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Horsin' Around with Will Taylor - Ep 25
308 Plays6 years ago
On this episode of A Life in Ruins Podcast, we interview Dr. William Taylor, assistant professor and Curator of Archaeology at CU Boulder's Department of Anthropology. We delve into his early formative years and how he ultimately got into the field of Anthropology.
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 25 and Guests
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 25 of a life in ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover. And as always, I'm joined by my boys, Connor, John and David in how our guest tonight is Dr. William Taylor. He is a new professor in anthropology and museum science here at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Taylor, thank you so much for being on today. How are you doing this evening?
00:00:37
Speaker
Hey, thanks for having me on. Doing all right. Awesome, awesome. So could you just give our guests a little background about who you are and what you're studying? Yeah, so I'm William Taylor. As you mentioned, I'm the one of one of the curators of archaeology at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado here in Boulder. And I'm also assistant professor in the anthropology department.
00:01:01
Speaker
I am an archaeozoologist, or you might say zoarchaeologist, and my research is focused mostly on the study of animal domestication with a big, big focus on the question of horses. I work in
Dr. Taylor's Archaeology Journey Begins
00:01:16
Speaker
a lot of different places, but mostly in kind of East and Central Asia, Mongolia, China, some different places over there.
00:01:27
Speaker
And then nowadays also here in North America in the Great Plains. So yeah, what kind of got you into archaeology? So I'm from Montana. To be honest with you, it's real cliche, but I grew up, I mean, I think I learned how to read playing an Indiana Jones computer game. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I grew up desiring to be Indiana Jones.
00:01:54
Speaker
I've always heard the Indiana Jones movies as being a catalyst, but never an old. Yeah, for me, it was the computer game. It was if you check it out, these old kind of point and click adventure games, Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis. It's a fantastic journey through. It's not exactly accurate, but it is a journey through
00:02:16
Speaker
the prehistory of the Mediterranean. It's an Atlantis, deep dive into Atlantis. Highly recommend.
00:02:27
Speaker
if you're able to handle that sort of thing. So the Atlantis stuff was right, but they used like a pointed trowel or something, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess I think there's no faster way to get people kind of lathered up in archaeology than to A, mention Indiana Jones, and then B, mention Atlantis.
00:02:50
Speaker
I guess I differ from most of my colleagues in thinking that these are both, you know, generally awesome things that have their downsides. But I'm kind of a geek on both of those things. Well, good stuff, man. So you went to undergrad at Carleton College, right?
00:03:11
Speaker
Uh, it's funny that you of all people would mispronounce the name. Um, but I guess, uh, it's got an extra E compared to your name. Is it Carlton college? Like really? It's pronounced Carlton college. It's your namesake bro. And you messed it up. Almost. I don't have ease in my name, but where is Carlton college? And does it have a big anthropology department?
00:03:38
Speaker
So Girlton College is in southeast Minnesota. It's a town called Northfield. And Northfield is, if it's known for anything, it's because that's where the Jesse James gang was defeated by the local citizenry in a failed robbery. And it's not a big town and it's not a big school.
00:03:57
Speaker
I was able to study archaeology there, but we just had a really, really tiny cluster. There was one professor who was full-time in the kind of classics department, and then there was a visiting professor in between the two of those, and they cobbled together some geologists and stuff who were kind of interested, and there was a little bit of an archaeology
00:04:20
Speaker
concentration, but it was kind of hanging on by a thread. But luckily,
Balancing Academics and Athletics
00:04:24
Speaker
there's some really smart people there. Shout out to Professor Bravo. If he's listening to this, he really kind of got me hooked back in from my childhood dreams. So
00:04:36
Speaker
So what led you to be in this kind of small town in Minnesota for college? Is it just proximity or is it? So a couple of things were going on. I mean, I grew up in Montana. So to be honest, my grandpa went to this school. It was on my radar. I kind of went there for football as well as academics. I was, I wanted to go somewhere where I had a decent shot at doing both of those things kind of the way that I wanted to. So.
00:05:02
Speaker
There was a family connection and then football played a part in that too. You played football in college? I did, yeah. What position did you play? I was an offensive lineman, so I played guard and then tackle. Really?
00:05:18
Speaker
Wait, wait, like how tall are you? This is going to be six, six foot five. Okay. That makes a lot more sense. No, I've just, I've only seen pictures of you on like Instagram. So I was like, I was a little heavier back then. I've dropped, you know, 60 pounds or so since then. Oh, what were you? What were you Carlton? You were a lineman. I was a, I was a tight end. Thank you. I was like a half lineman, half a receiver, a suicide receiver, if you will. I sat on the bench in baseball.
00:05:50
Speaker
Oh, thank you, David. Thank you, David. So you went to Carleton. I was about to say Carleton again. So you went to Carleton College first and went there to play to football and do academics. Now, did you immediately go into anthropology or was there kind of like that aha moment in another class?
00:06:06
Speaker
No, to be honest, I had kind of two different ideas going into school. I was always kind of interested in wildlife biology in high school. And then in fact, when I got into college, I thought I was going to do political science. So I got my degree and kind of.
00:06:22
Speaker
political science and international relations. And but it was it was like my last year and a half of school that I kind of picked up on archaeology and then it all clicked. And so I knew, even though my ended up with a sort of less than relevant degree, I knew coming out of school that that archaeology was was what I wanted to do, because I had spent a couple of summers doing field schools and doing some kind of internships and that kind of thing. Gotcha.
00:06:52
Speaker
So,
Mentorship and Internships
00:06:53
Speaker
you got your master's and your PhD at University of New Mexico down in Albuquerque. Now, did you go immediately from undergrad to your master's or was there some time in between that you did CRM? Yeah, I basically went directly there from my undergrad.
00:07:06
Speaker
And why did you choose University of New Mexico? Again, I mean, it sounds silly, but my mother and my grandfather both went there as well. So it's just it's like a family connection. It was always on my radar as an interesting place. And then I guess what happened is that when I was kind of starting to get interested in archaeology as an undergrad, I was looking for folks that would let me intern kind of learn the ropes, especially researchers or museums. I ended up messaging
00:07:37
Speaker
like everyone that I could find their contact info at the Smithsonian and I think I probably sent close to 30 emails and I only got two replies and one of the replies was from Mindy Zader who studies animal domestication and would end up you know being a really good great mentor to me but she said I'm sorry you know we're
00:08:00
Speaker
We're going to be gone this summer, and we've already got stuff figured out. But if you're interested, down the line, message me. And then the other person was Bill Fitzhugh, who runs the Architect Studies Center at the Smithsonian. And actually, he talked to our class this semester that Carlton was a part of. So you recognize his voice anyway.
00:08:21
Speaker
Bill, he does a lot of different stuff, he works in Mongolia, he works in Newfoundland, in different parts of Canada and Quebec, but he has this idea of studying
00:08:36
Speaker
the Arctic. So he works all over the world through the study of Arctic cultures. And so Bill was kind of the person guiding me into grad school. And I was looking for somewhere that I could keep doing this Arctic studies thing. There's not a lot of places that you can do that. And so I was looking at school up in Alaska, and also at UNM, where the researcher who would go on to be my advisor, Jim Dixon.
00:09:03
Speaker
was at UNM. So I basically applied because I wanted to work with Jim and then I ended up in Albuquerque because I felt a little bit more comfortable with it because I have family connections there and then also because the money worked out a little better there.
00:09:22
Speaker
Well, that's super interesting, man. Especially when you're talking about how they consider the Arctic more than just Canada. Because I feel like Americans, that's what we think of as the Arctic. But if you take this kind of global view,
00:09:41
Speaker
you know, the Taiga and all that the steppe in Mongolia are also kind of part of that. So that's super cool that you're like, you know, kind of getting into this area that's like huge and, you know, is a large part of the globe.
00:09:54
Speaker
I think that, uh, that had a huge impact in kind of the way that ended up thinking about archeology and, and the world is that, you know, right from the start, I had these kind of role models who were thinking about the whole world and they're not letting political boundaries limit their thinking or their research questions and stuff. And
Fieldwork Experiences
00:10:18
Speaker
ultimately it's something I try to kind of emulate as I got into archeology a bit more.
00:10:23
Speaker
That's, yeah, that's super cool. I mean, it's just, it's something I had never thought of. So you said, and you mentioned as part of like, um, kind of between your transition from undergrad to grad school, you had some field schools. Where did you do a lot of your field work?
00:10:40
Speaker
So my first field school was in my own backyard at the Montana Yellowstone Archaeology Project, which was with the University of Montana. And it was in Yellowstone. We worked a couple of different spots in the park, one of which was kind of up pretty much near Gardiner. We spent the most of the time, it was on the shores of Yellowstone Lake, kind of the North edge, which was just unbelievable. It was awesome.
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds like a good time. Yeah, it was fantastic. Yeah, not a bad spot to start out. Yeah, I mean, the kind of a weird experience because I've been to Yellowstone a bunch, but I guess probably because my folks knew about the tourism situation. We never went in the summer, really. We went like in the fall and
00:11:30
Speaker
The winner and so it's like this crazy juxtaposition is that you're there for work and you're you know, you're in a
00:11:41
Speaker
one of the least developed places in the U.S., but you're staying at a campground with just hundreds of tourists and some of the most clueless, unbelievable people that you can imagine. The guy next to my tent got gored by a buffalo in
00:12:04
Speaker
in the campground while we were staying there. I woke up one morning and there was there's buffalo sleeping kind of in our within the campground area and you know a lot of idiots kind of taking pictures and stuff and getting way too close and then we came back and there was the the word on the street was that he had been hospitalized so.
00:12:29
Speaker
Wow. Pretty wild. Pretty wild to be in that place where you're at the same time, you're in the middle of this beautiful, you know, nature reserve. And at the same time, you're just hundreds of completely, you could not pick a more clueless group of people to be in the outdoors and you're in close proximity with them and stuff. So that, yeah, it was an interesting experience.
00:12:51
Speaker
I don't know if you're familiar, but there's a Instagram called Torons of Yellowstone. It's a compilation of just videos of people being complete idiots at Yellowstone and like other national parks, but it's a lot of Buffalo. It's pretty good.
00:13:08
Speaker
There's also like a book that's, what is it called? It's like Deaths in Yellowstone or Ways to Die in Yellowstone. And it's a compilation of people just like, hey, I'm going to walk into Old Faithful and see how that goes. I mean, it's sort of like, it's somehow it's a bright light for people that are just unable to
00:13:30
Speaker
to sort of control their urges. I guess when the parks were closed, someone even died in one of the thermal features because people just can't resist whatever Darwinian urge is driving them.
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah, Yellowstone is definitely
Research on Mongolian Horse Culture
00:13:47
Speaker
a fun spot. On our way back, I just recently got back from Montana, thanks to Dr. Taylor. We really wanted to drive back through Yellowstone, but the northern entrances into Montana were closed, and we were going to drive a five-hour roundabout to go back through Wyoming, which was a bummer. Yeah, so it's a great place to get. If you haven't been up there, you really should get up there.
00:14:10
Speaker
Oh, dude, when I used to live in Wyoming, we used to go a bunch before I went to grad school. We'd always head up there. It's always a fun spot. So while you're at University of New Mexico before this break, what was your thesis and dissertation on? When I was in grad school, I worked a couple different places with Jim. We worked up in Alaska for a couple of summers. But I really wanted to, I had gone to Mongolia the summer before I entered grad school with Bill and the Arctic Studies guys.
00:14:40
Speaker
And I just really wanted to get back there. So for me, one of the formative experiences of my life was in that first summer in Mongolia, before I started grad school, we excavated a 2,500-year-old horse burial. And out of that horse burial, this thing was like five meters in the ground. It was just basically weeks of physical labor just to open it up.
00:15:07
Speaker
It was just a horse, but that experience was unbelievable. This beautifully preserved skeleton of a horse from one of the world's first horse cultures. It had this bridle with beautiful gold inlays and
00:15:25
Speaker
I just made these incredible friendships and I just got hooked and I kind of always had this in the back of my mind. So my dissertation, basically when I started out, it was just go back to Mongolia, look at horses. And that was really as far as it had been thought out. But I found a little bit of support from the American Center for Mongolian Studies. They give these little student support grants and it got me back there and I started
00:15:56
Speaker
trying to study kind of the origins of horse culture in Mongolia. So when do people start herding horses? When do people start riding them? How did this kind of way of life develop? And it's the kind of thing where
00:16:12
Speaker
similar to many places. This is a culture that is a nomadic kind of a grassland culture. And their history is kind of written by sort of snarky farmers from China who didn't like them very much. Right. And so the history, historical record would have you believe that Mongolians started riding horses, you know, maybe 200 BC. And as a result of, you know, the
00:16:37
Speaker
advancement, great advancement of Chinese civilization. But we had this thousand years of additional archaeological record of horses here, and we had no way, no real artifacts to speak of other than
00:16:56
Speaker
ritual horse burials and bones of horses. So there's nothing really except stone monuments and rock art, as well as bones of horses to work with. So my work was basically, let's get into these horse bones and see if we can find ways that we can use them to learn something about their relationship with people and kind of the origins of
00:17:24
Speaker
Mongolian horse culture. So it was a lot of looking through modern natural history collections and trying to develop new and use old ways of understanding horsemanship through the animal skeleton. Well, that's dope. But we're going to have to continue this horsing around. Oh, dude, you took it. That's exactly what I was going to say. It was low hanging fruit, dude. Like we had to go for it. All right.
00:17:54
Speaker
I wanted to start this off by saying nay, but then I realized it'd be super ridiculous. So I'm just going to say welcome back to segment two of a life ruins podcast. Uh, we're horsing around here again with William Taylor. Oh, that was also super lame. Uh, whatever. We'll just keep it. So
00:18:09
Speaker
That came off not. Oh boy. Let's cut that out. Anyways, so how did you, this is the first bullet point that I was talking about. How'd you get hooked up with studying horses in Mongolia? I know we kind of talked about it in the last segment. Well, let's just, let's just go hard.
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah so I mean basically I just kind of stumbled into it through this connection with Arctic Studies and what I would say is that for me the reason I stuck with it is I felt like it a little bit connected me back to my own family. My grandpa was a rancher and my dad grew up on the ranch and then I
00:18:46
Speaker
You know, had this unfortunate experience that I think a lot of folks my age have where it's like your family and your kind of traditions and your culture are one thing and then you grow up kind of like in the
00:19:01
Speaker
in a town or a city, right? There's this disconnect. And I felt like it was, for me, it's interesting to be able to get back into that, kind of the origins of horse culture here in Mongolia, and felt like I was connecting a little bit with some of my own family story, you know? That's cool. So there's
Challenging Historical Narratives
00:19:21
Speaker
a little bit of a personal connection to some of this research you're doing. Yeah, absolutely.
00:19:29
Speaker
Well, it's interesting to see, I mean, like, like you mentioned in previous segment that, you know, there's this history that's written by certain folks.
00:19:37
Speaker
So you were kind of unraveling this deep history of horses on the steppe that wasn't exactly something that everyone is talking about. I think I find that super fascinating, especially because Mongolian and Chinese history is so intertwined and interconnected. And have you really dealt with any issues studying that as part of your research?
00:20:03
Speaker
You know, one of the things about archaeozoology and studying animal bones and studying doing what what you might call archaeological science is that it has this really unique ability to correct historic bias or serve as a kind of a counterpoint to it. But that that goes just as much for the history of folks that might they might have had their history written by someone else, you know, whether it be for for colonial reasons or
00:20:32
Speaker
or just for historic reasons. It's just as true for those folks as it is for correcting mistakes or gaps that people didn't know were there in the archaeological record of a place with a really, really rich tradition like China. So, you know, we've had some really big successes working in China as well because sometimes you just want to understand
00:20:57
Speaker
a process that doesn't come through in the historic record. If you want to understand where did this revolutionary change emerge from? For example, when did people start riding horses?
00:21:12
Speaker
why and how, not every step of that change is going to be, you typically in the historic records, you might get the last little snippets of that change. Or maybe somebody writes down what happened and why and why they made their choices. But for the most part, to study big, big level processes, they're often beyond humans conscious awareness.
00:21:36
Speaker
Right. And that's true just as true in 2020 as it was in the past. So I think it's really cool to be able to use kind of zoarchology as an additional tool that pairs nicely with historic information and also tends to counteract some of its excesses, I guess you could say.
00:21:58
Speaker
Well, that's cool because a lot of sites that we get in certain places are zoarchaeological remains, and we have to kind of connect them back to humans in a way that makes sense and is scientifically tested. So it's cool to see that used in other countries as well, at least to kind of tell the stories of people in the past. Yeah, I think it's really important.
00:22:27
Speaker
The problem is that you can't really draw easy lines between, you know, country borders are relatively meaningless in terms of understanding our common history. And so, yeah, I think it's important that folks all over the world end up getting to do that kind of thing.
00:22:47
Speaker
totally irrelevant, but one of my favorite memes to come out of some of the build the wall down in the South, cause it's, we're only thinking about this thinking about Mongolia and China was the meme that was like walls work. And then it's a picture of changes con and it just says laughs in Mongolian. Um, so I'm going to use this as a teaching moment here. Don't, don't say, don't say Jane guess, don't say Jane just, uh, so that the American English pronunciation would normally be gang is, but that is,
00:23:17
Speaker
So if you want to be proper Mongolian, you would say Chinggis. Chinggis. Okay. Awesome. And... Chinggis Khan. Khan with a soft kind of H sound.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah. Feel free to make this whole podcast a tissue moment for Carlton. You know, that's okay. But like the, the, the reason like we say Genghis is like from a like French transliteration or something like that. Right. I remember hearing it. Maybe I'm actually not really sure. Okay. I mean, I think I learned that on like history channels. So it's probably nonsense, but
00:23:55
Speaker
If Carlton, if you end up coming to Mongolia, you'll get all this stuff down. Dude,
Interdisciplinary Work at Max Planck
00:24:01
Speaker
I was so bummed. Well, I mean, among other things going on and the horrible crises that COVID-19 has bestowed upon the world, the loss of going to Mongolia was definitely a near and dear sorrow to my heart. But moving away from the East, so start doing the horses in Mongolia, but you also worked at the Mox Planck Institute.
00:24:23
Speaker
which is a like highly prestigious Institute. And those that work there, it's kind of a pretty, why are you laughing? Cause I was trying to think of a word other than Institute and then you said Institute too. So we're on the same page is what I'm saying. So yeah, I couldn't think of anything else. I was like, so
00:24:43
Speaker
I mean, Max Planck is highly, highly prestigious in the world of science. How did you get that gig? And yeah, just tell us about it. And how do you think getting a position at Max Planck was beneficial to your career? Yeah, you know, I think as you may end up figuring out, it's a pretty rough, pretty rough world out there. Once you feel like you spent all these years thinking I'm going to get my PhD and then you get it and it's like, oh,
00:25:13
Speaker
I need to find a job now. And it's not an easy market out there. And the world in Europe is a little bit different. I mean, there's a lot more science infrastructure. And it's pretty obvious to me, after spending so much time in America and then going to Europe, that this is where the world's leading minds are in archaeological science, for sure.
00:25:39
Speaker
And I just backed my way into it. To be honest, I got really lucky that these folks were looking, they literally posted a position for Mongolian archeology. So, you know, there's a limited pool of folks that are finishing up their PhD in Mongolian archeology. And so I ended up pretty much overnight, it went from being
00:26:09
Speaker
a grad student that was working in Mongolia as a grad student at UNM. I have wonderful, wonderful advisors at UNM, but none of the folks there were Asian-oriented folks. And so pretty much my whole dissertation, I was kind of working on my own
00:26:28
Speaker
was kind of off on my own trying to figure it out. And UNM is a great school, but it doesn't carry a whole lot of, the name doesn't carry a whole lot of weight overseas unless, you know, every once in a while you meet somebody who's like a fan boy of Lou Binford or something. But it's like, it doesn't really resonate with people. And so I was sort of starting from a position where
00:26:56
Speaker
My name and my credentials meant nothing and i had to kind of connect with people you know interpersonally or get them interested in ideas. Max plan kid it really switched overnight where all of a sudden you just have these incredible.
00:27:14
Speaker
resources at your disposal and also people just assume that you know what you're talking about. Whereas nothing about me actually changed or my ideas. I had all of a sudden this big boost in sort of unearned credibility, which was a huge advantage and ultimately very, very cool and useful. But I'd say the best thing about working there is that unlike any other place I've been to, you have this just group of
00:27:43
Speaker
literal world experts on every subject you could imagine in your sharing offices with them and you get to share ideas with them and it really just expanded my mind in terms of.
00:27:57
Speaker
What tools
Founding an Archaeozoology Lab at CU Boulder
00:27:58
Speaker
can we apply to study the past? I was pretty into osteology, but working at Max Planck, I walked away learning how to work with people in ethnobotany, with people in DNA and isotopes. I came away knowing how to do some mass spectrometry stuff, and you just start to think of archaeology as this
00:28:22
Speaker
really, really multi-methodological interdisciplinary science that's part of the broader science world, which I don't think we always think about things that way here in the States. I certainly didn't necessarily learn that through my education. It really kind of opened my eyes in those couple of different ways.
00:28:45
Speaker
So did you take that as inspiration for kind of dealing with this starting a new archaeo zoology lab at CU Boulder? Is that kind of like the template that you kind of worked from? The template that I've worked from, to be honest, draws mostly on my other kind of key advisor, Emily Jones at UNM, who set up an archaeo zoology lab from scratch while I was her student. And so I got to watch her
00:29:15
Speaker
Do this and i really try to emulate her approach in in most of.
00:29:22
Speaker
most of the things that I'm doing, but what I would say is that in terms of how I hope that our lab ends up, I would like it to be much more capable of hard science than your average Zohar clap would be, but I also wanted to keep what makes American archaeology special, which is a focus on teaching, a focus on personal relationships, a focus on
00:29:52
Speaker
holistic understanding of archaeology as a part of anthro, you know, there's a lot of things. There's European science on its own has a lot of things that don't need to be emulated or copied either. Right. So I hope that eventually we can find a middle ground, something that's combining the best of both worlds.
00:30:13
Speaker
I think that's a great idea. I've seen the facility you guys have there. So it would be, when I really liked that campus, it'd be a really cool situation to have at Boulder. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's a tough, uh, it's a tough battle to, to make a new facility. I mean, that's well aware. The first problem is space and you know, we work in a building that's a hundred years old. And so.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's gonna be, it'll be a journey to get us up to, up and running. It'll be a multi-year adventure, but yeah. For those listening, Dr. Taylor's archaeozoology lab has an Instagram. It's at cuarchaeozoology. And he posts, he posts things on there to see what's going on. But I mean, like, yeah, as Dr. Taylor's alluded to this past semester, spring 2020, I was his research assistant helping him
00:31:07
Speaker
this lab, and not only is there focus on getting collections, which comes from even like, we've had Devin Pettigrew on the podcast before, and we did the goat experiment, which we talked about, and I'm hoping it doesn't make me get, it's making me get good. But we got the goat, and that's going to, that's going to Will's lab, and we've also ordered a number of specimens, and how hard it is to find
00:31:32
Speaker
dead goat, dead goat, dead goat, dead goat, dead goat. It's just how bad it smelled. Like with the bison we just did, not a problem. Like totally fine. Even two days of the hide sitting in its blood in a cooler, not a problem. But that marinated goat
00:31:54
Speaker
was just something special. And on that note, Carlton just killed the segment like he killed that goat and puked up afterwards. And then we'll meet you on the other side of episode 25 with Dr. William Taylor.
00:32:09
Speaker
And we are back
Impact of Horses in North America
00:32:10
Speaker
with segment three of a life and ruins podcast episode 25. So Dr. Taylor, you did a lot of your research out there in Mongolia and China. And how is that translated into researching horses in the new world here in the American West? Well, as I kind of hinted at, you know, my first archaeology experience was, was here a lot of my
00:32:32
Speaker
my work and my whole life, it's centered in the American West and in places like Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, and now Colorado. So for me, always the most important piece of understanding the history of humans and horses was always to kind of bring this question home a bit.
00:32:55
Speaker
It's not the kind of question that has often been asked from a archaeozoological perspective because, you know, by the time we have European colonists in North America, it's considered to be history, right? And so it's almost as if until, you know, recent decades that the whole
00:33:24
Speaker
discipline of archaeology is sort of excluded from these particular data sets. And even when material related to the early history, or I'm not sure whether you want to call it history or prehistory, the earliest connections between people and horses, when it's emerged in the archaeological record, it hasn't really been
00:33:52
Speaker
a focus academically other than kind of to say, hey, here's some horses. But what we've learned working in Mongolia, working in East Asia and different parts of the world,
00:34:07
Speaker
There are whole classes of information that you can learn through the study of animal bones that no historical document is going to give you. Our hope was that by trying to apply some of these tools, the sword was sharpened on the archaeological record of Mongolia.
00:34:30
Speaker
There's nothing else to work with, but the sword is still sharp and we can apply it to questions here where we do by no means through historical documents know everything there is to know about the introduction of horses or the way that it transformed indigenous societies in in this part of the world. And in fact,
00:34:51
Speaker
I think a lot of folks would tell you right off the bat that those historical documents are carrying with them a whole host of kind of implicit biases or explicit biases. They're useful and they're interesting, but they're more of a reflection of the European societies that they came from than they are a direct
00:35:14
Speaker
barometer of when, why, and how horses were adopted, you know, integrated into indigenous societies. And so, basically, since the last couple of years, starting at Max Planck and then here at Boulder,
00:35:29
Speaker
we've been trying to take these tools, which are designed for a totally different purpose, right, and to see what we can, if applying them here, will sort of reshape the way that we think about this question, which has traditionally been part of history rather than archaeology.
00:35:48
Speaker
That's super interesting to hear, to see. Just for our listeners, horses didn't exist in North America prior to, I mean, they weren't adapted to humans or worked with humans until Europeans came here. Right? Is that correct?
00:36:09
Speaker
So the history of horses in this continent is really interesting. Horses as an aqueous, as a kind of a genus, as a taxon, a category of animal evolved in North America. So it is a grassland animal that evolved in North America. And then with the onset of the Pleistocene,
00:36:33
Speaker
it dispersed into Eurasia, into Africa, and it became things like zebras and asses and donkeys and horses. And there were horses, which might look a lot like what you would recognize as a horse today, living here in North America when the first people arrived in the...
00:36:57
Speaker
sometime within the last 20,000 years. Until about 10,000 years ago, horses were an important food source for early hunters in the Americas, North and South America. People made
00:37:19
Speaker
you know, bone tools out of horse bones, people hunted them. They were significant, but they did not survive the kind of emergence of Holocene climates.
00:37:33
Speaker
And best guess is that they went extinct in most places, probably about 10,000 years ago. They may have lasted quite a bit longer than that up in the High Arctic. But nonetheless, they were off of this continent until the Vikings arrived. And the Vikings did not, as far as we can tell, introduce them anywhere except, you know, Iceland, Greenland, so. Oh, they did. I didn't know that.
00:38:01
Speaker
But horses did not make it onto mainland North America in an established way until the 16th century. Sure. Well, it's super interesting because I talk to a lot of people who are non-archaeologists or paleo folks, and they've always assumed that horses have been here.
00:38:29
Speaker
basically their
NSF Project and Indigenous Perspectives
00:38:30
Speaker
introduction into North America is, is it due to the Spanish? Is it due to, it's like in the 1600s when they really kind of proliferate outside of and take over these landscapes in North America. Yeah, so I mean, that's part of the thing that we would like to understand a little bit better. So this project, this NSF project that we're going to be starting here this year,
00:38:58
Speaker
We're going to try to combine things like radiocarbon dating with historical records, ethno-history, and DNA. Part of the idea is to trace the sources of particular populations and how they spread into different parts of
00:39:20
Speaker
of the high plains and that sort of thing. But in general, what you said is pretty much right. Probably it was the Spanish that most significantly introduced them into the Western US. But you definitely had other groups of people, British, French, from a pretty early period.
00:39:42
Speaker
By later periods, you might have had horses coming over from Russia, some other places. So we hope to get into that a little bit more. Another aspect of your research is using the indigenous oral traditions, right? Like matching all these things up as legitimate sources of knowledge to redefine the whole premise that the Pueblo Revolt was the major catalyst for horse introduction.
00:40:08
Speaker
Yeah, so that's one of the ideas out there that's been kind of in the historical documents for a long time. And it's not fully just pure European bias, right? There's some legitimacy to the idea that when
00:40:24
Speaker
when Spanish were expelled from New Mexico, right, that this was a major catalyst for the spread of horses. I mean, it makes sense logically, but it also, if you think about it, is an extremely attractive idea for those of us white Europeans who want to feel, you know, we feel that domestic animals are sort of our thing.
00:40:48
Speaker
And it's kind of like, you know, when the cats, cats away the mice play kind of an idea. And what we're finding is that it's not really necessarily bearing out in the archaeology. And it is, surprise, surprise that in a lot of the cases of what we're, what we're finding here is that the best explanatory framework
00:41:14
Speaker
that we find for the archaeological results ends up being indigenous, ethno-history, oral traditions. Even if you take historical records but you just take a more optimistic view or a more constrained
00:41:35
Speaker
not taking everything literally, but trying to think along the lines of prioritizing, okay, what was the social fabric of this part of the world at this time? And thinking about the implications that might have for exchange between people or this kind of thing. And this is not my area of expertise, but there are a lot of scholars that have put time and energy into this. And those people, in my opinion, the folks that have spent
00:42:05
Speaker
the more time diving into the ethno history and taking indigenous ideas seriously seem to be producing answers that are closer to the truth. And so our project is trying to explicitly integrate that kind of information into our research. So we have partners that
00:42:27
Speaker
UNM and the University of Oklahoma who are really good at this kind of research and are through this grant hiring folks to explicitly dive into these kind of records and see what the story they might tell is and how it might differ from a purely kind of historical records approach.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, A, that's awesome. And B, just kind of like talking about other methods in which horses got around other than the Pueblo revolts. A, anyone that has been on the Great Plains knows it is easy to get lost and horses wander off. And the Spanish had several expeditions outside of the Southwest into the Great Plains. And all the times they did, there was one, I think, in the late 1600s where they came across a Wichita village.
00:43:15
Speaker
who are linguistic cousins and cultural cousins of the Pawnee and got annihilated. And then there was another one in 1720. It's actually about to hit the 300 anniversary of the Spanish did another expedition to try to claim the Great Plains and the Pawnee and Osage wiped out that expedition. And all these things were documented on bison hides. And, you know, when there's battles and of course, people moving long distances, it's easy to kind of lose horses. So it wouldn't be
00:43:45
Speaker
totally out of the realm that they kind of wandered aimlessly for a bit as horses do.
00:43:50
Speaker
So the thing is, even if you're just taking historical records only, and we look at this a little bit, there is all kinds of historical evidence to suggest that by the early 1600s, Spanish were losing horses to raids by various indigenous groups. Apache people show up a lot, but also Utes,
00:44:16
Speaker
Navajo, and so there's a clear paper trail here for horses getting out of Spanish control very, very fast after Spanish were permanently in the Southwest. What there isn't a great paper trail for is what happened next, right? But we know right by early 1680s, French folks were reporting horses along the Missouri, you know, the Pueblo Revolt
00:44:45
Speaker
idea, it's not wrong in the sense that I'm sure that the Pueblo Revolt had an effect on the spread of horses, but it's not really justified as the starting point, even if you just take a purely history-based approach. People think of Plains Indians as horsemen-based for such a long period of time, at least that's how we understand the historical record.
00:45:16
Speaker
But Plains Indians are more recent adopters of that. And Carlton, how do you feel about this kind of portrayal of Plains Indians as a horse culture, even though they're just more recent adoptants of that?
00:45:33
Speaker
So, some background, even before I met Dr. Taylor, because I worked with my tribe a lot, that Dr. Taylor had been in contact with the Pawnee Nation Tipo, Matt Reed, who also listens to this podcast. Shout out, Matt. Hey, Matt. But honestly, my research focus is pre-European contact, so I'm mostly looking at
00:45:56
Speaker
you know, ethnogenesis. And it wasn't until Dr. Taylor came along and kind of took me under his wing that I start learning more about historic stuff. And then, like rightly so, Dr. Taylor stressed the importance of understanding the impact of horses and colonialism.
00:46:12
Speaker
and how you can see these changes. So that's when I started to be taking an interest, but I had always believed those, the Pueblo revolts, and I really hadn't looked too much into the historical record. It was really Dr. Taylor showing me some of these resources, saying like, hey, no, this is probably definitely a major aspect of the dispersal, but in terms of the first dispersal, not
00:46:32
Speaker
not right. And you know, Dr. Taylor, you know, said like, there are oral traditions of indigenous people that talk about having planes at these times, and that really opened my eyes. So that's, it's really Dr. Taylor, who kind of, who, who really showed me kind of the, the, the, a lot of the truth behind a lot of, of some of these
00:46:49
Speaker
theories and horse dispersal, because, you know, horses changed planes society just as much. I mean, even, you know, before Europeans really showed up, I mean, horses were a major change. You went from in terms of like warfare, how warfare is conducted. I mean, without horses, you really don't get planes nomads. You know, without horses, you don't there's not a resource that allows for like Cheyennes and Lakotas to just wander aimlessly on the planes.
00:47:18
Speaker
Not aimlessly that was rude, but you know to just to do that so it was a huge Cultural transition because of horses and what a horse is a lot of people to do I mean it's if you study planes warfare it really goes from group based and with horses you're talking about more raids further distance. It's like
00:47:37
Speaker
It's honestly the best thing I can bring it up to. It's like the introduction of horses into the Plains Indian societies was like the invention of the airplane for the world. Like it changed so much about warfare in society and closing distances. Wow. And it was just critical.
00:47:54
Speaker
I think one thing that's important to clarify too is that this work, while you're right that it is clear from this work that horses were introduced into the continent, I think one of the roles that archaeology can play here
00:48:12
Speaker
is that that doesn't make this European process. In fact, I think the more that we look into the more that we realize that the adoption integration of horses into plain society was essentially a purely indigenous phenomenon. Right. And I think that by
Episode Conclusion and Contact Information
00:48:30
Speaker
telling that story, I don't think it in any way delegitimizes. And in many ways, we're we're actually extending the antiquity
00:48:39
Speaker
of this relationship as if you were to look at it from a historical standpoint, you sometimes might get the opinion that basically Coronado showed up and handed the horse off to folks and that these relationships were only
00:48:58
Speaker
a short-lived fleeting phenomenon that we can pretty much thank Europeans for. And I think that the work that we're doing shows that to be very, very much not true and kind of restoring the legitimacy and the antiquity in the eyes of, you know, this is not going to be news to Indigenous folks, but it may be news to other audiences that are relying on different sources of information. So I think that's one opportunity that we have with the work.
00:49:28
Speaker
Well, yeah, we're super excited to hear how this project goes, if you will. This is a life in ruins. I'm going to ask you the question. Would you choose to live a life in ruins if you could do this again? Absolutely. Well, good stuff, everybody. And real quick, Dr. Taylor, do you have some social media to promote or anything where people can follow you? Check out this research and any ongoing projects.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, a couple things to say. Definitely check out, as Carlton mentioned, we have an Instagram that's occasionally managed by the far more social media competent, Carlton. But I do post stuff primarily on our Facebook page, which is CU Archaeozoology Lab. We also occasionally have stuff on the Horses and Human Societies page, also on Facebook.
00:50:18
Speaker
And then stay tuned if this is interesting stuff to you. In I guess probably 2022, we have a book coming out as kind of a popular oriented book. It's called Hoof Beats How Horses Shaped Human History from University of California Press. Nice. Well, yeah, well, good stuff. Well, all right, everyone. We just interviewed Dr. William Taylor, professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology from the University of Colorado Boulder. And with that, we are out.
00:50:54
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Hey, gents, what do you call a happy cowboy? Oh, no. A jolly rancher. Oh, boy. Whoa.
00:51:40
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:51:54
Speaker
Incend you have it.