Apaches !!!!

[uniface]

A type of site never before described by archaeologists is shedding new light on the prehistory of the American Southwest and may change conventional thinking about the ancient migrations that shaped the region.

The sites, discovered in the southern mountains of Arizona and New Mexico, are remote Apache encampments with some often “disguised” features that have eluded archaeologists for centuries.

And their discovery is surprising not only for their seclusion but also for their age, because some sites appear to date back hundreds of years before Apaches were thought to have migrated to the region.

“[T]he dates suggest that Apache groups were present in the southernmost Southwest in the 14th century, long before the arrival of Europeans, countering long-held notions that the Apache were late arrivals from the Plains,” writes Dr. Jeni Seymour, research associate with New Mexico’s Jornada Research Institute and the University of Colorado Museum.

The sites are called platform cave caches, where small, uniquely constructed platforms were built in rockshelters to secretly hold a stash of goods for later use, Seymour writes in the Journal of Field Archaeology, where she describes the finds.

The structures were sometimes “disguised” by rocks and other features in the caves, and typically included a ring of stones layered with ersatz shelves made from local desert plants, like ocotillo or yucca, and secured on the top with grasses, branches and stones.

The Apache practice of caching goods in caves — like pottery, basketry, food and, in later years, weapons and ammunition — has turned up in accounts from 19th century Native Americans and settlers, but no evidence of the custom had ever been found before.

Seymour notes that such secret stashes were necessities for itinerant people like the ancestral Apache, whose livelihoods often came from raiding other bands or foraging in places that were frequently under the control of other groups.

This may explain why the newfound caches were discovered only in remote mountain spots, and in areas far outside the boundaries of other, more sedentary farming groups, like the Mogollon, Mimbres or Hohokam.

But, the author notes, the sites do fall within the historic range of particular Apache bands, including the Mescalero of southern New Mexico, and the Chiricahua in Arizona, who offered one of the last and longest resistances to European-American control.

The most convincing evidence of the sites’ origin, however, is the fact that many include uniquely Apache artifacts, such as pottery and rock art.

One of the best-preserved platform caches Seymour found, in Arizona’s Peloncillo Mountains, features fragments of a ceremonial headdress, a ritual staff or “wand,” and four pictographs that depict Apache “mountain spirit masks” drawn in charcoal.

“The distinctly Apache imagery illustrates some continuity in symbolic expression through time and provides a means for archaeologists to definitively apply a cultural affiliation to associated material culture, in this case, the platform cache,” she writes.

In the case of the Peloncillo site, radiocarbon dating of yucca fibers used to build the cache were dated to the 1600s.

But grass samples from another platform cache just a few kilometers away, at a site called Whitlock Mountain, returned two sets of dates from the mid-1400s — more than 200 years before ancestral Apaches were conventionally thought to have migrated into the southwest from the Great Plains.

The new platform caches add to previous research Seymour has conducted in Arizona’s Dragoon Mountains, where another Apache camp — this one without a cache — was dated to the 14th and 15th centuries.

So while experts have long surmised from historic accounts that Apaches migrated to the Southwest after the 1680s, she concludes, “such interpretations are not sustainable when considered in the context of this new archaeological evidence.”

The new dates “open a host of new possibilities regarding the end of prehistory,” Seymour writes, suggesting that the years leading up to European contact may have been marked by interactions — either peaceful or not — between the itinerant Apaches and more sedentary groups, and that those relationships may have been long-standing by the time the Spanish appeared.

Taken together, she says, the new data provided by the platform caches “provide a basis for reevaluating long-held views about the end of prehistory and the arrival of ancestral Apachean groups in the heart of the American Southwest.”

http://westerndigs.org/long-hidden-site ... igrations/

[Cognito]

But grass samples from another platform cache just a few kilometers away, at a site called Whitlock Mountain, returned two sets of dates from the mid-1400s — more than 200 years before ancestral Apaches were conventionally thought to have migrated into the southwest from the Great Plains.

The new platform caches add to previous research Seymour has conducted in Arizona’s Dragoon Mountains, where another Apache camp — this one without a cache — was dated to the 14th and 15th centuries.

So while experts have long surmised from historic accounts that Apaches migrated to the Southwest after the 1680s, she concludes, “such interpretations are not sustainable when considered in the context of this new archaeological evidence.”

The Tiwa Puebloan tribes maintain that the Apaches and Navajos arrived in the Southwest during the mid-1400s. Where has Seymour been?
Further: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 104932.htm

[shawomet]

"So while experts have long surmised from historic accounts that Apaches migrated to the Southwest after the 1680s, she concludes, “such interpretations are not sustainable when considered in the context of this new archaeological evidence.”

I think it would be better to say her findings support the knowledge we already had developed from genetics, rather then make it seem like a previously unacceptable point of view that they arrived ~500 years ago.

[Cognito]

OK, but I'm having a difficult time reconciling this:

So while experts have long surmised from historic accounts that Apaches migrated to the Southwest after the 1680s ...

With this:

In the 1670s drought swept the region, causing famine among the Pueblo and increased raids by the Apache which Spanish and Pueblo soldiers were unable to prevent.

See Wiki on the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt ... and look at the early New Mexico map. The Apache and Navajo had already been in the region for many years prior to the revolt with Navajos having settled into farming while Apaches remained nomadic and mobile. See: http://www.crowcanyon.org/EducationProd ... navajo.asp

The Espejo expedition to New Mexico in 1583 referred to "... hostilities ... with the people of Acoma and with a band of semi-nomadic Querechos, or ancestral Apaches." See: http://www.newmexicohistory.org/filedet ... fileID=467

Am I being too picky? Probably, but not one expert believes that Apaches migrated to the Southwest after the 1680s. To me, Seymour is patting herself on the back for something that was already obvious to anyone with an interest in Southwest pre-Columbian history.

[shawomet]

Can't reconcile those statements. That's why I felt she should say her research supports what is already established. Her findings are not overthrowing conventional interpretation, so I don't know why she thinks it is, if she thinks it does. I don't get it either.