New, exhaustive study probes hidden history of horses in the American
West

Date:
March 30, 2023
Source:
University of Colorado at Boulder
Summary:
Indigenous peoples as far north as Wyoming and Idaho may have
begun to care for horses by the first half of the 17th Century,
according to a new study by researchers from 15 countries and
multiple Native American groups.


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FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A team of international researchers has dug into archaeological records,
DNA evidence and Indigenous oral traditions to paint what might be the
most exhaustive history of early horses in North America to date. The
group's findings show that these beasts of burden may have spread
throughout the American West much faster and earlier than many European accounts have suggested.


==========================================================================
The researchers, including several scientists from the University of
Colorado Boulder, published their findings today in the journal Science.

To tell the stories of horses in the West, the team closely examined about
two dozen sets of animal remains found at sites ranging from New Mexico
to Kansas and Idaho. The researchers come from 15 countries and multiple
Native American groups, including the Lakota, Comanche and Pawnee nations.

"What unites everyone is the shared vision of telling a different kind
of story about horses," said William Taylor, a corresponding author
of the study and curator of archaeology at the CU Museum of Natural
History. "Focusing only on the historical record has underestimated the antiquity and the complexity of Indigenous relationships with horses
across a huge swath of the American West." For many of the scientists involved, the research holds deep personal significance, added Taylor,
who grew up in Montana where his grandfather was a rancher.

"We're looking at parts of the country that are extraordinarily important
to the people on this project," he said.

The researchers drew on archaeozoology, radiocarbon dating, DNA sequencing
and other tools to unearth how and when horses first arrived in various
regions of today's United States. Based on the team's calculations,
Indigenous communities were likely riding and raising horses as far north
as Idaho and Wyoming by at least the first half of the 17th Century --
as much as a century before records from Europeans had suggested.

Groups like the Comanche, in other words, may have begun to form deep
bonds with horses mere decades after the animals arrived in the Americas
on Spanish boats.

The results line up with a wide range of Indigenous oral histories.

"All this information has come together to tell a bigger, broader,
deeper story, a story that natives have always been aware of but has
never been acknowledged," said Jimmy Arterberry, co-author of the new
study and tribal historian of the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma.

Study co-author Carlton Shield Chief Gover agreed, noting that the love
of horses may be one thing that extends across societies and borders.

"People are fascinated by horses. They've grown up with horses," said
Shield Chief Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and curator
for public anthropology at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology.

"We can talk to one another through our shared love of an animal."
Mud Pony For many Native American communities that shared love goes a
long way back.

The Pawnee, for example, tell the story of "Mud Pony," a boy who began
seeing visions of strange creatures in his sleep.

"He makes these little mud figurines of these animals he sees in
his dreams, and, overnight, they become alive," Shield Chief Gover
said. "That's how you get horses." European historical records from the colonial period, however, have tended to favor a more recent origin story
for horses in the West. Many scholars have suggested that Native American communities didn't begin caring for horses until after the Pueblo Revolt
of 1680. During this event, Pueblo people in what is today New Mexico temporarily overthrew Spanish rule, releasing European livestock in
the process.

Taylor, also an assistant professor of anthropology at CU Boulder,
and his colleagues didn't think it fit as an origin story for the
relationships between humans and horses in the West: "We thought: There's something fishy about this story." Clues in bone With funding from
the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), they formed an equine dream
team that includes archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma and University of New Mexico. Geneticist Ludovic Orlando and Lakota scholar
Yvette Running Horse Collin took part from the University of Toulouse.

"This research demonstrates how multiple different types of data can
be integrated to address the fascinating historical question of how
and when horses spread across the West," said NSF Archaeology program
director John Yellen.

The researchers began collecting as much data as they could on horses
remains from the West. DNA evidence, for example, suggests that most
Indigenous horses had descended from Spanish and Iberian horses, with
British horses becoming more common in the 18thand 19th Centuries.

"Our analyses show it was born and raised locally," Taylor said. "It
was cared for, and when that animal passed, there was extraordinary significance to that event." The remains of this horse, along with
several others from the study, also seemed to date back to around the
turn of the 17th Century, decades before the start of the Pueblo Revolt.

How animals like it arrived in Wyoming isn't clear, but it's likely that Europeans weren't involved in their initial transport.

Shield Chief Gover explained that few Indigenous people will be surprised
by the results of the study. But the team's findings may help to
illustrate for academic scientists just how important these animals were
to the history of Indigenous peoples. The Pawnee, who lived in Nebraska,
for example, rode horses on twice-a-year buffalo hunts, traveling farther
and faster into the "sea of grass" of the Great Plains. Comanche also
galloped on horseback to hunt buffalo, while owning a lot of horses was
a sign of wealth.

"I don't want to diminish the reverence and the respect we have for
horses," Arterberry said. "We see them as gifts the Creator gave us, and, because of that, we survived and thrived and became who we are today." Respecting horses Study co-author Chance Ward, a master's student in
Museum and Field Studies at CU Boulder, would like to see the archaeology community begin to treat those relationships with more respect. He
was born and raised on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota,
which is home to four bands of the Lakota Nation.

Ward grew up listening to his mother's childhood stories about riding
ponies in the Bear Creek community. His father's parents started a ranch
on the reservation where members of the family practice rodeo today.

He explained that many researchers don't handle animal remains with the
same care they reserve for cultural objects and human remains.

"They tend to be thrown into a box or bag where they hit against each
other and break," Ward said. "This project is a chance for us as Native
people to put our voices out there and take better care of important
and sacred animals in museum collections."
* RELATED_TOPICS
o Plants_&_Animals
# Horses # Veterinary_Medicine # Animals # Mammals
o Fossils_&_Ruins
# Cultures # Human_Evolution # Anthropology # Archaeology
* RELATED_TERMS
o Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas o Goldfish o
Invasive_species o Icelandic_horse o Pig o Miniature_horse o
Bald_Eagle o Yellow_fever

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_Colorado_at_Boulder. Original written by Daniel Strain,
Nicholas Goda. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Related Multimedia:
* Horse_and_her_foal ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. William Timothy Treal Taylor et al. Early dispersal of domestic
horses
into the Great Plains and northern Rockies. Science, 2023 DOI:
10.1126/ science.adc9691 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230330172129.htm

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