Brilliance

Artifact Made of Scarlet Macaw Feathers at Edge of the Cedars Museum, Blanding, Utah

One of the most exciting developments for archaeology in the past few years has been the increasing application of sophisticated techniques from the physical and life sciences to questions of archaeological interest.  Chemistry has been one of the major disciplines to contribute to this trend through techniques such as trace-element analysis to determine the sources of materials used in artifacts with a precision that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago, but biology has played a role as well.  One of the most interesting recent applications of molecular biology to southwestern archaeology involves the artifact in the picture above, which I was lucky enough to see in person on my recent road trip.

The artifact (as it is usually designated since its precise function is obscure) consists of a series of yucca-fiber cords covered in scarlet macaw feathers dangling from a piece of squirrel pelt to which is also attached a buckskin strap.  It was found in a cave in Utah in 1954 and is now housed at the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, Utah, where it is on public display.

It’s really an astonishing thing, mostly because of the near-perfect state of its preservation.  The colors of the feathers are still vibrant.  There were doubtless many items used in the prehistoric southwest that were equally impressive in their brilliant color and fine workmanship, and we occasionally get glimpses of them from fragmented remains, but the perishable materials of which they were made tend to, well, perish over time.  This item, however, happened to be left in a cave, where it lay untouched for 900 years.  Caves are known for their good preservation conditions, and one of the main reasons cliff dwellings have been so important in southwestern archaeology is not that they were ever a major type of settlement in the region (they weren’t) but that they preserve their contents much better than the much more common exposed sites.

This particular item was studied by Lyndon Hargrave, the ornithologist who went on to become a major figure in the development of southwestern archaeology through his work at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff.  Hargrave’s archaeological work was wide-ranging and extensive, but he always retained an interest in birds and did considerable research on both remains of birds and artifacts made with bird parts.  In assessing the Utah item, Hargrave concluded that the feathers were from a scarlet macaw, the furry pelt above them from a tassel-eared squirrel, and that the strap was made of buckskin.

The natural range of the scarlet macaw is far to the south of Utah, so it was clear that the feathers indicated some sort of trade connection with cultures to the south.  Whether this connection involved the trade of feathers, live birds, or objects made from feathers was (and to a considerable extent remains) murkier.  Hargrave concluded on the basis of the way the feathers were attached to the cords of the Utah object that they had been attached in Mexico and traded up as manufactured goods.  To his knowledge, however, the tassel-eared squirrel was found only in the US southwest, so he decided that the imported feathered cords must have been attached to the pelt locally to create the full item.

However, since Hargrave’s time new subspecies of tassel-eared squirrel have been discovered in northern Mexico, raising the possibility that the entire item was created somewhere to the south then traded northward to eventually end up in Utah.  To evaluate this possibility, a team of scholars from the Mayo Clinic (Nancy Borson and Peter J. Wettstein), Northern Arizona University (Jack States), and California State University at San Bernardino (Frances Berdan and Edward Stark) teamed up a few years ago to try to apply recent advances in molecular biology to the problem.  Their study, published in American Antiquity in 1998, came to some interesting and fairly definitive conclusions.

Their basic approach was twofold: to reexamine the artifact and evaluate the method of manufacture to test Hargrave’s theory that the feathers were attached to the cords in Mexico and to sample the DNA of the squirrel pelt to see which of the modern subspecies it best matched.  The examination of the item revealed that the feathers were attached in a way that is rather different from that described in ethnohistorical accounts of Mesoamerican practices and more similar to the way feathers were attached to prayer sticks and other items as described in historical accounts of the modern Pueblos.  This clearly implies that the feathering was done in Utah, and that the cords were unlikely to have been important as finished goods.  It still leaves open the question of whether the feathers were imported themselves or plucked from imported birds.  Scarlet macaw remains have been found in various parts of the southwest, including Chaco Canyon, so I find the second option more plausible, but the authors of this study seem to lean more toward the first.

The examination of the object also revealed that the feathering didn’t go all the way up the cords.  The parts of the cords that are under the squirrel pelt are not feathered.  This reinforces the conclusion that the cords were not imported as finished goods, since they seem to have been custom-made for this particular item.

The DNA analysis concluded that the DNA did not precisely match that of any modern subspecies, but it was clearly closest to the northernmost subspecies, the range of which extends into a small part of Utah which happens to contain the cave where the item was found.  This is pretty conclusive evidence that the whole item was made in Utah, primarily of local materials.

So what does this say about Hargrave’s analysis?  Well, it does disprove his theory that the cords were imported already feathered, but it also confirms his theory that the squirrel pelt was local and that the final manufacturing stages were done in Utah.  This may not be the most exciting result, confirming the accuracy of a previous theory, but I think it’s important for the security of the data on which elaborate social theories are built to have these things checked out using whatever techniques are available.  The advent of methods much more accurate and precise than those Hargrave had at his disposal gives us a valuable opportunity to make sure we’re starting on a firm foundation before we venture out into questions that were unsolvable or even unimaginable to previous generations of scholars.  This research is an excellent example of how to do that well.