Bowers Cave

Where to Watch

DocAlliance Films

Overview

In 1885 two boys in Southern California discover a cave of Chumash Indian artefacts in the San Martin Mountains on land that is now part of the Chiquita Canyon landfill, located in the small town of Castaic. The cave is known as Bowers Cave, named after the amateur archaeologist Stephen Bower, a notorious looter of Indian sites, who bought the artefacts from the boys and then resold them for a profit, mostly to private collectors. Now, a small portion exists in the Peabody museum at Harvard.