. Finding people who could talk about them was a different matter.

Jones points me in the direction of Don Burgess, who recently published "Romans in Tucson? The Story of an Archeological Hoax" in Journal of the Southwest Spring 2009 edition. I hope that he can guide me to other experts on the subject. The email response to my inquiry states he has family in town and that I should just read his story in the journal.

This is the beginning of many dead ends.

I look for names of those involved in the excavation and research. The official investigation by the University of Arizona was all done from September of 1924 until the final report by Byron Cummings in January of 1930. Cummings is dead, Manier is dead, Bent is dead. Countless others who assisted or researched are all dead. My quest for sources is going nowhere.

Cummings, contrary to his previous support for the claims of archeological worth, wrote in his final report to Thomas Bent that the validity of the artifacts could not be determined and that the State Museum could not justify purchasing them. Jones says that this caused a rift between the university and Bent. She also says that the time of the report coincided with the Great Depression, a coincidence that never sat well with Bent.

The cited reasons for the decline of sale were that lead is a poor choice of weaponry, there are no bones excavated with the swords, indicating that no battle had ensued, and the 64 pound weight of the heaviest cross was unlikely to have been transported from a great distance. Some of the artifacts contain dates later than 560 AD, after the movement of the sand, rocks and gravel from the Tucson Mountains into the Silverbell area in which the artifacts are buried, indicating they had been planted there.

He also wrote that several of the Latin inscriptions were word for word copies of phrases that could be found in several Latin grammar books of the 1920s, and the phrases together created meaningless, purposeless scripts. The most telling reason, he wrote, for the failure to validate the historical significance of the artifacts was that a hole extending behind one of the spears that had been excavated appeared to have been drilled and resealed, also indicating intentional placement of the pieces.

The rift between Bent and the university means there is very little chance anyone there or at the Arizona State Museum can talk to me about them. I visit the museum's library to speak with a librarian. She locates two books for me, the journal article by Burgess and the documentation of the story by Bent. She tells me she doesn't know who else I can talk to, since the university hadn't been involved in the case since 1930.

The lead bears a secret that has escaped all those who have sought after it. As time passes, the spectacle that they once created dies.

Laraine Jones knows the story. Thomas Bent left behind his manuscript, however biased in the favor of the validity of the pieces, and Don Burgess wrote his journal.

But who else is out there who remembers? Who is left that can tell the tale without citing the story from a book he has read?

The mystery remains unsolved, and the artifacts are covered in darkness in the storage room, perhaps to be forgotten, perhaps never to share their secrets.