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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/Direct-Caterpillar77 on 2025-05-14 04:04:01+00:00.

I am not The OOP, OOP is u/hopalongrhapsody

Wife’s grandfather found this ~2,000 year old seed bag just sitting on a Missouri Ozarks hill, still filled with ancient seeds

Originally posted to r/missouri

Thanks to u/soayherder u/theprismaprincess & u/amireallyreal for suggesting this BoRU

MOOD SPOILER: super cool

Original Post May 3, 2025

Found around Roaring Rivers State Park (SWMO) area, at the top of a hill, sitting out on the surface of the ground where it had presumably been exposed to the elements for centuries, but it still seems pristine. Not even a stain on it.

The bag is not brittle at all, and the material is still extremely strong, though we didn’t dare stress test it. While it defaults to the wrinkled position pictured, it can be opened and closed and is very pliable – though out of caution we haven’t wanted to handle it for much more than a few photos. There’s at least two types of seed in it, probably several hundred seeds altogether.

Best we can tell, the only other known to exist is at the University of Arkansas, called the Eden’s Bluff Seed Bag: https://archeology.uark.edu/artifacts/edensbluffseedbag/%C2%A0which has a lot more info to suggest the time, material & seed contents (extinct cousins of plants that exist in the area today).

The two bags were found roughly 50 miles apart.

We have been in contact with the UA & have promised to bring it down at our earliest opportunity.

OOP posted 4 pics of the seed bag and Cat Tax!

RELEVANT COMMENTS

MissouriOzarker

As an avid gardener, I want to know what kinds of seeds were in there!

OOP

The seeds in the Eden Bluff bag are black don’t look anything like most of the off-white seeds in this bag. Most look a bit like pumpkin or squash seeds. Wife’s a lifelong gardener and we’ve definitely had the compulsion to plant one, but it would be kind of irresponsible without knowing a thing about any of it.

~

Wildendog

Listen, I’m not knocking you for this, but I will believe this once it’s been through the university. Exposed natural fiber doesn’t last. There is very specific conditions for something like this to survive and sitting on a hill isn’t it. Also cedar isn’t the best to make a bag with. Indian hemp is way more likely. Or even yucca possibly. I’m sorry but this does not seem like it is anywhere near what you think it is

OOP

The note was layman speculation from from her grandfather decades ago, the fiber could be anything. Also another, very similar bag survived to be carbon dated not far from this one. Since we don’t know the exact circumstances of this bags finding, we can’t assume it was sitting exposed for that long. But I’m no expert what do I know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Update May 7, 2025

This is an update to my previous post about an ancient seed bag that was found in the Missouri Ozarks which my wife inherited. Thanks for waiting, we had to get everyone’s permission to use their name and photos.

Our hunt for answers uncovered new details, artifacts and some fascinating answers from the bright team at the University of Arkansas Museum in Fayetteville, spearheaded by Dr. Mary Suter, Curator.

So it’s going to be long. TL;DR at the end.

First, I steered you guys wrong on a couple important details in my first post, which caused a lot of understandable skepticism. Sorry. That’s on me. Bear in mind it was found six+ decades ago. So I’ll try to clarify who/where/when & other details below.

This weekend we met with family in SWMO to clean up MIL’s tornado damage, and had interacted with the Museum months ago about bringing in the bag when we were close. So we took the opportunity to get as many details from any family member who might know anything and make the trip to Bentonville.   WHO Found It:

The bag was found by two men named Jerry Webber and Andy Juel. Andy spent many years as a surveyor for the railroad, and as a longtime farmer, he spent a lot of his life in the nature he loved. I never knew him but he left a pretty grand legacy. He died in the early 2000s, so a lot of what could be known about his discovery is lost.    WHEN it was found:

In the mid-1960s. The bag sat in a glass jar for ~65 years.

WHERE it was found:

A lot of people took issue with my saying the bag was found exposed to the elements, totally understandable, but I was just misinformed. Sorry again. My MIL didn’t know what she talking about, but her brother did. And I couldn’t edit the post.

The bag was actually found in a bluff shelf, like the small caves on side of a hill or cliff. We also learned he found some stone tools at the site.

And then, we actually found all of the native American arrowheads & tools Andy had probably ever discovered in a plastic bag in the bottom of a chest! About 7 total. Which is awesome, and did end up telling us something, but being mixed together meant we couldn’t possibly determine which may have been collected from the seed bag site.

The site of the find was most likely Barry County just north of Roaring River State Park. Andy had lived in a place called Dry Hollow, between Cassville and Seligman. The seed bag may not have been found exactly there. It could have been found around Washburn Prairie immediately west. We were told secondhand it was at a bluff that had at least partially collapsed at some point in “recent” history, geologically speaking.

I doubt we’ll be able to pinpoint it much more because all parties who were directly involved are dead. Her uncle offered to lead people to where he thinks it was, but he would have been like twelve at the time, so nobody hold your breath.

ON TO THE MUSEUM!

So now with more solid details & more artifacts, we headed to meet the Museum.

TBH we had no idea what to expect; we’d only sent photos to the Museum via email & they wanted us to bring it. Would we be wasting their time? Would they care about such a thing? Do they get this sort of stuff all the time?

They were standing at the door eagerly waiting for us, and upon laying eyes on the bag, we were surprised to find the atmosphere was almost immediately a combination of awe and reverence.

The University of Arkansas Museum does NOT have a facility that is open to the public, like curations you can walk around and see. Instead, the space features a large, sterile, controlled area they called “Collections Storage”, which was carefully stocked with shelves of curiosities, antiquities and much, much archeological research & artifacts.

After some talk on the finding of the bag, Dr. Suter carefully placed a pad and laid out the bag, loose seeds and stone tools. After a brief inspection, she found a tattered old copy of a book called “PREHISTORIC PLIES”,  maybe 150 pages, that was a reference analysis made by the Museum for every cordage, netting, basketry and fabric from Ozark Bluff Shelters that they’d found. It was the perfect book for this!

She studied page after page and then in one page turn, her eyes lit up & everyone almost immediately locked onto a bag that seemed to have incredibly similar features.

About this time, I guess word of what we brought in had gotten around and some of the staff came literally running into the room to see the bag, which quickly accumulated a small crowd of very excited curators. My wife and I were curious by this reaction, and really didn’t know what to make of the attention.

When Mel Zabecki of the Arkansas Archeological Survey said “this is the nicest thing I’ve ever seen come in”, we exchanged a look like, ‘is this for real?’

As it turned out, no, nobody ever brings in something like this.

One archeologist there had actually participated in a dig on a bluff nearby Andy’s old place! He was kind enough to print out pictures for us, which I’ve included to give you an idea of the environment where it was found.

He told us they called them “bluff shelters”, and a number had been found in the area, often around creeks and rivers.

There was a nervous chuckle of light disbelief among the researchers when my wife mentioned that she took it to 2nd grade show-and-tell (for Native American month, of course) — the only time anyone was ever allowed to move the mystery bag in the glass jar in the back of the hutch.

This is also where & when those notes were written, for the benefit of the class. Dr Suter, noticing the notes had sentimental value, kindly & carefully stitched one back together again with tape & gave them both a protective flat for us for safe keeping.

HOW OLD IS THE BAG?

It is ancient.

The UofA have suggested that the preferred word now is “pre-contact” (with Europeans) as opposed to “prehistoric”, which can cause confusion with dinosaurs & much earlier eras. The bag is firmly pre-contact.

All of the following …

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1km63nw/wifes_grandfather_found_this_2000_year_old_seed/

  • Spacehooks@reddthat.comMEnglish
    1·
    24 days ago

    HOW OLD IS THE BAG?

    It is ancient.

    The UofA have suggested that the preferred word now is “pre-contact” (with Europeans) as opposed to “prehistoric”, which can cause confusion with dinosaurs & much earlier eras. The bag is firmly pre-contact.

    All of the following is speculation from the research team, and not cold fact.

    It is safe to say the bag would be no less than 500 years old, and is most likely much, much older. The reasons they told us were as follows:

    Because bluff shelters were used during a specific time period, long before Europeans made contact with Native Americans, and had not been in popular use by the native population for many many years, as they had developed more efficient methods of storage & cultivation.

    The age & style of other bags found in the same area

    Carbon Dating

    Carbon-dating the bag will take time. As it is a Native American artifact, there is a process of interaction and collaboration between the Museum and the Osage Tribe that must take place first. Then the process of carbon dating involves sending off a sample to another university, so that itself could take weeks.

    All this is way out of our scope. So we have left the bag and its research in the incredibly skilled & capable hands of the University of Arkansas Museum, the Arkansas Archeological Survey, and The Osage Tribe.

    IS THE BAG RARE?

    Extremely.

    Before this, they have only ever found two bags with seeds in them – Eden Bluff, and a decayed bag with a small amount of acorns (which we also got to see!)

    As many, many (many) redditors pointed out, fiber and seed are obviously very perishable, so it is almost impossible for both bags and seeds like this to survive to the modern era.

    It is a one-of-a-kind specimen.

    THE SEEDS & STONE TOOLS

    Some of the staff quickly began taking photos of the seeds and stone tools, and texted colleagues and counterparts, who offered some fast initial analysis.

    The Seeds

    The small black-ish seed stumped everyone, at least then, but it was generally quickly agreed upon that all the seeds were:

    Extremely old

    NOT viable to plant. Sorry gardeners, we tried.

    The Stone Tools

    Archeologist Jared Pebworth, an expert on ancient stone tools among other things, almost immediately determined our seven stone tools & arrowheads came from two sets of times:

    Middle Archaic Period, 2000 to 5000 BC (about 4,000 years to 7,000 years ago)

    The Woodland Period from 1000 BC to 1000 AD (about 1,000 to 2,000 years ago).

    I have no idea how this was done, but it was impressive.

    It is only marginally helpful in dating the bag though, since we cannot know which, if any, were found with the bag.

    COMPARING THE SEED BAG TO A PREVIOUS DISCOVERY

    Now pretty confident that the bag in the book was comparable, Dr. Suter lead us back into the depths of Collections Storage to take a look at the real thing.

    We walked through a vast, fascinating collection of racks filled with small, identical cataloged boxes until she found one in particular – an excavation from 1932.

    She opened the box top and there was a neatly organized collection of ancient artifacts: shells, bones, rope that looks like it was made last year – and a bag that was the spitting image of ours!

    Same weaving, coloring, stitching, etc. This bag was larger, more decayed and badly torn, it was wrapped at the top with a piece of leather. When found, all it contained was half of a very old, carefully carved pipe, which was also in the box. If we can get permission, I will share photos of the what we can later.

    So we asked, where was this 1932 excavation? Barry County, Missouri. Bingo. Just a few miles away from Andy’s seed bag’s location.

    Unfortunately, the '32 contents had never been carbon dated, so we werent lucky enough to get a fast answer.

    Then to our amazement, Dr. Suter casually pulled out another nondescript box containing THE actual Eden Bluff Seed Bag, in all its glory.

    This is the Eden Bluff seed bag we’re talking about, for the curious.

    We couldn’t believe it… the bag had sparked our imagination for years and here it was “in the flesh”, 2,000 years old looking like it was made yesterday. We just stared in wonder… It was a reverential experience.

    Due to certain permissions issues, the Museum has requested that we not share photos of the Eden Bluff bag, though we may be able to later. There’s plenty of photos on their website.

    THE MUSEUM COLLECTIONS STORAGE AREA

    After fawning over more boxes with bags, tools, pottery & trinkets from ancient fellow Ozarks humans, Dr Suter kindly let us basically roam the Collections Storage.

    She casually played the part of the world’s greatest tour guide. We’d point at any fascination and she’d teach us the most interesting things we’d ever heard…

    What the calcified throat of a whole alligator fossil meant, a very early electronic music studio, the first atom accelerator (made by a later Nobel prize winner), finding the first (dog sized) horse in America, ancient Aztec calendars, the terrifying claw foot of a 10’ native Arkansas raptor-like dinosaur… we spent a long time in there.

    DONATING THE BAG

    We made the easy decision then & there to donate the piece to the University of Arkansas in Andy Juel’s name.

    Or technically, to the Osage Tribe, who have taken the great responsibility of being stewards of many Native American artifacts found & excavated in the area. So when artifacts like this are found, UofA often administrates these under the oversight of the Tribe. It will be housed at the UofA Museum, and we’ve been told we can visit it whenever we’d like, which is a sweet touch.

    We have been concerned for years about our ability to keep such an ancient thing from deteriorating while in our care, and felt that the piece belonged to something bigger than our little finite lives, where we know it will always be properly cared for, studied and respected.

    Most importantly, we believe it was what Andy Juel would have wanted.

    Andy was very conservation-minded and taught his granddaughter to follow practices of respect, care for the land and stewardship.

    PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ARTIFACTS!

    While this process was quite an adventure, it is also a pretty good example of why you should always leave an artifact if you find it. Instead, contact researchers who can properly exhume & document it.

    This bag was found decades ago & we’re all glad it had a happy ending, who knows where it would be otherwise, though by not knowing the site of the find, we may well lose the opportunity to discover even more. It could be worse! They shared many horror stories of flea market finds, farmers plowing over dig sites, kid burning up ancient artifacts, etc.

    All artifacts are a limited resource that is very valuable to better understanding our history and our changing world, and the Arkansas Archeological Survey has requested we discourage people from collecting artifacts, even artifacts on the surface, even on your own private property.

    We’ve lost so much history, and even more problematic is that indigenous folks have had their history monetized, looted, abused, and destroyed. Artifacts in the hands of archeologists can be studied by researchers for many, many decades and generations to come.

    END OF UPDATE # 2

    Thanks in part to your overwhelming interest, we were inspired to find answers and better understand the mysteries of Andy Juel’s Ozark Mountain Seed Bag.

    It has been a profoundly rewarding experience and a unique once-in-a-lifetime adventure for both of us, and some of the Museum staff as well, we’re told. We learned so much, and it meant the world to my wife, who had been concerned quite literally her whole life about ensuring that this special bag would be given a proper home.

    We honestly did not dream this interaction would turn out the way it did. The University of Arkansas’ Archeology program was the most perfect place in the world to bring this one-of-a-kind artifact. Not only did they have a similar bag just a few feet away, but they were so excited to study it, and so happy that we brought it with the mindset for preservation.

    The team of archeologists were as endlessly hospitable as their vast knowledge. They have promised to keep us involved & appraised on all developments, and they kindly sent us home with a copy of the Prehistoric weave book!!

    • Spacehooks@reddthat.comMEnglish
      1·
      24 days ago

      Special thanks to Dr. Mary Suter, Dr. Mel Zabecki, [Dr.?] Jared Pebworth, The University of Arkansas Museum, the Arkansas Archeological Survey, and the very friendly staff at both. Thanks also to the extended Juel Family, whose individual names I won’t list due to privacy requests.

      For anybody interested in this sort of thing, the Arkansas Archeological Society is a cool group of people who are always looking for volunteers, even for a weekend.

      The photos were shared with permission. We have more photos I will share in this thread after/if we receive permission on those.

      Once researchers have carbon dated the seeds and analyzed the bag, we’ll post one more update. It might be a while.

      -Super special shoutout- to u/whateverhouseplease who private messaged me just to insult my wife and I and call us “intellectually disabled” after my first post. Guess we can’t be in your study… A few of yall need to learn that being skeptical is healthy, but being insulting, cruel and rude to each other is not. Please remember the people you’re talking to in r/missouri are your neighbors and friends.

      Sup to whoever chatted me that you could “buy this exact bag on Etsy”.

      TLDR – The bag and seeds are ancient prehistoric pre-contact artifacts, and the Museum of Arkansas will need to go through a process with the Osage Tribe before having its contents carbon dated. It was found (in the 60s) on a bluff not a hill, sorry for the confusion.

      OOP posted 15 pics

      The pics

      The Prehistoric Seed Bag found by Andy Juel in the Ozarks in Barry County, Missouri

      Dr Suter during her comparison of the ancient Seed Bag to another found about 90 years ago

      Arrowheads and stone tools discovered by Andy Juel

      The seed bag and various stone tools being laid out for inspection, discovered by Andy Juel in Barry County, Missouri

      Inspecting the artifact

      Side-by-side comparison of the seed bags

      Side by side photos

      Every box contains carefully cataloged and curated artifacts. There are dozens of these shelves. The 1932 Bag

      This is NOT where the bag was found, but a bluff excavation a few miles from that site, so you can see what the bluff shelters look like in the area.

      Vast archeological findings in Collections Storage

      One of the museum’s curiosities, a full crocodile fossil from the early Jurassic period. It was in that mud a hundred million years…

      Ancient clay head

      A gift presented to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in India… it is an ashtray made from a tiger skull.

      Plates

      (Cat tax) Frankie is an honorary architect, she’s got a curious spirit and she’s a heck of a digger

      RELEVANT COMMENTS

      OOP on why it’s at Univ. Arkansas and not Univ. Missouri

      That was something that we did talk through a while back, and it was a very difficult decision to make. As lifelong Missourians, our initial reaction was to want to see this “home”. I’ve spent time at MU History and The University of Missouri would have been magnitudes easier for us personally to visit. But ultimately, The University of Arkansas is well-established for research of this specific region & field, as many Ozark bluff shelters are on the Arkansas side of the border, and they have a strong relationship with the Osage Tribe who are often defacto stewards of artifacts such as this. Hopefully this allows for a good opportunity to be able to research and study the piece as part of the whole document. Still not sure if it was the right call, if there is such a thing in this case, but I am glad it’s being looked after.

      When someone asked for a link to form saying the Museum recieved the bag

      Always good to be a healthy skeptic, I suppose… Here’s my wife signing the donation form at the Museum, with personal information redacted. We were told to expect a Deed of Gift in the mail in upcoming weeks. We documented everything about the meeting, even recorded the conversations for accuracy. The photos & information I posted was done so with permission from the Museum, if it helps you.

      I’m sure if you were so inclined to call the Museum they’d be quite happy to verify, it’s not like there’s confidentiality, and they seem eager to discuss matters of archeology.

      https://imgur.com/a/U2w07hT

      Previous-Society-714

      Sorry lol, I never trust the internet, but it’s also part jealousy, I imagine, but still pretty cool to be a literal part of history, guys

      OOP

      It’s a solid rule to never trust internet strangers. Happy I could help. It is very rewarding to be a very small part of this story, but the experience really helped us consider how tiny and finite we truly are.

      It’s such an impossible connection with human beings who lived and loved and worked the exact earth we live on, and it’s been here sooo much longer than us. No single human should “own” such a thing, if for no other reason than we just plain don’t live long enough.

      What would happen if we kept it, then died? It could end up in a flea market with no context whatsoever, or lost. And for what? Bragging rights?

      If the bag were, say, 1,000 years old, nearly 40 generations of people would have lived their entire lives in the time between when someone made/used this and when it came to us. Kind of makes the few decades it’s been in the family seem really trivial by comparison…

      Ultimately, we are all just temporary stewards of the things we come into possession of. Act accordingly.

      ~

      jwpilly

      This is so great! Thank you for the updates. Will you give us another update when you learn the results of the carbon dating?

      OOP

      Absolutely. It almost certainly will NOT be a quick process to the send off. The University was also quite concerned about their ability to pay for radiocarbon dating of the bag, as grant funding has recently dried up, but we’ve offered to sponsor the service in the pursuit of answers. If the time comes & funding is all that is stopping them, I hope they take us up on it.

      EDIT: We may have a way people can donate to the museum directly, will keep you posted

      THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT THE OOP

      DO NOT CONTACT THE OOP’s OR COMMENT ON LINKED POSTS, REMEMBER - RULE 7