In the fall of 2021, I drove from my home in Denver to the University of Colorado, Boulder, to see a spectacular archaeological find. At the university’s natural history museum, I met Douglas Bamforth, an archaeology professor.
Bamforth recounted how, in the summer of 2008, Brant Turney was running a landscaping crew not far from campus. Working on the front yard of Patrick Mahaffy, Turney put his shovel into the ground, and about 18 inches down struck a hole about the size of a shoebox. He inspected the strange void and pulled out a hidden treasure. Mahaffy was called and shown the discovery. He wasn’t sure what to do, exactly, but ended up telephoning the university’s department of anthropology. The next day, Bamforth went out to investigate.
Bamforth confirmed the find was a collection of 83 stone tools—one “core” for chipping off flakes, scores of flakes, one chopping tool, and eight finely made knives, flat and tear shaped, like big fallen leaves from a fantastical jungle tree. “I thought they were Indian artifacts from maybe 100 or 200 years ago,” Mahaffy later said. Mahaffy, collaborating with Bamforth, paid for a residue analysis on the stones. The results: on some of the tools was blood from sheep, bear, horse, and an extinct species of camel. The cache had likely laid buried for 13,000 years.
Bamforth believes that the Paleoindian people who made the tools lived in small groups in the region. Most of the raw stone material came from what is now Colorado and next-door Wyoming. The cache was buried at the edge of a stream, placed in a sandy, coarse soil and covered by a dark, clay sediment. “It looks like someone gathered together some of their most spectacular tools and other ordinary scraps of potentially useful material,” Bamforth theorizes, “and stuck them all into a small hole in the ground, fully expecting to come back at a later date and retrieve them.”
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Because so much work can go into crafting tools, it is not surprising that toolmakers expend additional effort preserving them. Macaques in the wild reuse the tools they make. Chimpanzees do too. One study by the biological anthropologists Crickette M. Sanz and David B. Morgan found that chimpanzees in the Republic of Congo reused wooden sticks for puncturing termite mounds more than half the time. Similarly, in Guinea, scientists have observed chimpanzees reusing stone hammers and anvils—often several times, occasionally more than a dozen times—for cracking nuts. The scientists interpret this as a near caching behavior, to reduce the amount of energy it takes to find the right raw materials (they are selective in the plants used) and to construct the tool.
Stone tools, which our most distant ancestors started creating more than three million years ago in East Africa, represent uniquely suited objects for reuse. From the very first days of stone tools, it seems that our forebears realized they are a kind of blank slate, open to nearly endless reuse. Studies of Oldowan tools, the technology that started about 2.6 million years ago, show that toolmakers were highly selective of the materials they quarried, transported across the landscape, used, and then reused—constantly sharpened by breaking off dulled edges. Stone tools are never really “finished”; their potential for reuse is continual. Initially, these tools could have been left in the open, waiting for their next use, as macaques and chimpanzees do.
But at some point, early hominins would have realized—perhaps even from watching food-hoarding animals—that they would do better to accumulate their tools when they had the chance, then store them for a later day. As our hominin ancestors invested more in a tool, the more energy and value expended on it, the more likely it would be protected. It is probable that hominins using the Oldowan technology applied the scatter hoarding strategy—à la the gray squirrel, to cache tools around a territory, ready for wherever an animal needed to be butchered or some tough roots needed to be processed.
The hoard emerged as a human strategy. While it seems probable that our ancestral lineage long used hoards to hide tools and food, it is difficult to recover and study hoards. They are, by definition, often hidden, and even when a collection of items is found, archaeologists may be reluctant to label it as a hoard because the intent behind it can be hard to discern. Hoards become far more prominent in the archaeological record with the introduction of metals, in part because these are easier to find using metal detectors. Additionally, metal items—particularly in the form of weaponry and money—were highly valued items, transportable, and easy to hide. For many, the ground proved to be the safest bank.
Many hoards are presumed to result from people needing to hide their valuables when faced with a crisis, such as during riots or war. For instance, the Bredgar Hoard of 34 gold coins in Kent was likely buried when the Roman Empire invaded Britain in AD 43. Archaeologists and metal detecting sleuths have found more than 1,200 hoards of coins in England alone. The Staffordshire Hoard is among the most famous. Found by an amateur metal detectorist in 2009, the hoard is the largest ever recovered in England, comprising more than 600 gold and silver artifacts of religion and warfare. Archaeologists believe the hoard belonged to King Penda, who ruled Mercia, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in central England, until his death in AD 665. They believe the hoard is loot taken from his enemies and then buried for safekeeping during this tumultuous period. In many cases, it’s easy to imagine that the person hiding the valuables was hurt or killed before they could reclaim the buried treasure.
Still other hoards are thought to be ritual offerings—“votive hoards,” left behind as gifts to unearthly powers. The archaeologist Richard Bradley has noted that hoards are known to have been deposited 20,000 years ago in southern Scandinavia. By 7,000 years ago, such offerings were commonly made throughout Europe, particularly in water—rivers and springs—and later at ceremonial sites and burial grounds made of huge, monumental stone. Bradley believes many of these offerings were related to fertility and food production.
As the Roman Empire expanded, coins circulated more widely and became a common type of offering to the gods, in the belief that it was payment for their services. Similar practices have been noted around the world: the ancient Maya in Central America, Jains in India, and among Javanese in Southeast Asia.
Throughout much of human history, this drive to accumulate has been tempered by scarcity. People had access to little, so they could accumulate little. After the agricultural revolution led to settled life, storage of large surpluses became possible, and necessary. As explored in chapter 3, debt became a feature of social relations, which in many cases led to social inequalities. These inequalities meant that some individuals could have access to more wealth than others. And nearly every human being who gained power garnered things—consider the palaces and treasuries of emperors and empresses, sultans, tsars, kings and queens. In a real sense, one can think of the wealth of the most powerful as both an act of hoarding and the possession of a hoard.
As civilizations made more stuff, covetous behaviors became more visible. Hoards of valued objects found in China, the Middle East, India, and beyond, dating to thousands of years ago, all point to the ability of individuals to amass small fortunes and try to protect them. But while no doubt many aspired to have as much as they could, in many cultural contexts, the hoarder became reviled. One can hypothesize that such scorn led to the extravagant gifting rituals around the world, such as potlatches and giveaways. The scorn heaped on hoarders can be seen in myths around the world: in ancient Greece, dragons guarded treasures, as did griffins in ancient India and ants in Ethiopian tradition.
The Bible is filled with admonitions against greed, a prerequisite for some forms of hoarding (Ecclesiastes 5:10–11: “As goods increase, so do those who consume them. And what benefit are they to the owner except to feast his eyes on them?”). In AD 590, Pope Gregory I listed greed as one of the seven deadly sins, which were then elaborated in Dante’s Inferno, where the fourth ring of hell is inhabited by hoarders and wasters.
For a number of centuries now, you do not have to be a conqueror to collect masses of things. Due to industrialization and the emergence of the consumer society, nearly everyone on Earth has access to markets that allow them to accumulate more than even some of the most powerful people in the ancient world. This is not to say that there is material equality today, but rather that for the first time in human history, hoarding is no longer a strategy of the elite; it has been democratized. In 2013, Vanity Fair ran a “pop quiz” that listed a string of items and then asked readers whether they belonged to King Tut’s tomb or to the contemporary apartment of hoarders: “A large painting of pussywillows, a brown chair made from animal hide, stalks of live bamboo, a blue painted urn, dried bars of oats and grain, boxes of papyrus, a painting of a giant sun, woven wool fabric, another brown chair made of animal hide, skeletal remains of cat.” The answer: they all belonged to two ordinary hoarders named Gordon and Gaye,—demonstrating that, in some respects, the line between ancient king and modern accumulator can be razor thin.
Building a collection—be it comic books or shoes—usually entails setting a goal and enjoying its pursuit, acquiring the most exemplary objects. In the collector, we can see the spectrum of our human relations to things. On one end is the most basic relationship: a desire to possess something of value. On the other end is the most fanatical desire unbound—when people become possessed by things. Today, the problem is that the distant human instinct to hoard food and tools, as well as the cultural behaviors that developed for small groups of the wealthiest, is not well suited to the Age of Plastic, built on the ideology of consumption.
Reprinted with permission from “So Much Stuff” by Chip Colwell, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2023 by Chip Colwell. All rights reserved.
Chip Colwell is an archaeologist and the editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, a digital magazine about anthropological thinking and discoveries. He served as the senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for 12 years and remains a Denver resident. He is the author and editor of 13 books including “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture,” which received six major book awards. His most recent is “So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything.”
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