An Architectural Puzzle in a Soybean Field
K. Kris Hirst, 2007
Originally published at about.com
Around 1988, I was assigned to investigate the property in the vicinity of a proposed highway project—the bypass of the town of Marshalltown, Iowa. If the name Marshalltown sounds familiar, it should; it is name of the manufacturing company that makes the famous Marshalltown trowel, your "friend in the field."
The Farm Town of Marshalltown, Iowa
Like many towns in the American Midwest, Marshalltown is a child of the railroad, but in the 20th century, the automobile—or to be more precise, the semi-tractor trailer—and U.S. 30 brought prosperity to this quiet farming community. By the early 1980s, truck traffic through town had increased the danger to the populace, and, as happens in growing towns all over the world, a highway bypass skirting the populated part of town was proposed by the Department of Transportation. In the United States, as in most of the developed world, federally-funded projects require archaeological inspection of the planned route prior to its construction. My firm (or should I say, the firm I worked for at the time) was hired to do that inspection.
The project was to include about 10 miles of new right-of-way, along the south side of Marshalltown. I did my homework, read all the published reports, talked to many landowners, hired my staff and headed out to begin the survey.
My crew consisted of Linda, a good friend with lots of experience in Maya archaeology as well as the Midwest; Lucy, our graphics artist who was tired of sitting at a desk all summer long; and the Tims, two newly minted BAs in Anthropology from the University of Iowa. One Tim, Tim the tall, had actually been born in Marshalltown, a bonus, it would seem.
The Field Survey Begins
Like many archaeologists, I suspect, I like to complete the pedestrian survey entire project corridor first, to identify any possible archaeological components and areas where surface visibility would require testing—that is, any areas where vegetation or soil deposition hides the original surface and could mask archaeological sites. We flag any archaeological sites we run across, in order to come back and subsurface test at a later date. (Today archaeologists use GPS equipment to mark the locations of their sites). In this case, we began our work at the east end of the project and walked westward along the proposed path.
We were lucky enough to begin the survey early in the summer, before the crops got big and leafy obscuring the ground surface. In the cultivated fields we recorded and collected a number of small lithic scatters, that is, small areas where a handful of stone chips were noted on the surface of the ground. These were plotted and labeled for further investigation. Because of the multiple site identifications, it took us the better part of a week to arrive at the western end of the project. As is usually the case, the crew fell to telling stories of our past archaeological digs. Linda spoke warmly of her experiences in Mexico, investigating Maya sites and visiting others.
"My favorite kind of site," she said, climbing over a barbed wire fence into a bean field, "is the Maya ball court."
"Ball court?" asked Tim the not tall. "What's that?"
Mayan Ball Courts: Dreaming of More Exotic Archaeology
"A Mayan ball court is a large depressed space with stone walls that archaeologists think—well, we're pretty sure—was used for sporting events. There are several Maya vases that illustrate these games, played with a rubber ball. The first Mayan ball courts were built around 1400 BC; when the Spanish got here, in the 16th century, the games were still being played, by the Aztecs. There's even an example in the American southwest. After the Spanish got here in the 16th century, they did their darnedest to destroy them all, but fortunately, they missed a few."
"An arena, then, basically?" asked Tim the tall.
"Exactly. Most of them were I-shaped, with cut stone steps on both sides of a long narrow alleyway. The alleys ranged in size from about 50 to 115 ft long by 10 to 40 ft wide or so. Copán has one that's pretty cool."
"What was the game like?" asked Lucy.
"Well, they think it was more or less like soccer—you weren't supposed to touch the ball with your hands or feet."
"Boooooring."
The Dangers of Ancient Sports
"Hardly!" said Linda. "The players wore heavy stone horse collar arrangements and, at least in the 16th century, if you lost, you lost your life. On one of the vases, it shows that you actually had to play on the stair arrangements, too. Some of the ball courts have a stone hoop on a side wall."
"Wow, that sounds really neat. I want to work there, or somewhere where you actually find big architectural structures," remarked Tim the not tall.
"Well, there is good archaeology in Iowa, it's just a little harder to find," I pontificated, and with that, we reached the top of a steep hill.
"Oh my god," said Linda—and there it was, a large 240 x 400 foot depressed oval cut into the hillside, the young soybeans making a nice concentric pattern on the inside. One side of the oval was steeply banked, and it looked, for all the world, like a Midwestern version of a Maya ball court. There had been nothing in the history, nothing in the plat books, and not one of the landowners had mentioned it to us. What was it?
Utter Befuddlement
I must confess; I had a moment of complete and utter befuddlement in the field. There we were out in the wilds of the prairie peninsula of the American Midwest, surveying ahead of a proposed four-lane bypass of the town of Marshalltown, Iowa, and there it was, an enormous physical anomaly—a 200 x 450 ft (60 x 135 m) diameter oval depression, more than 3 ft (1 m) deep over all, with a large banked wall on the south side.
When I first got a look at the enormous depression smack dab in the middle of a soybean field, I was stunned. Two questions were uppermost in my mind: What in the world was it? and Why hadn't the landowner said anything to me about it? There was no way the landowner could be unaware of it; he'd planted those soy beans inside the oval, in concentric rings. Surely he must have had a good idea of what it was—but he hadn't said a word.
So there we were, me and my crew, alone in the field, with a depression to investigate. We left the ridge above the oval, and began to survey its interior. Artifacts were pretty scarce here; in fact, the first artifact we found was a metal automobile hubcap marked "Chevrolet;" other artifacts included an automobile door handle; two unidentified metal strips, probably chrome decorative stripping from an automobile; and two fragments of a 78 rpm record.
One of the rules of archaeology is, if you don't know what something is, ask a bunch of questions. When I spoke to the landowner later, he laughed as hard as I've ever seen a guy laugh. He knew what it was, all right. It just never occurred to him that it could be considered an archaeological site.
Old Fashioned Dirt Track Racing
The big oval depression was all that remained of the Marshalltown Speedway, a dirt-track raceway operated in this place from 1952 to 1954. According to the landowner, Hymie Rovner and Jim Moehr had leased the land from him in 1951 and built the track with a bulldozer themselves. The park had bleacher seating for 1,000. Protection for the crowd was a wall of railroad ties, placed on end and buried approximately 1/3 their length in front of the bleachers. The track had no outdoor lighting, and racing sessions were held during summer afternoons and early evenings. Liability insurance was purchased on a weekly basis from Lloyds of London, and the extravagant expense of that put an end to the race track after 1954.
Newspaper reports from the Marshalltown Times and Republican during the summer of 1952 touted stock car, hot rod, and bicycle races held on a twice-weekly basis, Wednesdays and Fridays, with special events on holidays. At first, the events drew "capacity crowds," and included up to a half dozen hot rod and stock car events, as well as local beauty queens on hand to congratulate the winners. By 1953, the races were only once a week during the summer, and by 1954 the added attractions of novelty acts--such as racers driving through a wall of fire with a passenger riding on the car hood--still didn't bring in adequate crowds.
Maybe Not NASCAR...
Dirt track car racing—also called stock car racing—was extremely popular during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and although NASCAR never sanctioned the Marshalltown Speedway at this location, its archives from the time period indicate that in many mid-size towns in the United States had their own "bull ring." Interestingly, there has been a recent upswing in interest in dirt track racing, and the Marshalltown Speedway has been rebuilt in town and, now sanctioned by the IMCA, it is described by the Marshalltown Visitor's Bureau as "Iowa's fastest high banked quarter-mile dirt oval."
The old Marshalltown Speedway is just a memory, now; unlike its older counterparts in Mesoamerica, there didn't seem to be a very good reason to redesign a highway around it. The comparison of Mesoamerican ball courts to American dirt track speedways may seem a bit of a stretch—but is it? At their cores, aren't all arena sports fulfilling at least part of the same human desires?
No comments:
Post a Comment