Stones and Bones
We drove to the top of a dusty ridge, golden and red from oxidized mineral deposits in the ground, crumbling walls of sand and stone that looked like cheap stale cake, and in the walls of the cliffs you could see bones. Here, there are no roads, no parking lots, just suggested routes in the sand taken by others sometime before, ruts and tracks and holloways. The color of the landscape inspired Roy Chapman Andrews and his crew of archaeologists in the 1920’s to call this place, locally known as Bayanzag, the Flaming Cliffs, and it is one of the largest known dinosaur deposits in the world; 75–71 million-year-old Late Cretaceous fossils, including where western science discovered the Velociraptor and Protoceratops.
Humans have always collected things. There are ancient cave dwellings with shark teeth found that come from deserts thousands of miles away, things that were traded for inherent value. The word museum comes from the Greek mouseion, “seat of the Muses” — most famously the great library and research institution of Alexandria, where scholars worked under the patronage of the goddesses of poetry, music, and learning. In the Renaissance this word made a comeback but in the form first of small collections individuals would have from recent travels, small museums. They were stored in cabinets or small rooms and were called Cabinets of Curiosities, or Wunderkammer: wonder rooms. Objects collected were oddities, small handicrafts, bones and stones and fossils, objects of beauty from nature that were still new to knowledge. Fossils were popular.
The concept of geology, of a world that shifts and moves and is not static, this idea is fairly new to us, an idea of ‘deep time.’ The phrase “deep time” was coined by John McPhee in his 1981 book Basin and Range, by visualizing Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history as the span of a human arm. In this analogy, the history of the world begins at one shoulder, and a single swipe of a nail file on the middle finger removes all human existence. In this mental framework mountains move and plates of the earth’s crust fold and morph like dough; things once thought as locked and firm, now fluid.
In the 1830’s Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology which sparked the imagination of many to look to rock and stone as a window to history instead of just rubble. It allowed for many to realize there were worlds of the earth’s history that no longer exist, and that we can see into those worlds through looking at rock and stone. It was the first time we realized extinction was possible, primarily through the work of French naturalist Georges Cuvier, that there were animals that ruled the land that no longer exist.
Previous to this, fossils landed in the realm of myth and mistake, but there was a new science that explained it, and created a thirst for understanding; even the Queen of England had a mineralogist on call. The concept of the “Sublime” was written into thought by the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke in his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. This is the tide mark we can see where wilderness and mountains and oceans and deserts became beautiful in our collective psyche, when we stopped fearing the snowy peaks and began to know the joy of feeling largeness and insignificance. In seeking out the sublime in mountains and caves we began to notice things like geology, plate tectonics, and fossils.
It was the trend for the wealthy to go on a trip and collect things, objects, art, artifacts, and fossils to bring and spark conversations and study in their wunderkammers back home. Some sort of shift was omnipresent in culture in these days; philosophy had changed and the idea of the new Sciences were emerging. You can see this in the writings of Francis Bacon and the idea of philosophy being about going out rather than sitting in a dark room engrossed in contemplation. A universal natural history and categorization. Travel was central to this new science; we must go out to get things and bring them back to study and look at. The frontispiece of Bacon’s book Novum Organum (1620) had, in Latin across the page: Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia (“Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase”), a quote itself from the Book of Daniel (12:4).
Travel is linked with the success of the new sciences, with the wonder rooms, a going out must begin.
The grand tour was born from this, the gap year taken by the privileged where one would travel through Europe and the holy lands to bring back art and stories. A certain bacchanalia would happen as well, ‘what happens on the grand tour, stays on the grand tour.’ The grand hotels of Europe were built to house this market; guide books were written to advise. As modern organized travel began, so too did the large museums of the world. The collections and Wunderkammers began to grow in size, and buildings were needed to house the curios. The Ashmolean Museum was a collection of Cabinets of Curiosities by Elias Ashmole donated to Oxford for the hope of study and knowledge. Something learned from the objects themselves. With objects brought back came ideas and influence; architecture, fashion, and music. The American Museum of Natural History was born through this.
By the late 1800’s the industry of collection was at its height and established museums were funding expeditions all over the globe in search for artifact, stone, and bone. There was a joining of interests in hunting, travel, collecting, geology, conservation, and science, as if all of these were one motion. Patrons of museums would be hired to go out into the world to gather and bring back things to house in the great halls.
It was in this period Roy Chapman Andrews would thrive. Born 1884, in Beloit, Wisconsin, as a child, he explored forests, fields, and waters nearby, developing marksmanship skills. He taught himself taxidermy and used funds from this hobby to pay tuition to Beloit College. After graduating, Andrews applied for work at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). He so much wanted to work there that after being told that there were no openings at his level, Andrews accepted a job as a janitor in the taxidermy department and began collecting specimens for the museum. During the next few years, he worked and studied simultaneously, earning a Master of Arts degree in mammalogy from Columbia University. Andrews also joined The Explorers Club in New York during 1908, four years after its founding.
From 1919-1930 Chapman would spend a great deal of time in China and Mongolia as an explorer for the AMNH in search of bones, fossils, animals, and history. He wrote: “These expeditions went into Mongolia to explore the Gobi Desert, seek the ancestry of man, and study the natural history of the region.” There was a thread of thought in these years that was steeped in racism and cultural superiority. 19th-century race theories often sought to place the origin of the “white” race in Central Asia, Out of Asia as opposed to Out of Africa, and Andrews and these expeditions were not immune to these ideas; a sad impetus, only alongside that came dinosaur fossil discovery.
In 1922 the expedition arrived at a place called Bayanzag (also Ulaan Ereg) and later the place would be called the Flaming Cliffs by Andrews and the team. It was a geologically specific region where preserved dinosaur fossils, like a treasure chest, daily flow out of the gobi ground. Tonnes of ancient bone were extracted through the years, packaged, and sent to the American Museum of Natural History. This region is of immense importance in palaeontology and archaeology because they represent one of the world’s most significant fossil sites, offering an unparalleled window into the Late Cretaceous Period (75–71 million years ago). The site is most famous for yielding the first-ever discovered dinosaur eggs in 1923, which fundamentally changed scientific understanding of dinosaur behavior and reproduction, and still to this day continues to provide essential data on dinosaur behavior, species diversity, and ecosystem evolution.
From the Flaming Cliffs, one can move westward through desert and steppe all the way to Ukraine; it is landscape linked to human history, trade, and war. Just north of the Flaming Cliffs, there is a valley where a river cuts north into ancient mountains, the Orkhon River. It was here where so many ancient civilizations would set up their base, geographically significant as it was arable land in the middle of desert and steppe. The Orkhon is where the Turkish language and culture came from, the Uyghurs; it is where Genghis Khan built his capital. From here, along with certain breeds of horses, one could rule from the Pacific to Hungary, and he did. And in McPhee’s Deep time view, you can see through a looking glass at what the ancient world looked like.
There are giant standing stones in this valley, pre-history kings and queens still unknown in our books line this valley. There are signs in the soil of the past, in the dinosaur bones, but not just the fossils, there are shells and coral from antique oceans.
In time this deep, things that seemed dead and still become fluid and in motion. Mountains bow, plates morph, oceans meander, and entire worlds are created and destroyed in epochs. There are drawings in the caves of the deserts of Chad, images that show the grasslands and animals that thrived there long before it was a desert. Likewise, there are histories of the Gobi and the Altai-Himalaya that are yet to be told but can be felt in the cultural objects found still lingering in the landscapes.
Standing at the top of the Flaming Cliffs there was a family selling collections of trinkets taken from the earth, all misplaced in space and time, orange and red coral prayer beads and conch shells, auspicious items from when the Altai-Himalaya region was the seabed of the ancient Tethys Ocean (or Tethys Sea). The conch shells, sacred items in Buddhism, harken to the ancient sea, as well as the trade routes that line the desert floor and make up what is now called the Silk Road (a singular misnomer as the road is a series of many roads).
From the top of the Flaming Cliffs we walked down into the crevices of the land and had to side step to avoid crushing 70 million year old bones. They were everywhere and it was hard for my mind to understand and to believe this place was real, what Tristan Harris calls the “Rubber band effect,” when the mind sees and observes something overwhelming but snaps back into thinking it can’t be real.
To travel into the desert, into places like this, not only magnifies the sublime but stretches one’s mind into deep time, a perspective that helps remind us how connected we all are to nature, how small we all are in the timescale of nature, and how our future depends on shifting view points of relation and connectedness, that we are not separate from the tides of motion of the landscape, that we are shaped by it and our language and song sing melodies made from the wild.
