The Summer Solstice in Alaska

Sign with Summer Solstice Sunrise and Sunset Times, Anchorage, Alaska

Today is the summer solstice, and here in the “land of the midnight sun” the longest day of the year is very long indeed. In Anchorage, we don’t quite get to 24 hours of daylight, but it is nevertheless well after 11:00 pm as I write this and the sun is still up. North of the Arctic Circle they do have periods where the sun doesn’t set at all, for varying lengths of time depending on latitude. The northernmost community is Barrow, which gets several weeks of non-stop daylight in the summer (with a corresponding period of darkness in the winter, of course).

Given that the solstice falls right in the middle of this period of extreme daylight, it might be expected that Arctic peoples would mark it in some way, as many other societies around the world do (including the indigenous cultures of the US Southwest, as extensively documented in prior posts here). And this does indeed appear to be the case, though with a typically Alaskan twist.

Whalebone Arch with Umiak Frames, Barrow, Alaska

The Inupiaq Eskimos of the North Slope of Alaska, which lies entirely above the Arctic Circle, have traditionally had a whaling-based subsistence system, and to a considerable degree still do. They hunt whales in the spring (and in some villages also in the fall) using a type of traditional skin boat known as an umiak. These are large, open boats made of a wooden frame covered with the hides of walruses or seals, made according to a rigorous traditional protocol. They are used in other areas further south along the Bering Sea coast as well, but their close association with whaling is most pronounced on the North Slope. A recent article by Susan Fair discussed them in the context of their architectural uses as temporary shelters in various settings and their cultural importance in both whaling and the demarcation of ceremonial and other culturally important spaces at certain times.

One of those times is the Whale Feast, often known as Nalukataq (although that name technically refers only to the blanket toss that is one of the most famous elements of it). This ceremony is held only in years when at least one whale has been taken, and while its exact date varies it is scheduled for sometime around the summer solstice. As the name “Whale Feast” implies, the main focus of this event is on sharing the meat from harvested whales with the community, and it is an opportunity for the whaling captains (known as umialiit) who own the umiaks to demonstrate their generosity and show off their prowess.

Umiak on Sea Ice, Barrow, Alaska

Fair focuses in her article on the role the umiaks play in both the ceremony and the social system behind it, in which the small number of umialiit in a village form an elite within it and the umiak serves as a symbol of their power and prestige, but I was more interested in the timing of the feast. The spring whaling season at least in Barrow generally ends in late May or early June (it had recently ended when I was up there at the end of May and there were umiaks with flags raised indicating whaling success all over the place), so having the feast in late June makes a certain amount of just practical sense given the preparations necessary, but I do wonder if there is a deeper significance to the association with the solstice, perhaps as a vestige of a large role for indigenous astronomy in the pre-Contact era. I have not been able to find much information on archaeoastronomy or ethnoastronomy in Alaska, but given the high latitude and spectacular celestial phenomena that abound here I’m sure Native people have long been attuned to the sky. Recent changes, especially aggressive Christian missionization that sought to stamp out Native religion, has obscured a lot of the earlier cultural practices, but I wonder if things like the timing of the Whale Feast preserve bits and pieces of aspects of traditional knowledge that are otherwise forgotten. Certainly a topic that could use more attention, I think.

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Why Don’t Navajos Eat Fish?

Sign at Kluane Lake, Yukon Territory

In 1898 Washington Matthews, the US Army physician who was one of the earliest and best recorders of ethnographic information on the Navajos, published an article in the Journal of American Folklore entitled “Ichthyophobia.” It’s an interesting piece of scholarship for a number of reasons, not least its florid Victorian prose style. Matthews begins thus:

By the term Ichthyophobia I mean, of course, fear of fish; but I do not mean that proper fear, based upon actual knowledge, which the native diver of certain tropic seas feels, who will not venture into deep water lest he be torn to pieces by sharks, nor that equally rational fear that leads us to discard tainted fish, which so often proves poisonous as an article of food. I refer to the fear which results from superstition, and which prohibits all fish as an article of food; in short, to the taboo of fish.

He soon goes on to explain the background to his interest in this issue:

In the year 1866, after I had spent about twelve months on the Upper Missouri among some of the most primitive tribes then within our borders, I came on to Chicago, and there made the acquaintance of a gentleman who had recently returned from New Mexico, having spent a year or more among the Navaho Indians. Oddly enough the gentleman’s name was Fish, although this fact, like the vernal blossoms, had nothing to do with the case, since the Indians did not fear him. In comparing notes of our experience among the Indians, he asked me, “Do the tribes of the Upper Missouri eat fish?” “Of course they do,” I said. “Is there any one in the world who will not eat a good fish if he can get it ?” “Yes,” he replied; “the Navahoes will not eat fish; they will not even touch a fish, and I have known them to refuse candies that were shaped like fish.” At the time, although I had every reason to believe that my friend was a truthful person, I was half inclined to believe that his was a “fish story” in more senses than one, or that he had made some error in observation. But that was in the days of my youthful ignorance. I knew not then the extent and nature of the customs of taboo. I did not realize that I was myself the victim of taboo practices just as unreasonable as that of the Navaho fish-haters.

Fourteen years later I found myself a neighbor of these same Navaho Indians, and one of the first subjects I proceeded to investigate was the fish taboo, of which I had learned years before. I found that my friend, Mr. Fish, had told me the truth,  but had not expressed his case as strongly as he might have done. I found that the Navahoes not only tabooed fish, but all things connected with the water, including aquatic birds. Speaking of the Navaho repugnance to fish with the landlady of the Cornucopia Hotel (a slab shanty) at Fort Wingate, she related the following as a good joke on the Indian. She employed  a young Navaho warrior to do chores around her kitchen. The Navaho warrior has no pride about the performance of menial labor. He will do almost anything at which he can earn money, and this one would do any work for her but clean fish. He would eat, too, almost anything in her kitchen except fish. Noticing his aversion to the finny tribe, she one day sportively emptied over his head a pan of water in which salt fish had been soaked. The Indian screamed in terror, and, running a short distance, tore in haste every shred of clothing from his body and threw it all away. She learned that he afterwards bathed and “made a lot of medicine” to purify himself of the pollution. He never returned to work for her, so this little trick cost her a good servant.

Anthropologists don’t write like this anymore, which seems like a pity to me. That aside, while Matthews certainly shows his fair share of nineteenth-century racism in what he writes here, he goes on to draw an interesting conclusion that is in some ways well ahead of his time:

Our philanthropists wonder at the reluctance of Indians to send their children to a distance to school, and think it is but foolish stubbornness. They cannot realize that, in addition to many practical and sentimental reasons, there are long-cherished religious scruples to be overcome—reasons which are the most potent of all—and, among these, not the least is that they know their children will be obliged to violate tribal taboos. The Navahoes have heard from returning pilgrims that the boy who goes to the Indian school in the East may be obliged to eat geese, ducks, and fish, or go hungry; or that, if  he eats not at first of these abominations, he may be ridiculed and chided till he changes his customs.

“What foolish scruples!” we say, and yet fail to realize that we all refuse certain edible and wholesome articles as food for no good reason that we can assign. What civilized father would send his child to a distant boarding-school where he might be obliged to eat stewed puppy? Yet I have been informed by those who have tasted it that it is a very palatable dish. But we can find a better illustration of our case than this: There are many among the most cultured of our Christian communities who, for religious reasons, refrain on certain days and at certain seasons from articles of food which at other  times are eaten. Such persons would not willingly send their children to places where they would be compelled to disregard these fasts. We may all understand and approve the sentiments which actuate them; yet we seem unable to extend an equal consideration to savages who are, perhaps, actuated by equally worthy motives. Often among the Navahoes children returning from eastern schools fall into feeble health. Their illness is almost always attributed to the violation of taboo while they were away from home, and costly healing ceremonies are performed in order to remove the evil effects of the transgression.

Matthews was unusual in his generation, even among anthropologists, in taking Indians seriously as people and trying to look at things from their perspective. He is best known for his extensive documentation of Navajo legends and ceremonial practices, including sandpainting designs. His success at eliciting this information was likely due in part to his status as a physician and a sense among the medicine men he talked to that he was in some sense engaged in the same trade as they were, that of healing. His respectful attitude toward his informants, evident in his discussion here of their concerns about the possible effects of boarding school on their children, likely also played a role.

Although Matthews clearly considered it important to emphasize to his audience that the Navajo taboo on eating fish is not some absurd result of “savages” being “irrational,” the main point of his article is to look into how this taboo may have arisen. He notes that the Apaches have a similar taboo, and quotes at length a then-recent article by one P. C. Bicknell, who had recently explored the mountains of east-central Arizona, inhabited by the Western Apaches, and had noticed the same taboo among them and inquired into the reasons for it.  Bicknell eventually got an explanation that the Apaches had long ago, when there was not enough food for everyone in the region, made an agreement with the Mohave and Yuma tribes who lived along the Colorado River to the west. Under this agreement, the Apaches would eat no fish, while the river tribes would eat no venison, and therefore everyone would have enough to eat. Neither Bicknell nor Matthews found this explanation convincing, and Matthews uses it as another example of the parallels between Indian and Anglo-American society:

The story here related, which is wisely discredited by Mr. Bicknell, may have been coined for the occasion; but it is more likely that it has been current for some time among the Indians. White men are not the only ones who are importunate to know the why and the wherefore. The inquisitive small boy whose business in life it is to ask questions exists among the savage as well as among the civilized; and there are boys of older growth who pester their seniors for explanations. To satisfy the mind of the inquirer with something in accord with his mode of thought, with the grade of philosophy which he has reached, is the aim of the man, in all ages of the world, who would gain and retain a reputation for wisdom. Milton’s Adam explains everything to Milton’s Eve according to the philosophy of Milton’s time. Modern science has its myth-makers, no less than the wild Apache.

Matthews does however find a possible clue to the actual origin of the taboo among both Navajos and Apaches in another of the explanations given to Bicknell. One of the Apaches he asked, who apparently had very limited proficiency in English, just said “all same water.” Bicknell interpreted this to mean that fish is just as insubstantial and tasteless as water, but Matthews considers this implausible, since if the Apaches have been avoiding fish for generations they presumably don’t actually know what it tastes like. He sees this instead as an indication that it is the association of the fish with water, which is so scarce and precious in a desert land, that accounts for its avoidance. He checks in with Frank Cushing, the preeminent expert at the time on the Zunis, to see if they have a similar taboo, and receives a reply which he quotes:

The Zuñis, like the Navahoes, will not, under any circumstances, eat fish or any other water animal. The reason is this: Abiding in a desert land, where water is scarce, they regard it as especially sacred; hence all things really or apparently belonging to it, and in particular all creatures living in it, are sacred or deified. But, in the case of the fishes, they eat water, chew it, and are therefore, since they also breathe water and the currents or breaths of water, especially tabooed. The Zuñi name for the Isletas is Kyas-i-ta(w)-kwe, Fish Cannibals, because they ate fish formerly.

Matthews considers this ample confirmation of his own conclusions regarding the Navajo avoidance of fish, which seems to be a common (but not universal) trait of Southwestern groups. Furthermore, he notes that the northern Athapaskans, who speak languages quite similar to those of the Navajos and Apaches but live far to the north, in generally well-watered areas of Canada and Alaska, do not have any sort of taboo on fish consumption. To ensure that he hasn’t missed something on this topic he checks with Franz Boas, the towering figure in American anthropology who had done extensive fieldwork among the Northern Athapaskans. Boas replies:

The northern Athapascan tribes have no taboo against fish; on the contrary, they almost subsist on fish for a considerable  part of the year.

Indeed, salmon in particular is hugely important to the diet of many of the Athapaskan groups in Alaska to this day. Matthews draws the reasonable conclusion from all this that the Navajos and Apaches likely acquired their fish taboos after reaching the Southwest, probably under the influence of the Pueblos, although the arid environment itself may have played a role directly as well.

Many years after Matthews’s paper, Herbert Landar presented further thoughts on the linguistic implications of all this. He notes that Navajo basically has only one word for “fish”: łóó’, a generic term referring to all fish.  This echoes the situation in Hopi and Zuni, both of which only have one general “fish” term, but is quite different from the extensive inventory of terms for various fish found in northern Athapaskan languages. These languages do tend to have terms cognate to the Navajo one, and these terms usually refer either to fish in general or to salmon or whitefish specifically. They also have a wide variety of terms for other specific fish and aquatic creatures, cognates for which are apparently totally missing in the southern languages. Landar concludes from this, in keeping with Matthews’s conclusion (though rather oddly he does not cite Matthews’s article) that “a prehistoric southwestern fish taboo led to the truncation of the Apachean fish vocabulary.”

At the time Landar was writing in 1960, the Alaska Athapaskan languages were still not very well documented compared to those in Canada and the Southwest. It was not until the establishment of the Alaska Native Language Center in 1972 that extensive, systematic documentation of all these languages began. The data collected by the ANLC has greatly increased both the ease and the reliability of the kind of comparative study done by Landar, which in his case given the material he had to work with was necessarily very tentative.  As far as I know no one has yet looked at this exact issue using that data, but it would be interesting to see exactly how many “fish” words each Athapaskan language has and how specific they are. Be that as it may, however, the conclusions reached by Matthews and Landar using much less information are likely to stand the test of time.

Landar, H. (1960). The Loss of Athapaskan Words for Fish in the Southwest International Journal of American Linguistics, 26 (1) DOI: 10.1086/464559

Matthews, W. (1898). Ichthyophobia The Journal of American Folklore, 11 (41) DOI: 10.2307/533215

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Cannibal Christmas Returns: The Witchcraft Theory

Fort Smith Gallows, Fort Smith, Arkansas

Last year around Christmas I did a series of posts on the evidence for cannibalism in the prehistoric Southwest.  I didn’t cover nearly all that there is to say about this important but controversial issue then, so I figured it would be a good idea to discuss it a bit more this year.  In this post I would like to take a look at what has become the main alternative explanation for the assemblages of human remains that are often seen as evidence of cannibalism: witchcraft execution.

The idea that the assemblages of broken, burned, and otherwise heavily “processed” human bones found in various parts of the Southwest represent the remains of the execution of alleged witches originates mainly in an article by J. Andrew Darling published in 1998.  In it, Darling notes that most of the evidence for cannibalism in these assemblages has come from osteological analyses of the bones conducted by physical anthropologists, with little contextual analysis by archaeologists or ethnographers that would allow better understandings of what the assemblages mean in cultural terms.  This is more or less true as of when he was writing, although more recent analyses have been much more thorough (perhaps in part as a response to critiques like Darling’s).  Importantly, Darling does not contest the osteological evidence.  He accepts the conclusions of physical anthropologists that it represents substantial “processing” of human remains around the time of death or shortly afterward, and he even agrees that the specific actions indicated are strongly reminiscent of the evidence for butchering found on animal bones.

Where Darling parts ways with the physical anthropologists, however, is in inferring from this evidence for butchering that the intent of this processing was to prepare human flesh for consumption.  He points out, again rightly, that little is known about the butchering of animals for purposes other than consumption, and that it cannot therefore be assumed that any processing of remains, human or animal, necessarily indicates consumption of those remains.  In other words, Darling agrees that people were butchering and mutilating the bodies of other people, but he does not agree that this means they were eating them.

At this point I think it is worth pointing out that Darling’s acceptance of this much of the physical anthropological evidence indicates how much the cannibalism side had already won the debate at this point.  Indeed, the objections of Darling and those who cite him may reveal more about the societal mores of modern anthropologists than those of ancient Puebloans.  ”Yes, okay, they did gruesomely butcher and dismember people, but that doesn’t mean they ate them” is a rather odd line of defense to offer against accusations of cannibalism.

Note also that Darling was writing before the publication of the data on the Cowboy Wash assemblage, including the infamous coprolite that tested positive for human muscle tissue.  His arguments that the evidence of butchery on the bones doesn’t necessarily indicate consumption of the flesh therefore stand on their own, but they don’t apply at all to the coprolite evidence, which is just about the most solid evidence for actual consumption of human flesh imaginable.

Leaving all that aside for the moment, Darling’s alternative explanation for the heavily processed assemblages is that they represent the remains of executions of suspected witches.  His evidence for this draws mostly from modern Pueblo ethnography, especially records of witchcraft trials at Zuni in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as ceremonies conducted at several Pueblos to cure ailments attributed to witchcraft.  He notes, importantly, that this does not mean he is merely projecting the ethnographic present into the past; indeed, the modern activities he describes would likely not account for anything like the prehistoric assemblages.  The Zuni trials, many of which were subject to intensive interference by Anglo anthropologists and government agents, provide interesting data on Zuni attitudes toward witches, but they resulted in very few executions, and there is little to no data on the way those few executions were carried out.

For data that could possibly account for the intensive processing of the remains of executed witches, Darling points to the ceremonies, which in modern times largely consist of the symbolic hunting, capture, dismemberment, and burning of the witches in the form of effigy dolls.  Combining this with the evidence from the Zuni trials, the idea seems to be that at some point in the past similar “trials” often ended up with executions carried out similarly to the ritual destruction of the dolls.  This is a bit speculative, but it’s not a hugely implausible theory.

It’s not totally clear, however, that this is actually an alternative to the cannibalism theory.  I think it could just as easily be seen as a supplement to it, with the intensive processing of executed witches at some times in the past also involving consumption of their flesh. Darling doesn’t address this objection specifically, but it seems like it has occurred to him, as he makes a big deal about how cannibalism itself is strongly associated with witchcraft in Pueblo thought.  Indeed, one of the reasons he argues the cannibalism theory is wrong is that this association is so strong that Pueblos would never engage in cannibalism, even under conditions of severe subsistence stress, for fear of either being thought of as witches or even actually becoming them.  This is fair enough, as far as it goes, but Darling doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that some of these attitudes toward witchcraft and cannibalism may have developed relatively recently, perhaps even in reaction to prehistoric incidents of cannibalism.  Whether or not the people who dismembered and perhaps cannibalized others in the twelfth century interpreted what they were doing as punishing witches, it seems pretty plausible to me that later Puebloans reinterpreted those events as the actions of witches themselves, and incorporated cannibalism into their cultural ideas of witchcraft.

Overall, Darling’s article raises some important points, and presents some interesting data on Pueblo witchcraft ideas, but it is highly unconvincing in presenting an alternative to the cannibalism theory.  As noted above, it is totally inadequate as a response to cannibalism evidence that comes directly from coprolites rather than indirectly from bones, and the alternative theory it proposes is actually not necessarily incompatible with cannibalism at least in some instances.  The fact that some archaeologists continue to rely on it as the basis for arguing against cannibalism as an explanation for certain assemblages just goes to show how few other interpretations are really plausible at this point.

Darling, J. Andrew (1998). Mass Inhumation and the Execution of Witches in the American Southwest American Anthropologist, 100 (3), 732-752 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.732

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The Puzzling Dena’ina

Dena'ina Civic and Convention Center, Anchorage, Alaska

As I mentioned in the last post, it’s generally thought that the Athapaskan migrations which eventually led to the entrance of the Navajos and Apaches into the Southwest began in Alaska.  The northern Athapaskan languages are actually spoken over a very large area of northwestern Canada as well, but the linguistic evidence clearly points to Alaska as the original place where Proto-Athapaskan was spoken at the last point before it splintered into the various Athapaskan languages.  That is, the Urheimat of the Athapaskans seems to have been somewhere in Alaska.

There are two main pieces of evidence pointing to this conclusion.  One is the fact that it has been quite well established at this point that the Athapaskan language family as a whole is related to the recently-extinct language Eyak, which was spoken in south-central Alaska.  Eyak was clearly not an Athapaskan language itself, but it had sufficient similarities to reconstructed Proto-Athapaskan to establish a genetic relationship.  Since Eyak was spoken in Alaska, it therefore seems most probable that the most recent common ancestor of both Eyak and the Athapaskan languages (Proto-Athapaskan-Eyak) was also spoken in Alaska.  This is not very strong evidence on its own, however, since Eyak was only a single language spoken by a relatively small group of people, and there is some fairly strong evidence that they have not lived in their current location for a very long time (although they may well have moved there from elsewhere in Alaska).

A stronger piece of evidence is the internal diversity of the Athapaskan languages themselves.  A general principle in historical linguistics is that the Urheimat of a language family is likely to be found where there is maximal diversity among the languages in the family.  That is, since language families often spread through migration, areas with many languages from the family that are not particularly closely related to each other in relatively small area are more likely locations for the Urheimat than areas with fewer languages that are more closely related.  When it comes to Athapaskan, this condition obtains most strongly in Alaska.  The languages in Canada and the Lower 48 are all relatively closely related to each other within the family as compared to some of the languages in Alaska.  Although interior Alaska is overwhelmingly dominated by Athapaskan groups, the linguistic boundaries among these various groups, even those adjacent to each other, are often extremely sharp.

This is particularly the case when it comes to the most divergent of all the Athapaskan languages: Dena’ina.  (Note that in many publications this term is spelled “Tanaina,” and I have spelled it that way myself in the past.  ”Dena’ina” is the generally preferred form these days, being closer to the original pronunciation and consistent with the principles of the currently used orthography.)  This is the language traditionally spoken around Cook Inlet in south-central Alaska, including the Anchorage area.  While it’s clearly Athapaskan, it’s very weird as Athapaskan languages go.  It is not mutually intelligible with any other Athapaskan language, although it borders several of them, and it is in turn divided into several internal dialects that are strikingly diverse.  James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, published an article on Dena’ina dialects in 1975 based on original fieldwork.  The basic conclusions were that there are two main dialects, Upper Inlet and Lower Inlet, and that Lower Inlet is further subdivided into two or three subdialects: Outer Inlet, Inland, and Iliamna (which lies between the two other dialects and shows similarities to both, although Kari seems to consider it likely that it is ultimately more closely related to the Outer Inlet dialect with the similarities to the Inland dialect due to later influence).  In general, the Lower Inlet dialect is more conservative than the Upper Inlet one, which shows extensive influence from the neighboring Ahtna language, which is also Athapaskan but not very similar to Dena’ina.  Within the Lower Inlet dialect, the Inland dialect is the most conservative, as well as the one with by far the most speakers of any of the dialects as of 1975.  Both these conditions are presumably due to the relative isolation of this dialect, which is spoken in the Lake Clark area and further north in Lime Village.  Kari considers this the most likely homeland of Dena’ina speakers, whom he sees as having moved from the interior to the coast relatively recently, although he acknowledges that this cannot be established based on linguistic evidence alone.

Despite the relative conservatism of the Lower Inlet dialect, however, all its subdialects do show a  certain amount of influence from Yup’ik Eskimo (particularly in the development of the Proto-Athapaskan vowel system).  This is unsurprising, as these dialects lie on the boundary of the Yup’ik area to the west and south, and the Dena’ina groups in these areas show extensive Eskimo influence in many aspects of their traditional culture.  This is particularly the case for the Outer Inlet groups, especially those at the southern end of Cook Inlet, who adopted a much more maritime-oriented culture than is typical of Athapaskans.  These cultural distinctions within the overall Dena’ina society were documented by Cornelius Osgood of Yale in the 1930s.  In an article published in 1933 he noted that the main distinctions among the Dena’ina groups were economic, having to do with their subsistence systems, while other social systems were pretty similar across the various groups.  The Lower Inlet groups, especially those in the Seldovia area on Kachemak Bay near the outlet of Cook Inlet, showed a much heavier dependence on hunting sea mammals and a correspondingly heavier influence from nearby Yup’ik Eskimo groups with a similar adaptation than their compatriots further north who had a more typically Athapaskan lifestyle based on salmon fishing and hunting of terrestrial animals.

The fact that Dena’ina, the most divergent of the Athapaskan languages and therefore the one that most likely split earliest from Proto-Athapaskan, is spoken in Alaska makes it very likely that Proto-Athapaskan was spoken in Alaska as well.  Indeed, if Kari is right that the Lake Clark area was the original homeland of the Dena’ina, this potentially places Proto-Athapaskan quite far west within Alaska and quite close to areas traditionally occupied by Eskimo-speakers.  It should be noted, however, that it’s still very unclear when the breakup of Proto-Athapaskan occurred and who occupied which parts of Alaska at that time.  Nevertheless, the evidence from Dena’ina, which is still one of the least-understood Athapaskan languages despite its obvious importance for Athapaskan studies, seems to pretty clearly show that whenever the important early events in the history of the language family occurred, they almost certainly occurred somewhere in Alaska.

Osgood, C. (1933). Tanaina Culture American Anthropologist, 35 (4), 695-717 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1933.35.4.02a00070

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Best Acknowledgment Ever

Petroglyphs of Quadrupeds at Atlatl Rock, Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada

In 1978 H. Martin Wobst of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst published a short article in American Antiquity entitled “The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record in Archaeology.”  Despite the evocative title, the article itself is a highly theoretical argument about the proper relationship between archaeology and ethnography that is unlikely to be of much interest outside those fields.  Basically, Wobst argues that the archaeology of hunter-gatherer societies is overly dependent on concepts drawn from ethnographic study of modern hunter-gatherer societies, even though that ethnographic research has inherent limitations in what it can observe about those societies and is further limited by the specific priorities of the scholars who conduct it.  He therefore says that archaeologists should play a larger role in developing theoretical approaches to these societies based on archaeological data, which has its own limitations but is nevertheless better suited to studying certain topics, such as large-scale regional interaction, than is ethnography.  From the perspective of archaeology, Wobst’s article is clearly situated in the processualist tradition, with its emphasis on using archaeological evidence to reconstruct social behavior and contribute to general anthropological theory.

The most interesting part of Wobst’s article, however, is the acknowledgments at the end, which begin with this remarkable dedication:

I would like to dedicate this paper to Provost Dr. Paul Puryear, without whose failing support of Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I would have been done much earlier.

It seems that Paul Puryear was indeed in some sort of administrative position at UMass at the time, but beyond that I have no idea what Wobst is talking about here.  Still, it’s a welcome change from the anodyne expressions of gratitude that usually dominate these parts of papers.

Wobst, H. (1978). The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record in Archaeology American Antiquity, 43 (2) DOI: 10.2307/279256

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Speaking of Ester Boserup

Wupatki Pueblo

The paper I discussed earlier on the connection between plow-based agriculture and highly inegalitarian gender roles was based on a theory proposed by Ester Boserup.  Boserup was a Danish economist who had a lot of interesting ideas about the relationship between population growth and agricultural intensification.  She’s best known for arguing that intensification of agricultural production is a response to population growth, rather than a cause of it as Malthus proposed.  The basic idea is that the default mode of agricultural production is extensive, i.e., requiring a lot of land but relatively little labor.  As population grows, however, the amount of land available per person declines, so people need to get more production out of each unit of land.  This generally requires more work, and the amount of production per unit of work declines.  That is, although the overall amount of food produced increases, the amount of food produced for the amount of work expended to grow it declines.  Thus, people will only intensify agricultural production when they are forced to do so by increasing population.

The Citadel at Wupatki National Monument

This model has been very influential, but it has also been criticized on a number of fronts.  Many of these relate to the underlying assumptions, which Boserup didn’t really make explicit.  The model assumes that the amount of land available is fixed, and doesn’t make allowances for other responses to increased population growth such as trade, migration, and conquest.  There have also been a number of cases in which the model doesn’t seem to apply, either because increased intensification does not in fact require more work or because putting more work into intensified agriculture does not in fact increase crop yields.  (Note that these objections come largely from cultural anthropologists based on ethnographic data.)

Rooms at Wupatki Pueblo

A 1999 paper by Glenn Davis Stone and Christian Downum (available here) tries to incorporate the criticisms of Boserup’s model into a recasting of the model that sees it as applicable only under certain circumstances, namely where increased labor is both necessary and sufficient to raise production.  When this is the case, one option for coping with increased population pressure is what they term “Boserupian intensification,” which is basically the process Boserup described in which people work harder and get higher total yields but lower yields per unit of work on a fixed amount of land.  There are other options, however, including migration and trade, for dealing with population growth in this context, and in other contexts where Boserupian intensification is not an option because of ecological conditions those other options comprise the whole set of possible responses.  In conditions where intensification is possible without harder work, due to new technology or innovative techniques, population pressure ends up not being much of a problem.  Examples given in the paper include raised-field agriculture in the Andes and rice paddies in East Asia.  In other conditions, however, such as arid environments where the weather is very unpredictable, intensification through increased labor just doesn’t work to increase yields reliably, and population pressure becomes a very big problem that must be addressed through other solutions.

Entrance Sign, Wupatki National Monument

Stone and Downum illustrate their proposal through an examination of Wupatki.  This is a very arid part of northern Arizona with similar climatic conditions to Chaco Canyon.  Like Chaco, it was also (rather mysteriously) a major population center in prehistoric times.  Wupatki’s heyday came mainly in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries AD, a little later than Chaco’s in the eleventh and early twelfth.  Many years ago Harold Colton of the Museum of Northern Arizona proposed that the rise of Wupatki was a response to the eruption of Sunset Crater Volcano in 1064, which covered the area with volcanic ash that served as a natural mulch and greatly increased local fertility, leading to a massive influx of population.  This theory has been challenged more recently but it seems to still have a large number of adherents, and Stone and Downum seem to be among them.  They take the idea of increased fertility from the volcanic ash for granted and look at what happened once people started to move into the Wupatki area.  There have been proposals that the increased population pressure from immigration led to intensification of agriculture at Wupatki in a classic example of Boserupian intensification, but Stone and Downum look carefully at the evidence and conclude that there is very little evidence of any intensification.  Instead, they argue that the vast majority of the Wupatki area is totally unsuitable for intensification; there are very few places where any kind of irrigation or floodwater farming can be practiced, and for the most part the only way to grow anything is to extensively dry-farm the open spaces.  Thus, intensification was not an option, and other options for dealing with population pressure must have been pursued.

Dry Land Farming Sign at Box Canyon, Wupatki National Monument

The strategy they see as most likely is political consolidation to secure claims to land.  Since the necessity of extensive agriculture made holding on to as much land as possible a necessity, coming up with effective means of demonstrating and enforcing land rights was a high priority.  They see the most likely way this would have happened is the formation of political units organized along ethnic lines.  It is always difficult to recognize ethnicity in the archaeological record, but Wupatki has long been known as a “frontier” area occupied by people of three distinct archaeological “cultures”: Kayenta Anasazi, Sinagua, and Cohonina.  These presumably don’t correspond exactly to “ethnicities” in the modern sense, but there are notable differences in material culture among the three, and Stone and Downum identify two main clusters of settlements including large, impressive pueblos.  One of these, centered on Wupatki Pueblo, seems to show Sinagua affiliations, while the other, centered on the Citadel, shows more Cohonina affiliations.  The place of the Kayenta Anasazi in all this is unclear.  They don’t seem to have a cluster of their own, and Kayenta-affiliated sites are spread all over the area.

Wall at the Citadel, Wupatki National Monument

Stone and Downum see the construction of large, aggregated pueblos as a sign of group power intended to impress others with the legitimacy of the group’s claims to land and other resources, and they suggest that relatively few people might have actually lived in the pueblos themselves despite being affiliated with them politically.  For this system to work, the groups’ land claims had to be backed with the credible threat of coercive force, and there is indeed some evidence of violence at Wupatki that may reflect occasional instances when this force needed to be shown.  (There is an interesting parallel here to a more recent article on a different part of the Southwest which I will discuss at some point.)

Wall at Wupatki Pueblo

To illustrate the plausibility of their interpretation of Wupatki, Stone and Downum rely on analogy to contemporary ethnic groups in central Nigeria.  This is an area where Boserupian intensification is in fact possible and some groups have dealt with population pressure through intensification.  Other groups, however, have responded instead by organizing along ethnic lines to defend their land claims through the threat and occasional application of violence.  Stone is a sociocultural anthropologist and this part of the paper is based on his fieldwork in the area.  This is a good example of what (sociocultural) anthropology can contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship.  Ethnography produces an enormously rich, textured body of qualitative data that can be used to test hypotheses and models to explain social phenomena.  Those models can come from anthropology itself, of course, but they can also come from other disciplines, such as economics in this case.  Downum is a Southwestern archaeologist, and his role in this paper seems to be in providing the data about Wupatki.  Much of the data comes from an extensive survey of sites within Wupatki National Monument which has greatly increased the amount of information available about this interesting but poorly understood area.

San Francisco Peaks from Wukoki Pueblo, Wupatki National Monument

I think the arguments in this paper are pretty plausible.  There are some questions about the application of the theory to Wupatki, but it seems to fit as well as any other explanation I’ve seen for the processes of aggregation and abandonment that marked this period of Southwestern prehistory.  The basic idea is that aggregation occurred because of political consolidation, which came about to secure land claims in the face of population pressure and inability to intensify production.  Along with this consolidation came increased conflict, and ultimately that conflict and poor climatic conditions led to abandonment.  This is similar to the model I have proposed for the role of warfare in spurring aggregation and abandonment, although there I focused more on warfare specifically as a response to resource scarcity rather than political consolidation as the response and warfare as the result of that.  This is really a difference of emphasis, however, and the basic idea is very similar.  What Stone and Downum’s theory doesn’t explain, however, is the widespread nature of the aggregation and abandonment processes across the northern Southwest, even in places with much better ecological conditions such as Mesa Verde where intensification would presumably have been an option in a way it wasn’t at Wupatki.  They acknowledge this, and make no claim to explain anything beyond the specific local situation, but it’s an issue that is worth thinking about in evaluating theories like this.

Interior Room at Wupatki Pueblo

Since I’ve been talking a lot lately about disciplinary issues in academia, it’s worth noting that this paper seems to be to be pretty much entirely a cultural anthropology paper.  It uses archaeological data, and one of the authors is an archaeologist, but the overall analysis lies squarely within the realm of (sociocultural) anthropology.  It’s well-done, too, and quite serious and empirical.  I suspect its authors are probably among those who consider themselves “scientific anthropologists” and are outraged by the American Anthropological Association’s moves toward removing “science” from the definition of the field.  I wouldn’t call this science, though.  There’s no hypothesis testing or statistical analysis, and the analysis is basically comparative and qualitative.  It doesn’t go so far in that direction as historical papers like Robin Ganev’s, which I discussed in the previous post, but it’s nowhere near as scientific as the economics paper on plowing that I discussed in the post before that.  What I take from this is that scholarship doesn’t need to be scientific to be serious.  Indeed, in a paper like this one of the main advantages is to take a more “scientific” theory like Boserup’s and evaluate it from a more qualitative perspective to define the unstated assumptions behind it and the conditions under which it applies.  I still maintain that anthropology is not a science, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile or doesn’t count as serious scholarship.

Stone, G., & Downum, C. (1999). Non-Boserupian Ecology and Agricultural Risk: Ethnic Politics and Land Control in the Arid Southwest American Anthropologist, 101 (1), 113-128 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1999.101.1.113

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Patriarchy Follows the Plow

Plow at Lost City Museum, Overton, Nevada

Most if not all cultures have gendered divisions of labor, but the specifics of what counts as “women’s work” versus “men’s work” vary considerably from one culture to another.  There are some broad generalizations that apply pretty widely cross-culturally; hunting tends to be a masculine task, for instance, and childcare a feminine one.  When it comes to more complicated tasks of more recent origin, however, the gender designations can seem pretty arbitrary.  This is particularly obvious when it comes to agriculture, which developed several times in different parts of the world with different crops.  In many societies tending crops is a feminine task, perhaps because it is similar to gathering wild plants, which is often a responsibility of women.  This was historically the case, for example, among the indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America, where women tended the fields while men were responsible for hunting, war, and diplomacy.  In other parts of the world, on the other hand, such as most of Europe, agriculture was traditionally considered a masculine pursuit, and men tended the fields while women stayed at home and took care of cooking, cleaning, and childcare.

Why would this be?  Is it mere chance that agriculture developed different gender associations in different societies, or is there some pattern?  A recent draft paper by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn takes a look at one hypothesis, originally advanced by Ester Boserup, to explain cross-cultural differences in the gendering of agriculture.  Boserup proposed that cultures in which farming is done primarily by men tend to farm with plows, while those in which agriculture is done by women use other agricultural techniques.  Furthermore, she argued that these two types of agrarian societies tend to differ systematically in other ways as well, particularly with respect to gender roles.  In plow societies women tend to stay at home and tend to household tasks while men are out working in the fields, and in many cases they develop highly elaborated systems of gender role differentiation with men in a clearly dominant role.  This has historically been the case especially in the Near East and most of Europe, as well as in other areas such as northern India.  In places without plow agriculture, however, societies tend to have less rigid gender role definition and more flexibility in acceptable economic activity for women.  This is the case in most of Africa, the Americas, and southern India.  Strikingly, these differences in economic role for men and women in plow societies seem to persist even when societies industrialize: men take the manufacturing jobs outside the home instead of working in the fields, but women still stay at home rather than working.  Very recently this has begun to change, especially in the wealthiest societies, but there is some evidence that the pattern has been surprisingly persistent.

Roswell Seed Company, Roswell, New Mexico

The proposed mechanism behind this is that plow agriculture, unlike other techniques, requires considerable physical strength to push the plow, which makes it more suited for men, who are on average physically stronger than women.  Once they have gained a predominant role in agriculture, which is the mainstay of the subsistence system, men go on to become dominant in other parts of society as well, and cultural norms begin to reinforce male superiority on an ideological as well as an economic level.

An interesting idea, to be sure, but is it true?  This is what Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn set out to determine, using elaborate statistical techniques.  This paper is an example of an increasing trend among some economists of analyzing anthropological questions using the sophisticated quantitative techniques that are standard in economics but vanishingly rare in anthropology.  Archaeologists do use statistical techniques quite a bit these days, but the stuff in this paper blows away anything I’ve seen in archaeology, and sociocultural anthropologists hardly seem to use statistics at all.  This paper is an example of what serious quantitative social-science research looks like as applied to the subject matter usual addressed by anthropologists, and the difference between these techniques and those used by anthropologists shows why anthropology is not a science.  That’s not to say that these techniques are necessarily better than those used by anthropologists.  In fact, I think there are a lot of drawbacks to this kind of research.  Regardless of whether this kind of research is useful or not, however, I just don’t see any way to avoid the conclusion that it’s fundamentally different from what anthropologists do.

Aztec Feed & Supply, Aztec, New Mexico

Be that as it may, this is a very impressive paper.  The authors start from the assumption that plow agriculture works better for some crops than for others.  Plows are expensive, as are the draft animals necessary to pull them, so societies are unlikely to adopt the plow if they can grow enough food on the land available to them more easily.  This will be the case if the land is suitable for growing crops that don’t need plowed fields to grow effectively.  These include tree crops, roots, and tubers, as well as some grains such as corn, millet, and sorghum.  Other grain crops, such as wheat, rye, and barley, require extensive preparation of the land by plowing before they will grow effectively.  The idea, then, is to identify the parts of the world suited for “plow-positive” and “plow-negative” crops, then to identify the traditional agrarian societies that have historically inhabited these areas and to check that their agricultural techniques corresponded to the crops to which their land was suitable.  Using several databases of ethnographic documentation and soil suitability data, the authors confirmed that this in fact the case.  They then used some fairly ingenious analysis with geographical information systems to calculate percentages of the population whose ancestral ethnic groups used the plow in countries around the world and compared these percentages to replies to worldwide surveys of attitudes toward gender roles and statistics on women’s participation in the workforce.

The results confirmed Boserup’s prediction: countries with higher percentages of people from plow cultures had lower numbers of women working outside the home and gender attitudes among both men and women more focused on male superiority.  To make sure these results were really associated with plow use rather than something else they controlled for a wide variety of potential confounding variables, and the results were still quite robust.  They also did a separate analysis of workforce participation among female immigrants and daughters of immigrants to the US, to control for the possibility that institutional structures in countries with histories of plow use rather than cultural factors were causing the effects on women’s workforce participation there.  The results remained the same, with female immigrants from plow cultures less likely to work than other immigrant women and the same effect for daughters of immigrants, with the effect strongest when both parents were from the same ethnic background.

Bullock's Feed & Seed, Artesia, New Mexico

These results aren’t definitive, of course.  The paper is certainly pretty rough, although more in the writeup than the data.  Also, with any statistical analysis like this there is always the possibility of additional factors that the authors missed that could be causing these effects.  In this case, however, the authors did a very good job of considering and controlling for a wide variety of possible confounding factors.  This paper is a good example of how interdisciplinary research can work well.  In this case the data and many of the crucial assumptions behind the analysis came from anthropology, while the analytical tools came from economics.  This kind of research won’t replace traditional anthropological research, but it is a useful supplement to it.  Multiple lines of evidence are always good when evaluating complicated questions such as those that arise in studying human societies.

To bring this back to the usual subject matter of this blog, another possible factor in whether or not a society uses the plow is of course the presence or absence of draft animals.  The general lack of draft animals in the Americas was probably one contributing factor to the lack of plow agriculture.  We’ve seen a similar explanation advanced for the lack of wheeled vehicles in the Americas as well.  However, given that maize and other indigenous cultivated plants like potatoes and manioc don’t require use of the plow, it’s likely that the crop-based explanation advanced by this paper is more important in explaining the non-plow nature of American agriculture.  Regardless of why, however, it is certainly the case that the Americas did not develop plow cultures like those of the Old World, with their extreme gender inequality and ideology that a woman’s place is in the home.

Tractor Brewing Company, Los Lunas, New Mexico

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Anthropology Is Not a Science

Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico

There’s been a flurry of activity in the past few days reacting to the American Anthropological Association‘s removal of the word “science” from its mission statement.  I’m not an anthropologist myself, but my perspective is that this change is appropriate to how the discipline has developed and what it currently is.  Whether or not anthropology was ever “really” a science (and it’s important to note that the common cultural understanding of the words “anthropology” and “science” has changed quite a lot over the past century), it is today not a science in any common sense of the word.

The traditional “four-field” division of anthropology into sociocultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics was in my view never more than an historical accident, and these “subdisciplines” have never had a whole lot in common other than the vague concept of “culture” tying them loosely together.  I think people who have been saying that sociocultural anthropology, with its increasing tendency toward more humanistic and less scientific methods, has becoming increasingly hegemonic within the discipline are correct, and that this is not really a problem.  To an increasing extent, anthropology today just is sociocultural anthropology, and as trends within sociocultural anthropology cause it to move away from the other subfields the most natural result is for the increasingly disjointed discipline to break up.  The more “scientific” subfields could easily just become separate disciplines.  Linguistics did this decades ago as part of the major shift in the discipline inaugurated by Chomsky’s theories in the late 1950s, and the few linguists who are still associated with anthropology departments generally practice a type of linguistics more in line with anthropology than is typical of most linguists.  Archaeology, in particular, could easily do the same thing.  There are already independent archaeology departments at BU and Simon Fraser, and the establishment of new departments at other universities is quite conceivable and would, I think, be a good thing for the discipline of archaeology, which I don’t think has much of a connection to the discipline of anthropology these days.  Archaeologists like Mike Smith are up in arms about this change and some are even threatening to leave the AAA over it, which I think is all to the good.  If archaeologists feel anthropology is no longer scientific enough for them, they should leave anthropology and set out on their own.  Then we can have a discussion over the separate and, to me, more interesting question of whether archaeology is a science.

Sign for Anthropology Building, University of New Mexico

Physical anthropology, the most scientific of the subfields, is a trickier case since there are no independent departments (as far as I know) and the word “anthropology” is right there in the name, but some sort of closer affiliation to biology or human physiology programs would make sense, and I can also conceive of new departments of primatology or some such being established, which would also take care of the odd and (to me) rather disconcerting fact that much of the research done in physical anthropology is actually not about humans at all but about other primates.

The new mission statement not only gets rid of the word “science” but also downplays the four-field concept, instead referring to a variety of research approaches, some associated with completely separate disciplines such as economics and history.  To the extent that research from these perspectives, as well as from the perspectives of the traditional anthropological subfields, intersects with research in sociocultural anthropology, it makes sense to consider them part of the mission of anthropology as a discipline.  There is no longer much reason to privilege the anthropological portions of certain disciplines as subfields of anthropology while leaving research within other disciplines that may be equally anthropological isolated from anthropology as a discipline.

Now, as it happens I’m not actually all that interested in the sorts of things sociocultural anthropologists have been doing recently, so if the discipline does start to formally dissolve the way I’ve sketched out here I probably will not be keeping a close eye on developments within the remnants of anthropology.  Instead, as with other disciplines with which I have no particular connection, I will deal with it only as it intersects the subjects that I am interested in.  But that’s okay with me.

Anthropology Building, University of New Mexico

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Atlatls to Bows: More on the Skagit River Atlatl

Starbucks, New Brunswick, New Jersey

My post on the atlatl found at the mouth of the Skagit River north of Seattle seems to have led one reader to ask about it in a forum for modern atlatl makers and users.  The responses are interesting.  One respondent linked to an article from the 1960s with more detailed information which is available free online.  This article, by Charles Borden, has some very good pictures of the atlatl, which was at some point acquired by the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, which has even better pictures and more information on its website.  Borden’s analysis focuses mainly on the iconography of the elaborately carved figure, which he puts in the context of ethnographically known imagery from various Northwest Coast cultures representing sea monsters and other mythological creatures with similar characteristics to the one on the atlatl.  He argues, not entirely convincingly, that it represents an early form of the important creature known as the Sisiutl, which is usually represented as a two-headed snake but which can take on other forms as well.  Whether or not he is right about that particular identification, Borden does make a convincing case that the atlatl fits easily into the artistic traditions of the Northwest rather than being an import from elsewhere.  He also argues that it is likely very old, and tentatively suggests that it may be contemporaneous with the Locarno Beach site in Vancouver, which produced an atlatl hook made of antler.  The Locarno Beach site defined the Locarno Beach Phase, which now seems to be dated to around 3500 to 2500 radiocarbon years before present.  As I mentioned in the previous post, the Skagit River atlatl was apparently later radiocarbon dated directly and assigned to the Marpole Phase, which dates to around 2000 to 1500 radiocarbon years before present.  (According to the UBC Museum website the exact date was around 200 AD.)  Borden was therefore off by quite a bit in suggesting that the atlatl was contemporaneous with Locarno Beach, but of course he had less information to go by than is available now.

Also, John Palter recently commented on a post in which I discussed an article of his on atlatl weights, pointing to a more recent article in which he bolsters his theory that they were associated with flexible atlatls by discussing the attitudes of modern atlatl users toward the advantages of flexible, weighted atlatls over more rigid types.  As with the forum discussion on the Skagit River atlatl, this shows the interesting insights on atlatl use that can come from the large corps of amateur atlatl users and their extensive experimental experience with atlatls.  This is a very different approach to learning about atlatls than the abstract study of surviving ancient specimens more typical of archaeologists, and I think the two approaches used together can be quite complementary. I’ve mentioned this issue before with regard to interpretation of an atlatl petroglyph.

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Atlatls to Bows: A Very Strange Atlatl from California

Higuera Street, San Luis Obispo, California

In November of 1793 a British naval expedition commanded by Captain George Vancouver arrived at the small Spanish settlement of Santa Barbara on the coast of California.  Vancouver’s primary mission was to explore and map the poorly understood northwest coast of North America, building on the more preliminary information provided earlier by Captain James Cook.  He was quite successful at this, and the detailed maps produced by his expedition greatly enhanced British understanding of this area, which was becoming very important geopolitically as a result of its potential resources and increasing competition among Britain, Spain, and Russia to claim it.  When he arrived at Santa Barbara he was headed south, having spent the spring and summer exploring the area around the island that now bears his name and bound for Hawaii to spend the winter.  He anchored off of Santa Barbara for eight days to rest and resupply, and his men took advantage of the opportunity to trade with the local Spanish and Chumash inhabitants.  Mission Santa Barbara was only a few years old, having been established in 1786, and the presidio where Spanish soldiers were garrisoned was only four years older than that.  Although the Chumash had been in contact with the Spanish since the Cabrillo expedition of 1542, the permanent Spanish presence in their territory dated only to the establishment of Mission San Luis Obispo in 1772, and at the time Vancouver’s expedition stopped by they were only just beginning to move to the missions and experience the profound and complicated cultural changes that would result.

Chamber of Commerce, San Luis Obispo, California

George Goodman Hewett, Surgeon’s First Mate on Vancouver’s flagship, HMS Discovery, was among the members of the expedition who did some trading with the locals at Santa Barbara.  Hewett apparently had a strong interest in the customs and lifestyles of the various peoples the expedition encountered, and he collected from them various items of material culture whenever possible.  Over the course of the four years that the expedition ended up taking he acquired a substantial collection.  While the greatest number of items in the collection were from the places the expedition spent the most time, particularly Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest, the items from Santa Barbara were (and are) of particular interest to later anthropologists, since Hewett collected them at a time when traditional Chumash culture, now known primarily from the very detailed but nevertheless retrospective ethnographic fieldwork of John Peabody Harrington in the early twentieth century, was still mostly intact and only beginning to be affected by missionization and Spanish contact.  Hewett’s collection remained in his family until 1891, when it was acquired by the British Museum, where it remains.  A description of some of the most significant items was published by Charles H. Read in 1892.

Hill, San Luis Obispo, California

Read’s description included two atlatls.  One is an elaborately carved example from southeast Alaska, where use of the atlatl is known to have persisted into modern times, perhaps because of its usefulness in fishing and maritime hunting compared to the bow.  The other is from Santa Barbara.

First Bank of San Luis Obispo, San Luis Obispo, California

The Santa Barbara atlatl, as it has been known ever since Read’s publication, is very odd for a number of reasons.  For one thing, just at the outset, the idea of the atlatl being used at Santa Barbara in the late eighteenth century is odd.  California is one area where the replacement of the atlatl by the bow and arrow, whenever it happened, is widely agreed to have been complete by long before then.  While atlatl hooks have been found in early archaeological contexts in various parts of the state, including the Chumash area, there is no evidence of atlatl use from later prehistoric contexts, and the copious ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature on the Chumash nowhere mentions the atlatl, whereas the importance of the bow and arrow is discussed many times.  Read was not in a position to know any of this, of course, since this understanding of the culture history of the area came long after his time.

San Luis Surf, San Luis Obispo, California

Furthermore, the form of the atlatl itself is odd.  While archaeological and ethnographic examples from North America, including the Alaskan ones from the Hewett collection, are typically long and thin, the Santa Barbara specimen is short and thick.  While most atlatls are about half a meter long, this one is only 15 cm long, and nearly as wide.  Furthermore, while North American examples typically have either attached leather finger loops or none at all, this one has two large holes carved out of the wood itself.  The wood seems to be a local type, and no one has questioned the authenticity of the specimen or Hewett’s account of its origin (Read notes that Hewett’s record-keeping was pretty good by the standards of his time), but it’s all very odd and hard to explain.  If it represents a survival from a local atlatl tradition, this tradition is suspiciously absent entirely from both the archaeological and ethnographic records.  While it’s true that atlatls, being made of wood, rarely survive archaeologically, this one does have a bone hook, so if it represents a survival of an ancient atlatl type that continued in use after the adoption of the bow and arrow it would be reasonable to expect at least one similar bone hook to survive somewhere, and this still doesn’t address the lack of ethnographic evidence.

Street Signs, San Luis Obispo, California

Nevertheless, the Santa Barbara was generally accepted as an unusual but indigenous type of atlatl until 1938, when the prominent California archaeologist Robert Heizer published an article looking at the issue and coming to a quite different conclusion.  Heizer pointed out the lack of any other evidence for this type of atlatl as well as all the oddities of the Santa Barbara specimen compared to other examples, and went a step further by noting that it bore a striking similarity to the atlatls still in active use at that time by the Tarascans of western Mexico (remember them?).  These also have paired finger-holes carved out of the wood, and have the same widening of the body of the atlatl around the holes.  The dimensions are still different; the Tarascan examples are much longer and thinner than the Santa Barbara one.  There is still a remarkable similarity, however, and Heizer goes on to point out that the Spanish were known to use Tarascans and other Indians from previously colonized parts of Mexico as settlers on the frontier, particularly in the northwest, which is where the expeditions that colonized California in the 1770s are known to have started.  Although there is no direct evidence that the Spanish soldiers and missionaries in California were accompanied by Mexican Indians, given typical Spanish practices it would not be a surprise.  This, combined with the striking similarities between the Santa Barbara atlatl and Tarascan ones, leads Heizer to propose that the Santa Barbara example is not a survival at all, but a reintroduction of the atlatl to the area from Mesoamerica, where it remained in use long after the Spanish conquest.  The Santa Barbara one is clearly of local manufacture, however, which suggests that this process did not simply involve Tarascans bringing their own atlatls to California, although that was presumably part of it.  Rather, once the Mexican Indians were there, they apparently showed the Chumash the use of the atlatl, which they used for fishing and hunting in maritime settings, and the Chumash (who were a coastal people very oriented toward the sea) were sufficiently impressed to copy it themselves.  Since it apparently did not become established securely enough to be noticed or mentioned by either the Spanish or later ethnographers, the Chumash don’t seem to have ultimately decided to adopt it as a core part of their culture or subsistence system, but they do seem to have at least tried it out.  Indeed, Hewett may have encountered the Chumash at a time of experimentation connected to the changes associated with the transition to mission life, and his acquisition of the atlatl may have preserved a moment in time, a tentative embrace of foreign technology that was ultimately rejected and that would therefore otherwise be unknown to history.  Along the same lines, it’s worth wondering why the Chumash were willing to part with this obviously unusual and presumably rare item when all the other things they gave Hewett were rather typical and plentiful items such as bows.  Was whoever tried to copy the Mexican atlatls, or whoever had tried to use the copy made by someone else, displeased with how the experiment had turned out and eager to get rid of the item when a foreigner interested in buying random things showed up?  There’s no real way to tell, of course, and it’s also possible that atlatls like this were used successfully for a while around this time then abandoned for some other reason.  This item is, however, an intriguing window into a complicated past, and it shows that it’s important to look carefully at the stories behind artifacts before constructing theories based on their characteristics.

Heizer, R. (1938). An Inquiry into the Status of the Santa Barbara Spear-Thrower American Antiquity, 4 (2) DOI: 10.2307/275985

Read, C. (1892). An Account of a Collection of Ethnographical Specimens Formed During Vancouver’s Voyage in the Pacific Ocean, 1790-1795 The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 21 DOI: 10.2307/2842277

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