Sara Minogue reports for CBC News:
New research on a trove of 13th century moccasins is shedding light on how the Dene language may have spread across North America. The distinctly subarctic Dene moccasins were discovered in the Promontory Caves in Utah nearly 100 years ago. They’re believed to be evidence that some Dene people left northwestern North America and successfully resettled in what is now the American southwest. Dry conditions in the cave preserved what would usually be perishable goods, including about 350 moccasins and thousands of animal bones. Most of the moccasins were made from locally gathered materials, but recent chemical analysis found one outlier: an ankle tie that came from a bison believed to have lived 700 to 800 kilometres further south.
Jessica Metcalfe, an assistant professor of anthropology at Lakehead University, used data based on the archeological remains of other ancient bison to determine that the animal lived off plants that would have only grown in a much warmer climate. Further chemical analysis ruled out the idea that the bison wandered north, or that the leather was obtained through trade. She believes the leather shows that the people who lived in the cave were travelling long distances and returning, “probably for the purpose of scouting.”
Metcalfe says this is “the first time past human migrations have been reconstructed using chemical traces in footwear.” Her analysis, published earlier this month in the journal American Antiquity, puts the subarctic Dene group closer to the homelands of the Navajo and Apache than has previously been documented. Dene languages, also known as the Athapaskan languages, are one of the most widespread Indigenous languages in North America, but there is little in the archeological record that explains how the languages spread, and why there are two distinct groupings nearly two-thousand kilometers apart.
(Dene is the common word for ‘people’ in the Athapaskan languages.) I’ll be curious to know what those Hatters who know more than I about Native American linguistic history make of this. Thanks, Trevor!
The original article, BTW, is open access.
It’s a neat piece of work, but it doesn’t add much new to Dene linguistic history. The materials in the cave have been associated with Dene culture for a long time. The novelty in the study is that it shows that people didn’t uniformly move in one direction. It’s cool to be able to show it, but it’s not surprising.
It should be feasible by now to sift for human DNA on the moccasins and in the soil of the cave floor.
It’s also a lot of moccasins in a temporary shelter. Did they make them on the hunting expedition rather than bring the hides back home?
I’ll read the paper.
Mille neuf cent quatre-vingt dix-neuf kilomètres à pied…
The notion that “chemical analysis” could have “ruled out” the possibility that a piece of leather had traveled north via trade rather than the local humans going down and getting it there themselves seemed implausible, and indeed that seems to be the journalist’s garbling of the actual argument, not that I find the actual argument on that score (basically, there was lots of bison hide obtainable locally so it wouldn’t have been a commodity valued for systematic long-distance trade) particularly convincing when we’re talking about a single outlier object.
Harry Hoijer, in 1956, calculated that Southern Athabaskan had spread from the North some 1000-600 years before the mid-twentieth century: the moccasins do thus seem to come from the right time period, assuming he was correct of course.
If it really was the one piece of leather, I’d probably have expected it to have been brought in by a traveller/migrant from that area… who did not necessarily make (much) more than just the single one-way trip.
Why were there hundreds of mocassins in one cave in the first place, anyway? Were they perhaps ritual offerings? If so, maybe some kind of 13th century tourist (or, again, migrant) noticed that people ritually offer mocassins to that cave and did that to their own (spare?) southern shoes?
A lot probably depends on whether the entire shoe came from down south, or just a single part of it. The latter would probably imply some kind of leather reuse.
@January. Just one part, apparently. So who was reusing (or repairing?) what where is the question, and it seems to be you can come up with plenty of different scenarios with no particularly good way to be certain which actually occurred.
Probably like Tocqueville coming back to France, after having had his shoe repaired in Montreal.
Me: It’s also a lot of moccasins in a temporary shelter. Did they make them on the hunting expedition rather than bring the hides back home?
That was a stupid question. The moccasins were worn-out and discarded. The Promontory Caves were used as a semi-permanent dwelling for about 50 years.
The authors don’t rule out trade, but they find trading of bison hides into a specialized hunting society unlikely. I agree with that, but a single item could be that unlikely event.
They also mention that wickerwork and pottery point to contact with peoples with origin in the Pueblos. The paper stops just short of saying so, but maize farmers ceasing to grow maize and turning to hunting and raiding would be a likely origin of the Kiowa. We discussed the Kiowa, their Pueblo cousins, and the Apache a couple of years ago.
Here.
Quoted in the paper:
Kristensen, Hare et al 2019: The Movement of Obsidian in Subarctic Canada: Holocene Social Relationships and Human Responses to a Large-Scale Volcanic Eruption (pdf)
I’ll quote chapter 8 in full:
Kristensen had another 2019 paper on clinker exchange and an article from 2020 with a somewhat broader scope.
Kristensen et al (2020): Environmental and Hunter-Gatherer Responses to the White River Ash East Volcanic Eruption in the Late Holocene Canadian Subarctic, Arctic, Vol. 73 No. 2 (2020).
We discussed Felgontov et al in Ancient Indo-European Folktales:
If I understand this correctly, Kristensen asserts that the late introduction of the bow-and-arrow to the inland Dene contradicts Flegontov’s argument for a Na-Dene arrival to North America with the Arctic Small Tool tradition. Instead, Dene groups learned the skill from their hosts in the years they spent on the coast after the 846/848 volcanic event. The bow-and-arrow completely replaces the atlatl in the repopulated areas, and arrowheads gradually replace darts in the regions further north,
So what prompted the forest hunters to migrate south after the volcanic event? Maybe the interrupted migrations of salmon and caribou made some of the more southern Dene peoples more reliant on the bison. When their neighbours returned from the coast with the bow-and-arrow, they got what they needed to specialize further and hunt on a large scale on the open plains.
Fascinating stuff, thanks!
The Kristensen et al. paper looking at a large patterns involving lots of objects from lots of sites and trying to match them to the aftereffects of a known and dated disruptive event is, shall we say, a different genre than the Metcalfe et al. paper trying to come up with the most likely (but still speculative) narrative that would account for a single anomalous object.
Very different, but still, anomalous objects are interesting and have something to tell. This far-travelled piece of leather tells that the Promontory Cave people had a wider horizon than just their local hunting grounds. That’s a rather trivial conclusion, and maybe they should have let it be with that, but I found the further speculations interesting.
But not necessarily correct, so I’ll throw in a speculation of my own. I don’t think an adolescent would have been part of a scouting expedition. I suggest that the moccasin was worn by someone moving to the Promontory Caves from a Na-Dene settlement located further south or east, maybe most likely a young bride. (But what do I know? This could well be a specifically male design.)
Dry conditions in the cave preserved what would usually be perishable goods, including about 350 moccasins
This could be evidence for a powerful woman in the local society. Someone like Imelda Marcos.
Or for a powerful man trying to corner the moccasin market.
Or it could be the laboratory of an early scientist investigating the physics of shoe racks. Today mice are used.
Also cited:
Yanicki, Gabriel M. (2019): Promontory–Fremont Contact and Ethnogenesis in the Post-Formative Eastern Great Basin
It’s a monumental doctoral thesis (680 pages), and I’m not anywhere near finished reading. I’ll quote the opening paragraphs of the introduction to keep the subject warm and in the hope that somebody else will join me:
Oh, that Promontory! I can see it right from the neighborhood trails but it takes two hours of driving to actually get there. A terribly desolate place indeed. The first transcontinental railroad went over the Promontory, with the Golden Spike site near the crest of these hills, only to be abandoned several years later due to the extreme desert conditions. The steam engines consumed too much scarce water on the inclines for this rail line to survive. No human habitation there now, but the remoteness of the area became a draw for a secret rocket factory, tucked into the folds of the hills away from the spy’s eyes in the age before the satellites.
And of course the Lair of the Illuminati. But I’ve said too much.
I don’t think it was so much the extreme conditions of that bit of additional railway going over Promontory Summit that caused its abandonment as much as the eventual availability of an alternative route that was objectively more desirable because straighter, shorter, and involving fewer changes in elevation. That alternative (operational from 1904) had presumably not been pursued back in the 1860’s because running trains straight across the Great Salt Lake on a twelve-mile-long trestle had seemed too ambitious for the trestle-producing technology of the day. Although maybe the Illuminati pitched in with the advancement of trestle-producing technology in order to keep snoopers farther away from their lair?
They just needed to find a large grove of centuries-old larches to build the salt-resistance trestle, and it took a while to find it.
In the pandemic-rearranged travel, the Promontory suddenly got so much traffic that even the first public restroom appeared there. All these people are traveling on the same dirt road to the Spiral Jetty on the far side of the hills. While the peculiar design of the jetty may have been inspired by any kind of the secret-knowledge systems, there is too much open, dusty semi-desert for the traffic to go anywhere else unnoticed. So no secret-lore monks there, guaranteed.
The Lucin Cutoff trestle running across the Great Salt Lake was still an important and/or impressive enough piece of infrastructure in 1940 that thwarting a terrorist attack on it was the focus of the very first story arc of The Adventures of Superman radio series.
Utah Natl History Museum ran a number of exhibits on Promontory Caves finds. Here is a story on gambling gamepieces found in abundance in the cave, of the types still known in the First Nations of British Columbia today
https://nhmu.utah.edu/blog/2016/08/23/jack-ives-promontory-culture
Yes, games (or high-stakes gambling) is a major theme of Yanicki’s thesis too, but I haven’t got that far yet. I’ve been stuck in the Uinta Mountains for days!
Let me know when you stumble over Uintatherium ^_^
The old lizard bones are relatively far from here, by the Eastern end of the Uinta range. The main quarry is fairly impressive, with hundreds of animals of all sizes deposited by a torrent right on top of one another. As they tumbled down the deluge, many lost heads or extremities. A snapshot of one catastrophe.
@Trond – there are also references to Deni Seymour who claims to have uncovered Dene objects in the itinerant camps dating back to the 1300s. Haven’t checked the references
@Dmitry: I didn’t notice, but I’ll have another look. I was hoping to learn that we’re at a point where Dene (and other) migrations are becoming identifiable by archaeology.
At the time of the Promontory culture, was the Great Salt Lake less sterile than it is now?
The amount of salt in the lake grows over time, very gradually, while the levels fluctuate one a few years’ time scale depending on the arid conditions. The overall amount of salt in 1300 may have been as low as 3/4 of what it is now. But the climate wasn’t particularly wet for any prolonged period after about 900 CE, so the lake levels tended to be low, and the salinity, very high.
Ultimately it was the sustained drought conditions which drove the Fremont out of their cliffside dwellings, right?
Mark Twain wrote an amusing and , as far as I know, accurate piece on the ecology of Mono Lake in CA, a salt lake much like GSL. Tiny shrimp , shrimp-eating flies, fly eating gulls..It sounds hellish.
Mono Lake is a beautiful gem.
The brine shrimp / brine fly ecology is pretty standard. Harvesting brine shrimp eggs is an industry which sort of replaces the nonexisting fishing on the Great Salt Lake (there is fish in Willard Bay East of the Promontory where the water is largely fresh). And the seagull is the Utah state bird, enshrined after saving the Mormon pioneer crops from Mormon cricket infestation. There is bison in the prairie even now, and porcupines are up there in the lakeside trees, and fat beavers in the creeks. It’s paradise, the land of milk and honey, if you miss the blackflies (Mark Twain must have missed them). The little ones are there for only about a month, but they make the place hell.
The brine flies swarm but don’t bite. After windstorms the shores are covered by the beached shrimp ankle-dip and the rotten piles stink pretty bad but it’s easy to get used to “the Lake smell”.