Nevada author, Dennis Cassinelli, will offer a lecture on the Great Basin Indians March 8 at 7 p.m. at the Carson Valley Museum & Cultural Center in Gardnerville. Cassinelli, a Northern Nevada resident, has spent most of his life as an amateur archaeologist.
The emerging Nevada author, now with two books on the subject in publication, still remembers the first time he found an Indian arrowhead. He grew up on the Glendale Ranch in Sparks and, as he roamed the fields for hours in the 1940s and 50s, he found a vast collection of colorful Indian artifacts. His grandfather, Pete Cassinelli, dismissed the artifacts as "rubbish," saying that they had been lying around for years, being churned up by ranch equipment that plowed through the dirt and had unearthed the pesky things. He also told young Cassinelli that he was wasting his time collecting rocks when he should be working.
Cassinelli never lost his sense of awe and as he grew into a young man he spent every possible moment roaming the deserts looking for fragments of forgotten history.
In 1995 Cassinelli inherited a vast collection of Indian arrowheads from his aunt, Clare Perino, who also shared her nephews passion for collecting these pieces. He immediately sought the assistance from various government agencies to help him identify the many projectiles so that he could one day donate the collection to a reputable museum. After being told there were no people available to dedicate time to a private collection, he resolved to identify the points on his own, no matter how long it took.
After months of work, Cassinelli had accomplished what he had set out to do and established it as the Cassinelli/Perino Artifact Collection. He then donated it to the now closed Stewart Indian Museum in Carson City. The artifact collection in now on display in the Carson Valley Museum & Cultural Center.
Every spring, for the past 10 years, Cassinelli has given a lecture at the Gold Hill Hotel near Virginia City as well as lectures on the subject for the Douglas County Historical Society. In 2003 Cassinelli followed his first publication with his self-published "Legends of the Spirit Cave", a fictional account to recreate the history and humanize the man and his people, of the recently unearthed Spirit Cave mummy. Cassinelli is currently working on a third book titled "Uncovering Archeology."
