A Very Old Horn

What a fossil might tell us about cultural ties between the ancient peoples of the Grand Canyon and Bears Ears.

BY R.E. BURRILLO

This is a story that begins over 13,000 years ago inside the Grand Canyon and ends — if indeed it does — in New York City. At its center is the horn of one very old goat.

Every river is more than just one river. Every rock is more than just one rock. Why does a real estate developer look across an open field and see comfortable suburban ranch homes nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac, while a farmer envisions endless rows of waving wheat and a hunter sees a five-point buck cautiously grazing in preparation for the coming winter?

Where these two threads braid together is where you’ll find conservation archaeology.

Here I present a conservation archaeology tale — a story of landscape and history. It’s a story about the cultural landscapes of the Grand Canyon and Bears Ears, two of the most culturally important places in the Southwest to the indigenous peoples of the Colorado Plateau, and how their material history indicates that this has always been the case. It begins with a mountain goat.

Harrington’s mountain goat occupied much of the Southwest up until about 13,000 years ago, or roughly the time human beings first appeared in North America. Fossil specimens have been found in dry caves throughout the entire intermountain West, although the goats evinced a particular love for the Grand Canyon. Like modern mountain goats, their fleetness-of-foot likely evolved as a strategy for avoiding predators, allowing them to scramble up and down steep, rocky slopes that bears and wolves couldn’t effectively navigate. Fecal pellet analyses have shown that, also like modern mountain goats, they were versatile eaters, following the flow of nutritious growth up and downhill depending upon the season. At the canyon, this meant occupying dry caves within the gorge from late winter to early summer, then grazing on the rims from late summer to early winter. Precontact peoples of the Grand Canyon practiced an almost identical type of seasonal round, occupying the inner gorge during the winter when wild resources were still available and then moving up to the rim to grow crops and avoid the blasting heat of summer.

Between about 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, during what researchers call the Late Archaic period, people began utilizing — but not living in — many of these same dry caves.

Evidence of this includes one of the most intriguing and enigmatic Late Archaic-period developments: the split-twig figurine tradition. Split-twig figurines were usually made from a single willow twig that was split down the middle and carefully wrapped into complex forms, usually in the shape of deer or bighorn sheep. They were first discovered in the Grand Canyon in 1933, with hundreds of documented figurines coming from a total of just 15 caves. A second iteration occurs around the Green River area in Utah, although the two traditions are stylistically different.

For at least 20 years now, archaeologists have noted a strong and distinct correlation between Grand Canyon split-twig figurines and the fossils of Harrington’s mountain goat. Biologist Steven Emslie and colleagues first noted this correlation in a 1987 study, musing on "a deliberate association between Archaic artifacts with the late Pleistocene fossils" — underscoring a contention voiced by archaeologist Alan R. Schroedl as early as 1977 that Archaic people visited dry caves in the Grand Canyon primarily for ritual or ceremonial purposes. Archaic period hunter-gatherers were keenly familiar with the land — as is the case with any group of people who derive their sustenance from the environment rather than the grocery store — so they would have known these were the remains of animals that weren’t around anymore.

Grand Canyon National Park paleontologist Robyn Henderek dusted this topic off just a few years ago and, with the help of several colleagues, tested the existing and newer data against a series of alternative hypotheses.

Was there a causal connection, for example, or did Late Archaic people and Ice Age animals just happen to like the same caves?

The correlations stood up against all statistical onslaughts, and it turned out the people were deliberately targeting those caves with the most challenging access (behavioral ecologists would most likely interpret this as  "costly signaling," which is a fancy way of saying  "showing off"). These data also support the conclusion that the figurine makers were choosing difficult-to-get-to caves, specifically those containing the bones of Harrington’s mountain goats. Robyn saliently contends that this relationship may indicate a form of  "contagious magic," generally defined as the belief that things once in contact continue to be in contact with one another forever after.

Allow me to elaborate. Based on evidence from elsewhere in the canyon, we know that the Late Archaic people were hunting desert bighorn sheep and mule deer. So it would be reasonable for the Late Archaic people to assume, at the time, that the bones of the Harrington’s mountain goats that the figurine-makers encountered in the caves might be the ancestors of those animals they were hunting. Perhaps, then, placing the split-twig figurines near the bones of the ancestral animals the figurine-makers were hunting served as an offering or act of reverence to ensure successful hunts. We can’t ever know what specific notions Archaic cultures may have held about these ancestral mountain goats, but they were obviously important.

This Harrington’s mountain goat/split-twig figurine correlation is the earliest known example of people deliberately associating their material culture with in situ paleontological materials, although it is not the only one. In Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, there is a set of very distinct dinosaur tracks leading straight to the edge of a cliff, giving the impression of giant three-toed creatures having walked to the edge and leapt off (in reality, the tracks were shoved upward during the geologic uplift that created the Colorado Plateau). On the rock surface just below the tracks is an Ancestral Puebloan rock-art panel that depicts, among much else, interpretive renderings of the tracks. And at another Ancestral Puebloan site, this one in Butler Wash within the once-and-future Bears Ears National Monument, a team of paleontologists — including Bears Ears paleontology specialist Rob Gay — is working on a paper that reports the finding of a theropod track in a slab used as a door lintel.

This brings us to Cedar Mesa, heart of the Bears Ears area and location of the legendary Grand Gulch. It was there in 1894, while digging in what would come to be called Cut-in-Two Cave (don’t ask), that Richard Wetherill’s team unearthed a mountain goat horn in an archaeological trash dump. Following the custom of the day, it was given a label and then tossed into a box to be trundled off to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. There it sat unnoticed until 2014, when it came under the gaze of Dr. Laurie Webster and Chuck LaRue as part of the Cedar Mesa Perishables Project.

Briefly, the Cedar Mesa Perishables Project is a scholarly effort designed and directed by Laurie to examine and catalog the thousands of perishable artifacts excavated in the Cedar Mesa area — and relegated to one repository or another — over 100 years ago. She and her colleagues have catalogued over 4,000 perishable artifacts, including sandals, baskets, combs and hairbrushes, blankets, nets, and even sets of round wooden dice. Chuck’s role is that of animal-identifier. He once spent almost an entire day poring over a single feather blanket, identifying the feathers of more than a dozen different bird species. And it was Chuck whose  "aha" moment forms the basis of this tale: Wetherill’s site dates to the early Basketmaker period, which immediately succeeded the Late Archaic, and the horn is from a Harrington’s mountain goat.

Harrington’s mountain goats are not known to have lived in Grand Gulch, although they probably did; there is plentiful evidence of their presence at Natural Bridges National Monument to the northwest. But the provenience doesn’t imply accidental association — Harrington’s mountain goats predate the early Basketmaker period by 11,000 years or so, which makes their having gotten mixed together by coincidence a hard sell. Moreover, just last summer a perfectly intact Clovis (11,400-10,800 B.C.) projectile point was found in an early Pueblo (A.D. 750-900) site atop Cedar Mesa where it was probably someone’s precious antique; so the ancient peoples of the area were just as fascinated by very old things as we are today.

On the other hand, split-twig figurines have also never been found in the Bears Ears area. Not in the literal sense of figurines made with split twigs, at any rate. Instead, the version one finds in Bears Ears are rock art depictions of Grand Canyon-style split-twig figurines, the most impressive of which are geographically located along riverine corridors that connect the two landforms. Their locations being coincidental are, in other words, as much a hard sell as the horn just happening to appear in archaeological rubbish.

All of this is underscored by the climatic and cultural histories of the Colorado Plateau as a whole. At the end of the Late Archaic period, or about 2,000 years ago, climatic shifts seem to have compelled people to leave the Grand Canyon altogether until later in the Holocene or modern climatic period. So where did they go?

Meanwhile, according to Drs. Bill Lipe and RG Matson, who led the historic Cedar Mesa Project of the 1970s, the higher and cooler Cedar Mesa in the heart Bears Ears was ground zero for early Basketmaker farmers. In fact the majority of what archaeologists know about that period derives chiefly from there (Grand Gulch is the primary canyon system of Cedar Mesa, by the way). So where did they come from?

Having made the foolish decision to go hiking in both the Grand Canyon and Grand Gulch during the full blaze of summer, I can say with grim certainty that the fierceness of the latter still doesn’t quite compare with the former. It wouldn’t take an enormous shift in temperature to make either one more favorable than the other when you’re relying on nature to provide all of your food and water.

While fun to contemplate, speculations on a Late Archaic and early Basketmaker migration from Grand Canyon to Bears Ears via the Colorado River and its tributaries engender data requirements that far exceed several rock art panels and a very old horn. But it’s a start. More importantly, however, it demonstrates an overarching and significant connection within the greater cultural landscape of the Colorado Plateau beginning at least 2,000 years ago. Whether that connective factor was migration, cultural diffusion, or something else altogether is a question we can’t answer now — and maybe never will. But the importance of both places in the sacred geography of the indigenous peoples of the Southwest appears to have very deep roots indeed.

R.E. Burrillo is an archaeologist, author, conservation advocate, and PhD candidate at the University of Utah. The author of over two dozen publications, he was the lead editor (with Ben Bellorado) of the 2018 Archaeology Southwest triple isue, Sacred and Threatened: The Cultural Landscapes of Greater Bears Ears.