Find the Marker
The Tooele County marker is in the landscaped gravel on the southeast side of the Operations Building at Wendover Airport, right next to the Avfuel sign. It highlights Danger Cave, one of North America’s oldest archaeological sites.
GPS 40°43’39”N 114°2’15”W
Dig Deeper
Tooele County’s Danger Cave used to have a different name. Located not far from the Utah-Nevada border, this place used to be called “Hands and Knees Cave” because archaeologists curious about what might be inside had to get on their hands and knees to crawl in. That’s already a scary situation for the claustrophobic. But during excavations by the University of Utah in the middle of the 20th century, a boulder fell and almost crushed one of the archaeologists, a close call that inspired a new title – Danger Cave.
Archaeologists’ thoughts on what the Danger Cave finds mean has changed over time. Following early excavations in the mid-20th century, archaeologists thought that the seeds and seed-processing artefacts found within the cave layers indicated that the people here had suited their lifestyle to unchanging desert environments. This was called the “Desert Culture concept.”
But later investigations of the cave and the clues found within indicated that this hypothesis wasn’t quite right. The oldest layers of the cave, between 12,000 and 9,700 years ago, didn’t show the blankets of seeds that the younger layers did. People were living in the cave, to be sure, but seed processing was a shift that happened later. The people who used and lived in Danger Cave during the earliest times were doing something different.
Exactly what that something different was, archaeologists and paleoecologists are still investigating. The 12,000 year mark is the end of the Ice Age, when the global climate became warmer and wetter. It was also when many large animals – such as mastodons and giant ground sloths – became extinct. That change might explain the shift seen in the Danger Cave layers.
All of these stories are connected. How the people who used Danger Cave lived, and how community habits changed through time, is tied to sweeping environmental changes that affected all of what’s now Utah. If we can understand a little more about what the layers of Danger Cave represent, we can understand a little more about just how dramatically these lands have changed through the ages.
Want to Go Farther?
Danger Cave is closed to public visitation to help protect the site. Visit the Natural History Museum of Utah’s archaeology exhibits to learn about Utah’s peoples and where they lived.