What does this look like?
It looks like three stones stacked by human hands to me.
Who? Why? When?
The rocks did not fall from the wall or ceiling of the cave that I could tell. There is no trace of a break or fracture in the cave or some such occurrence that may have sent the rocks tumbling and falling into place.
Yet, even if they had fallen naturally, it’s impossible to believe they landed stacked so elegantly.
The rocks could have been set deeper into the stone hollow and thus farther into the dry shelter. But they are nonetheless well under the lip of the cave mouth and so sheltered fairly well.
The cave is found on the mountain in a deep canyon, on a relatively steep slope above a section of a creek that only runs seasonally, but that leads into a perennial stream just a short distance away. The photo is taken looking at a sharp angle up into the cave.
To reach this place requires a strenuous hike into Condor National Forest without aid of a trail anywhere and over some of the most rugged terrain I’ve hiked in the county.
The cave is impossible to see from any distance away due to the angle of its opening and a shroud of bushy chaparral.
California Indians visited nearby places in old times and Americans more recently have grown marijuana plants in the canyon.
I don’t have a single reason to suspect that this is the work of guerilla weed growers. That does not make sense to me, for various reasons, not the least of which is the proximity of the cave to decent growing grounds, which are too far away.
I am inclined to think this is a much older artifact than something possibly left by weed growers or Americans of recent times.
The stones look like a possible deadfall gravity trap designed to catch small game, but it strikes me as an odd place to set one up.
The Chumash of old were known to have crafted such traps sometimes baiting them with an acorn (Harrington 1942).
Or maybe the stones were used to hold and store something out of dew and rain and off the ground, to keep it dry and well-aired and so preserved from rot. This possibility seems more likely to me than a trap.
What else might this be?
I don’t think those rocks ended up there on their own.
This is an artifact. An artifact of a different kind than usual.
And I wonder how long it’s been there, who left it and what it was used for.