You can see author contributions at the end. It took 5 to write it, and everyone else to get the samples, perform experiments, analyze data, etc. Pretty typical for genomics.
No, it took 60 researchers (geneticists, archaeologists, radiocarbon dating specialists) to collect and analyze the data involved in drawing a fairly sweeping conclusion involving a wide array of evidence from a large portion of the continent. They all deserve credit for their contributions, even if they didn't directly contribute in an authorial sense.
TLDR version: horses broadly used in the American west (like New Mexico) just 30 years after Spanish arrival (so 1520ish). Earlier guess was that it was much later, 1700ish coming from the east to west across North America.
Good context from the author of 1491 here, including the intricacies that required so much collaboration:
Probably the Spanish-Indian interactions were quite like the interactions of the Romans with the Germanic tribes across the Rhine. In both cases the occupying force didn't press further, due to unfavourable geography, but the tribesmen were well aware that the occupiers weren't going to go away, so arrangements had to be made.
It's no wonder that the Native Americans of the Southwest adopted the horse, seeing how useful it is, and then it spread quickly throughout the continent.
oh man so much confusion, and everyone's grifting, and I kind of suspect that the paper itself relies on ignorance to stir up a little controversy.
Iberian horses moved from south to north. English horses from east to west. This should be obvious why. Spaniards landed in Mexico, with the landmass northward, which is also the direction of their exploration. Anglos landed on the east coast and explored westward, the whole Oregon trail business. There's a point sometime in 1700s when English riding anglos were interacting, trading and warring with Iberian riding indigenous peoples.
What this paper focuses on is the details of south to north Iberian movement. The specific scientific arguments that it's making, supported by phylogeography and archeology is that the adoption of the Iberians by the indigenous tribes with some probabilities happened sometime between 1516 and 1599, and that with some probability dates of samples in specific states fall in some period between 1600 to 1700.
Next there are two simplifications that exist in general lore, and arguably in historic lore. The first one is the idea that horses were introduced by the Anglos on their westward expansion of the American frontier. The second is that Iberian horses were introduced to indigenous tribes predominantly during 1680 pueblo revolt (in future new Mexico), when a whole bunch of Spanish horses were stolen.
The first simplification exists because there's a lot of cowboy movies, and it's just a pop understanding. Nobody really cares about horses anymore. But equestrians know that there's at least vaquero tradition, and Baja California is one of the last surviving places, where men ride Iberian horses in Spanish style. vaquero ranching was dominant on the west coast, it was never "erased", but it was forgotten along with cowboy ranching in general. little known fact, but "buckaroo" is English riff on "vaquero".
The second simplification is the strawman that this paper for some reason decides to construct. It references a 2017 book, where the 1680 pueblo revolt is presented as a kind of turning point, where downtrodden Indian slaves, who were all trained by Spanish, stole some Spanish horses and rode into various tribes. The problems is that 1910 and 1930 articles that this paper references, and the first person accounts that the articles reference themself, despite being written by colonists and cowboys, were still written by serious equestrians so they don't even remotely support this comedic take. Possibly the Pueblo revolt narrative became dominant recently as an attempt to give agency to indigenous peoples.
So now one is ready to understand the political point that this paper makes: between 1600 and 1700 Indians have developed their own sacred equestrian tradition, and that this happened before and independent of Pueblo revolt and definitely by the time the anglos crossed the continent. The problem is that any serious equestrian (I dunno about anthropologists though) already agrees with this conclusion. Existing historic papers don't disagree with this conclusion either, and support it at least in terms of "yeah we went there and they already had horses".
From this perspective Charles c mann is just straight up grifting, trying to imply that indigenous equestrian tradition existed even before the Spanish, and there's a lot of people in his comments that decided it's a done conclusion.
And the fact that some North American horses didn't come east to west is also a well established fact, that unfortunately very few people know, but it's not a novel discovery this paper made.
I'm going to answer to myself, since above is already a tl;dr and it's unlikely that these comments will attract any kind of attention. Note to self. There's a subtler political point that the paper is trying to make, neither vaquero tradition, nor historic accounts by colonists can strongly testify to the existence of indigenous sacred tradition in the 1600s. This are my suppositions, but I suspect what when the various conquistadors were exploring North America, they wouldn't be privy to the burgeoning sacred equestrian tradition of the indigenous tribes. By the time anglos cross the continent and establish strong enough ties to learn of such a sacred tradition, it becomes impossible to date exactly the tradition's beginning. The paper tries very hard (with talk of care, and quotes from tribe representatives) to establish that such a tradition was already establish in the 1600s, so by the time there was a contact with anglos, indigenous peoples really really knew what they were doing.
Would love to read this, but the website has no zoom buttons and if I zoom in using my browser and click anywhere, that annoying sidebar screws everything up.
Can't find the doc on scihub. Anyone have a PDF they can share?
Will Taylor (lead author) is pretty nice guy from past experience working with him. He would probably be happy to provide drafts if you reach out to him privately. He uses his twitter pretty frequently (@wtt_taylor) when he's not in the field, and he has a rarely checked mastodon account @archaeozoo@fediscience.org if you don't like twitter. Some of his other papers are available on his academia.edu page.
The Puebloan discussion is very…odd. It focuses on the Pueblo Revolt (1680) as a magical demarcation point for Puebloan contact with the horse, based on two 100-year-old Anthropological papers that I’ve never seen referenced in the New Mexicana literature I’ve read. Nor have I ever read the Pueblo-Revolt-horse-first thesis mentioned in any New Mexico history texts from the 1800s, or 1900s. It reads like a straw man argument to me. Nowhere near “the earliest date accepted by Western science” argued (without support) in the conclusions. Anthropologists might have been that foolish, but no professional Western historian ever was. (I stand to be proven wrong, however.)
European contact (riding European horses) for Puebloans would have started with Coronado’s expedition in 1540, and certainly extended with Oñate’s colonization starting in 1598. The Pueblo revolt was 1680. That is at least 80 years of intimate (read up on encomienda/repartimento and Mission churches for more details) Hispano/Pueblo contact prior to the Revolt. What historian would think Puebloans were uninvolved with horses pre-Pueblo-Revolt, when they were in physical partnership (a highly unequal partnership) with horse-riding Europeans for 80 years prior to the Pueblo Revolt. Why would a horse bone at Paa’ko in the early 1600s, when there were already many Spanish colonists in Northern New Mexico, be a surprise?
[There is, however, no mention of Puebloans using, or even being aware of, horses prior to any European contacts in any historical chronicle of the period, and this was such a crucial point for the Conquistadors that someone would have mentioned it, since the horse was perhaps the major strategic military advantage they had from 1540 through 1680. Evidence of that early an awareness would be significant if true. Very unlikely, given the European historical records that report no horses in any Pueblos encountered over those many years, but not impossible.]
Also, arguing “broad use of the horse” in Pueblo culture from a single Paa’ko horse bone dated to the period when many Spanish colonists were also in the 240000 sq mi “Kingdom of New Mexico” (Santa Fe de Nuevo México) is a bit of a stretch.
It wouldn’t surprise me, or many others, that horses were in more common use by the Comanche, Apaches, etc. in the 1600s than previously thought. It would add credence to the notion that availability of horses led to an increase in raiding parties from such tribes on the Pueblos after the Revolt and was one reason the post-Revolt Reconquista was so surprisingly successful.
You are familiar with terminus post quem? Genomic evidence and things like tree-ring dates often provide "no later than" evidence and so your observations to "but 80 years" are true, and reasonable, but also conjectural: find a document, get an artefact, or.. it's terminus post quem. (I'm sure you know this)
Within a few moments of being shown steel artefacts, islanders depending on stone age tools sought to obtain them, no matter how small, from sailors. It wouldn't surprise me if the first artefacts consciously designed to be sold to islander indigenous peoples has a 10-20 year lag, for whaling ships to realise it was better to source cheap knives to sell, than sell their own goods. Whaling ships stayed at sea for 2 or more seasons so it's easy to get to 5, 10 years purely on the mechanistic dynamics.
What percentage of written evidence to islander trade remains esablishes in like sense terminus post quem. If only one diary in a hundred survives, what chance it's the first one in time?
Patrick O'Brien writes of a reader complaining that his use of eau de cologne in georgean naval fiction is anachronistic. He responds in print that whilst written evidence of eau de cologne may lag his fictions time by 20 years he has little doubt people were using it, before they wrote about it. Analogous I feel.
The traditional (i.e. 1950s-1970s/1980s) narrative of Puebloan-Spanish interactions prior to the Pueblo Revolt is one of Spanish domination, in large part because of the reliance on Spanish literary sources. Social historians have explored resistance and resilience to colonial authority, but many scholars have continued working within the essential framework of that relationship. It's largely been native authors making the argument for indigenous cultures to exist in the narratives as causative, independent agents in their own right rather than defining them by their appearance in extant colonial literature. This is a fairly recent development, 1980s onward with it becoming fairly mainstream around the mid 00s.
So no, it's not a strawman. I had to stop here for brevity's sake though.
15 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 59.9 ms ] threadQuestion: did it really take 60 authors to write the article?
GP could probably do well to take a cue from their own username...
Good context from the author of 1491 here, including the intricacies that required so much collaboration:
https://twitter.com/CharlesCMann/status/1641537159973707777
It's no wonder that the Native Americans of the Southwest adopted the horse, seeing how useful it is, and then it spread quickly throughout the continent.
Iberian horses moved from south to north. English horses from east to west. This should be obvious why. Spaniards landed in Mexico, with the landmass northward, which is also the direction of their exploration. Anglos landed on the east coast and explored westward, the whole Oregon trail business. There's a point sometime in 1700s when English riding anglos were interacting, trading and warring with Iberian riding indigenous peoples.
What this paper focuses on is the details of south to north Iberian movement. The specific scientific arguments that it's making, supported by phylogeography and archeology is that the adoption of the Iberians by the indigenous tribes with some probabilities happened sometime between 1516 and 1599, and that with some probability dates of samples in specific states fall in some period between 1600 to 1700.
Next there are two simplifications that exist in general lore, and arguably in historic lore. The first one is the idea that horses were introduced by the Anglos on their westward expansion of the American frontier. The second is that Iberian horses were introduced to indigenous tribes predominantly during 1680 pueblo revolt (in future new Mexico), when a whole bunch of Spanish horses were stolen.
The first simplification exists because there's a lot of cowboy movies, and it's just a pop understanding. Nobody really cares about horses anymore. But equestrians know that there's at least vaquero tradition, and Baja California is one of the last surviving places, where men ride Iberian horses in Spanish style. vaquero ranching was dominant on the west coast, it was never "erased", but it was forgotten along with cowboy ranching in general. little known fact, but "buckaroo" is English riff on "vaquero".
The second simplification is the strawman that this paper for some reason decides to construct. It references a 2017 book, where the 1680 pueblo revolt is presented as a kind of turning point, where downtrodden Indian slaves, who were all trained by Spanish, stole some Spanish horses and rode into various tribes. The problems is that 1910 and 1930 articles that this paper references, and the first person accounts that the articles reference themself, despite being written by colonists and cowboys, were still written by serious equestrians so they don't even remotely support this comedic take. Possibly the Pueblo revolt narrative became dominant recently as an attempt to give agency to indigenous peoples.
So now one is ready to understand the political point that this paper makes: between 1600 and 1700 Indians have developed their own sacred equestrian tradition, and that this happened before and independent of Pueblo revolt and definitely by the time the anglos crossed the continent. The problem is that any serious equestrian (I dunno about anthropologists though) already agrees with this conclusion. Existing historic papers don't disagree with this conclusion either, and support it at least in terms of "yeah we went there and they already had horses".
From this perspective Charles c mann is just straight up grifting, trying to imply that indigenous equestrian tradition existed even before the Spanish, and there's a lot of people in his comments that decided it's a done conclusion.
And the fact that some North American horses didn't come east to west is also a well established fact, that unfortunately very few people know, but it's not a novel discovery this paper made.
Can't find the doc on scihub. Anyone have a PDF they can share?
Will Taylor (lead author) is pretty nice guy from past experience working with him. He would probably be happy to provide drafts if you reach out to him privately. He uses his twitter pretty frequently (@wtt_taylor) when he's not in the field, and he has a rarely checked mastodon account @archaeozoo@fediscience.org if you don't like twitter. Some of his other papers are available on his academia.edu page.
European contact (riding European horses) for Puebloans would have started with Coronado’s expedition in 1540, and certainly extended with Oñate’s colonization starting in 1598. The Pueblo revolt was 1680. That is at least 80 years of intimate (read up on encomienda/repartimento and Mission churches for more details) Hispano/Pueblo contact prior to the Revolt. What historian would think Puebloans were uninvolved with horses pre-Pueblo-Revolt, when they were in physical partnership (a highly unequal partnership) with horse-riding Europeans for 80 years prior to the Pueblo Revolt. Why would a horse bone at Paa’ko in the early 1600s, when there were already many Spanish colonists in Northern New Mexico, be a surprise?
[There is, however, no mention of Puebloans using, or even being aware of, horses prior to any European contacts in any historical chronicle of the period, and this was such a crucial point for the Conquistadors that someone would have mentioned it, since the horse was perhaps the major strategic military advantage they had from 1540 through 1680. Evidence of that early an awareness would be significant if true. Very unlikely, given the European historical records that report no horses in any Pueblos encountered over those many years, but not impossible.]
Also, arguing “broad use of the horse” in Pueblo culture from a single Paa’ko horse bone dated to the period when many Spanish colonists were also in the 240000 sq mi “Kingdom of New Mexico” (Santa Fe de Nuevo México) is a bit of a stretch.
It wouldn’t surprise me, or many others, that horses were in more common use by the Comanche, Apaches, etc. in the 1600s than previously thought. It would add credence to the notion that availability of horses led to an increase in raiding parties from such tribes on the Pueblos after the Revolt and was one reason the post-Revolt Reconquista was so surprisingly successful.
Within a few moments of being shown steel artefacts, islanders depending on stone age tools sought to obtain them, no matter how small, from sailors. It wouldn't surprise me if the first artefacts consciously designed to be sold to islander indigenous peoples has a 10-20 year lag, for whaling ships to realise it was better to source cheap knives to sell, than sell their own goods. Whaling ships stayed at sea for 2 or more seasons so it's easy to get to 5, 10 years purely on the mechanistic dynamics.
What percentage of written evidence to islander trade remains esablishes in like sense terminus post quem. If only one diary in a hundred survives, what chance it's the first one in time?
Patrick O'Brien writes of a reader complaining that his use of eau de cologne in georgean naval fiction is anachronistic. He responds in print that whilst written evidence of eau de cologne may lag his fictions time by 20 years he has little doubt people were using it, before they wrote about it. Analogous I feel.
So no, it's not a strawman. I had to stop here for brevity's sake though.