Nebraska's Buried Secrets: Gilder's Underground Cities and the Skulls That Defy History

Professor Robert W. Gilder's groundbreaking discoveries in Nebraska have long been a focus here, from his famous Loess Skull No. 8—a dramatically strange cranium that sparked endless debate about ancient cranial deformation or even lost races—to the other bizarre skulls he unearthed from loess bluff sites, with their unusual shapes, flattened profiles, and features that didn't match known Native American groups. Now, dive deeper into another of his 1914 bombshells: the revelation that everyday "buffalo wallows"—those shallow, grass-ringed depressions scattered across the Great Plains, long blamed on bison rolling in the dirt to scratch itches or create dust baths—were actually the sunken roofs of a vast underground civilization.​

Prairie Metropolis Unearthed

Picture the windswept bluffs west of the Missouri River near Omaha: Gilder targeted these innocuous dips, predicting their hidden contents with eerie accuracy, earning the awe of local Indians who dubbed him "Man-Who-Sees-Through-the-Ground." Excavating over 30 sites, he exposed a sprawling "metropolis" of square-plan dwellings, aligned not to true north but to the North Star—a cosmic quirk suggesting sky-watchers who built with stellar precision. Southern entrances often featured 50-foot ramps leading down to chambers floored with charred reeds, grasses, and corncobs, hinting at hearth fires and early maize farming 3,500 years ago.​

Deep bottle-shaped pits, sealed with burnt clay and ash layers, hid family treasures: notched bone fish hooks for prairie streams, elk-horn combs smoothed by generations, frog-shaped glazed clay pipes for ritual smokes, shell gorgets dangling as women's jewelry, and finely wrought pottery that rang like porcelain. Black soil from decaying grasses had piled two to three feet overhead, a slow burial confirmed by geologists—Darwin-style math pegged it at over 3,500 years, thrusting this burrow race back to at least 1,500 BCE, predating many Old World empires.​

Exotic Faces from the Depths

The real chills came from the carvings: a petite pink soapstone head, polished to perfection, staring out with Egyptian finesse—delicate nose, rectangular earguards, and a headdress mirroring Rameses II's marble busts in Cairo museums. Nearby, a clay figurine sported sharply sloping "Chinese" eyes, clashing wildly with Plains artifacts and igniting whispers of ancient sea voyages or forgotten migrations. Who were these millions who shunned the surface for subterranean squares? Climate catastrophe? Enemy raids? Their corn-dependent life and star maps screamed sophistication, yet they vanished without trace, unrelated to mound builders or historic tribes.​

Tying Back to Gilder's Skull Mysteries

These underground enigmas loop straight back to Gilder's skull vault. Beyond Loess Skull No. 8's extreme elongation—possibly bound in infancy for status or ritual—the collection brimmed with oddities: crania artificially deformed into towering cones, bird-like beaks, or asymmetrically flattened domes, far from natural variation. Some showed surgical trepanation holes healed over generations, hinting at advanced healers; others bore gold plates or exotic alloys, echoing Tiahuanacu's forehead finds. Were these the same elusive people, hiding skulls in loess caves and prairie pits? Gilder's Nebraska haul—from wallow metropolises to cranial freaks—paints a heartland haunted by a pre-Columbian puzzle, where Egyptians, Asians, and unknowns might have walked under our feet.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85038615/1914-02-15/ed-1/?dl=page&q=vanished+race&sp=47&st=image&r=0.239,0.962,0.381,0.248,0

To learn more about the strange skulls i've learned about in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa watch the youtube video above. I made this video before I learned about this story. This video includes a few of Gilders skulls.