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REFRESHER: The "Mane" Event with Dr. William Taylor - Ep 154
3k Plays1 year ago
For this week we are re-releasing Episode 80 - The “Mane” Event with Dr. William Taylor. Why? Well we will soon be releasing another episode with Dr. Taylor where we will be discussing his recently published article in Science titled: Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies.
For this episode, we are joined again by Dr. William Taylor, who first appeared on the podcast in episode 25. We start out by discussing Dr. Taylor's COVID experience as a new professor and how his museum projects had to change to adapt to the new COVID landscape. We then delve into the research surrounding the Lehi horse. Dr. Taylor explains his methods of analysis and how they can be used to tell us about individual specimens, while also contributing to the larger discipline. We then talk about his research on early horse domestication at the Botai site.
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Literature Recommendations
- 2021 Rethinking the evidence for early horse domestication at Botai by William Timothy Treal Taylor and Christina Isabelle Barrón-Ortiz
- 2021 The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasion Steppes by Pablo Librado et al.
- 2021 Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Lehi Horse: Implications for Early Historic Horse Cultures of the North American West by William Timothy Treal Taylor et al.
- 2015 Equine cranial morphology and the identification of riding and chariotry in late Bronze Age Mongolia by William Timothy Treal Taylor et al.
Guest Contact
- Email Dr. Taylor: [email protected]
- Instagram: @cuarchaeozoology
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/CUArchaeozoology
- Twitter: @wtt_taylor
Contact
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
Affiliates
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hey, everyone. Carlton here from Life in Ruins Podcast. And don't worry for those of you that absolutely detest the sound of my sickly breathing voice, this is not a solo episode by me.
Revisiting Interview with Dr. William Taylor
00:00:14
Speaker
Today, we're going to be listening to an episode that came out earlier, and that would be episode 80, titled The Main Event with Dr. William Taylor, and that's main spelled M-A-N-E.
00:00:27
Speaker
And the reason why we are bringing this episode back from the archives is that we will be recording with Dr. William Taylor on his recent science publication on the early dispersal of horses in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. So we thought in preparation for that episode that we should re-upload his second interview with us on his horse research. Now, Dr. Taylor was actually one of our early podcast guests back on episode 25. So if you're interested in learning how Dr. Taylor got into the field of archaeology, that is the episode for
00:00:57
Speaker
But for now, please enjoy this episode in preparation for next week's interview with Dr. Taylor about such an amazing article. And with that, enjoy the episode.
Introduction of Hosts and Guest, Absence of David
00:01:13
Speaker
Welcome to episode 80 of a life in ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and I am joined by my co-host Connor Janin. David is not with us today as he has started studying cats in the wake of Strider being canceled. Hashtag.
00:01:32
Speaker
Cancel Strider. So for this episode, just me and Connor, but we have the distinct pleasure of being joined again by Dr. William Taylor, who first appeared on the podcast on an episode 25, horsing around with Dr. Taylor. So, well, thank you so much for coming back on the show. How are you doing this evening? Hey, it's good to be back, fellas. I was trying to think back how long ago that was. It's like more than a year ago now, but it really seems like just the other day. So things are going well. It's nice to be back.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was like spring of 2020 is when you were first on. I hesitate to ask what would all that stuff was with David, but I guess maybe I need to have some episodes I need to catch up on and figure out the details.
Managing Host Absences in Podcast Schedule
00:02:13
Speaker
And this is going to be an announcement to all the podcast folks. We are not breaking up. We are busy folks right now. So every time someone doesn't show up, we're going to come up with some sort of ridiculous excuse. So I think Carlton was hunting newly not extinct mammoth last time.
00:02:29
Speaker
So, yeah, we're not breaking up. We're doing interviews and our schedules are busy, so I will not be on some episodes. David will not be on some episodes. Carlton will not be on some episodes. And that's just how it is, because life is busy and crazy. So, you do not need to catch up.
00:02:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's valid because I wasn't on the last two episodes and people were DMing me in my Instagram. They're like, is everything okay? Like, are you and the boys all right? Like, did you guys have a fight? I'm like, no, I just couldn't make it the past two episodes. We're fine. You were out elk hunting, right? Yeah. I was out elk hunting and then antelope hunting before that. And so it was just kind of busy. They left it in capable hands. They listened to the episodes. They were great. In capable hands. Is that what you meant?
00:03:15
Speaker
In space capable, not same word, but regardless, Dr. Taylor. So when we last said you on the podcast, we talked about you becoming an archeologist, your time as a football player and undergrad and research in Mongolia. And you just started, I believe that semester, spring 2020 was the first time you taught a course at CU Boulder as an, are you an, you're an associate professor, correct at the moment? Or is it associate is the word they, the term that they
00:03:44
Speaker
you once you've gotten tenure. I'm an assistant professor.
Dr. Taylor's Academic Career Amid COVID-19 Challenges
00:03:50
Speaker
You've taught a couple courses since then, so we really wanted to bring you back on and ask, one, what was it like to start your academic career as a professor during the COVID-19 pandemic? It's been an interesting
00:04:05
Speaker
experience. To be honest, I think the first thing that comes to mind is just how fortunate I feel like I was to have settled in here just before all of this hit because I feel like the pandemic was so disruptive for people that were in the shoes that I was in just before I got here, right? Early career scientists that were looking for a tenure track position, a lot of us like living in Europe, real isolated type of situation.
00:04:35
Speaker
And so I feel kind of like I dodged the bullet by getting here when I did and kind of thankfully having a lot of the pieces in place here so that everything was okay. But, you know, that being said, it was a very strange year to be, you know, moving to a new place, getting to learn the ropes of what is it like to be a professor and then the rug gets pulled out from
00:05:03
Speaker
you know, every aspect of university life.
00:05:07
Speaker
and all that. So it was definitely a challenge.
Adapting Teaching Methods During the Pandemic
00:05:11
Speaker
Carlton, you know, you, you were present for some of this, but you know, basically as a new professor, every time you teach a class, you're often, you're basically also creating class for the first time. And so one of the, the big challenges is how do I create consistent expectations while still adapting to what students need? You're kind of learning as you go.
00:05:34
Speaker
And then to design like a graduate seminar course that has like a clear trajectory to it. And then two thirds of the way through, just yoink all of that out. I think it was, uh, it was a wild ride. Um, and definitely, you know, not without its ups and downs, but I felt like sort of every month things kind of became a little bit clearer as to how we're going to navigate this. And.
00:06:01
Speaker
I'd say I'm pretty lucky here that I have a lot of really supportive senior colleagues that really care a lot as to how the newer faculty are navigating this stuff. And the students are, in general, real invested, interested, sort of adaptive. So yeah, we survived it, but it wasn't a pleasant year.
00:06:29
Speaker
For sure. So were you doing a mix of in-person and online or? In Boulder here, we had a certain amount of stuff that was fully mandated online, right? Spring 2020, when everything happened, everything was just online for the rest of the semester. When we came back, things were mandated online. You know, when I started teaching the Zohar class,
00:06:56
Speaker
It was mandated online for the first four weeks and then we were given the option to go back fully in person. So my second course, we did kind of the reverse of the pandemic onset semester where we did like three, four weeks of
00:07:13
Speaker
online only and then in person the rest of the time.
Unique Teaching Experience in Paleontology Hall
00:07:16
Speaker
It was a pretty interesting sight to see because we had a class of 15, 20 students but the university had these really intense spatial restrictions so the only way we could meet them
00:07:33
Speaker
We basically cleared out the giant paleontology hall with dinosaurs hanging from the ceiling and triceratops in the corner and this enormous space and put everyone in the far distant corner of it. I'm up here with a face shield and
00:07:50
Speaker
and stuff and sort of shouting out to the folks in the distant corners. But it actually worked really well. It was a blast to teach in a closed museum, you know, as opposed to a cramped classroom. So that was pretty fun.
00:08:06
Speaker
And so, because your classes in particular are very hands-on. You're the archaeozoologist, you've created the archaeozoology lab there at Boulder. I was in your course spring 2020, which was an emerging technologies museum course where we were supposed to learn how to do 3D scanning and do a lot of this modeling. And then halfway through the semester, it was just like, we're done, go home.
00:08:30
Speaker
and you had to format that. You did that very well, I think, in terms of seeing how other professors or things that I heard from my students, you transformed that course really nicely. What course did you teach in the fall of 2020? Because I know you taught Zoarc in this last spring, didn't you? Yeah. So new faculty are given
00:08:53
Speaker
one semester where because we're also expected basically to sort of wow everyone with all the research that we get done. We're given like one kind of a get out of jail free card to kind of take a semester that's a research focused semester and I don't know if it's for better or for worse but I had taken that for fall of 2020
00:09:14
Speaker
And I intended to spend about two to three months in China doing some sort of deep dive horse research. Ultimately, I pretty much just spent it all on Zoom here doing teaching and faculty and museum stuff instead.
Digitizing CU Museum of Natural History Exhibits
00:09:30
Speaker
But it was nice to not have to teach that semester because that was probably the highest stress one for most.
00:09:39
Speaker
folks that basically had to totally redesign a class to be online only. Carlton, were you teaching or are you assisting in that fall? I TA'd for ANTH 2200 with Dr. Doug Banforth. ANTH 2200 is my personal, uh, what's the, what's that place you go to before hell or sometimes, you know, I'm talking about purgatory. Yeah. ANTH 2200 is my teaching purgatory. That's the only thing I'm allowed to TA for.
00:10:05
Speaker
Are you going to be in the spring? Oh, I bet I am. I'll be teaching it. That'd be fantastic. That'd be, it'd be a lot of fun. Yeah. And I, and we were fully online. So part of CU's mandate, if like the large classes like intro to archeology is usually like a hundred something students, those classes were fully online. So I haven't had to teach in person since the fall of 2019.
00:10:31
Speaker
because the spring of 2020, I was Will's archaeozoology lab manager. So I haven't been in a classroom in front of a PowerPoint in two years. If you choose the professor route, it's probably going to be something you're going to have to reckon with at some point. I can't keep doing online forever exactly.
00:10:50
Speaker
Part of you coming in to see Boulder, right? It's not dual listed, but you're part of the museum studies program in anthropology, and you're also in the anthropology department. Part of you coming in was to create a new exhibit at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
00:11:09
Speaker
That's the title. I always get it confused because there's Denver Museum of Nature and Science and that doesn't get those mixed up a little bit. How did COVID change the planning and project of your exhibit within the museum? Yeah, this was also an interesting aspect of my first year at CU. When I arrived, we kind of have a rotating small exhibit that's just kind of a focus of like, what's new? What are people researching?
00:11:36
Speaker
I always loved museums and just so excited to finally have a sort of a sandbox to work here with some actual exhibit development stuff. I kind of got carried away with it, right? In terms of taking what was a tiny little thing and making it like a much bigger exhibit focused on telling the story of people and horses in North America. And basically we got all the way done with content development and we're at the point of
00:12:06
Speaker
getting ready to do install stuff with a pandemic hit. This probably applies to anyone who is doing any exhibit stuff, both either at our museum or anywhere else. We very rapidly, as a collective, had to scramble to figure out how do we do
00:12:27
Speaker
what we had planned to do, how do we serve our mission. At our museum, our mission is super multifaceted. Not only do we have a grad program where we've got all these emerging young museum professionals that are getting their high-level training,
00:12:47
Speaker
But we also have researchers coming in to study collections, right? We have undergrads working in the museum or doing research stuff using the collections for class stuff. And we have like K-12 and general public outreach stuff, right? We have 10, 11 year old girls that
00:13:09
Speaker
anticipate spending two to three days in the museum every week during fall and spring semesters. So pretty much everybody had to figure out, oh my gosh, how do we do some or all of this? How do we change what we're doing so that we can do this without people in the building? And it was a pretty widespread pivot. And some of it was actually super successful and probably changed the way our museum worked
00:13:36
Speaker
permanently in many ways. Actually, Carlton was a part of that. In terms of we started developing like a podcast, we were taking people into kind of long format interviews with some of our curators and yeah, folks should check that out if you're interested in things called Museum Unlocked. That was kind of cool. But basically every person at the museum was sort of rapidly developing new ways that we could
00:14:04
Speaker
make that switch. And so yeah, the horse exhibit was one example of how that played out. So we ended up doing a ton of 3D scanning and digitization of the objects that we had wanted to highlight and kind of trying to build a web
00:14:21
Speaker
based digital exhibit that could do a few things more than just your average 2D photos. One of the things that that stimulated us to do was add some video interviews that would have been harder to get right in a physical exhibit. And Carlton actually led some of those long format interviews that are providing perspectives from some travel historic preservation officers in the Great Plains and the Southwest.
00:14:51
Speaker
Ultimately, I think everyone came out of that and we were able to do a full fully bilingual right in Spanish and English. Everyone came out of that thinking like, okay, actually, well, it was awful to totally switch this in the middle of doing it. And it was a lot of work, but we ended up serving.
00:15:10
Speaker
a different audience as well, right? And making it available in a way that some of our stuff might not have been available in the old paradigm. So that's sort of how it went in most aspects of museum work over the last year or two, sort of a wild scramble. But in the process, I think we gave ourselves
00:15:31
Speaker
through tools in our toolkit about like how we can serve the different folks that are sort of our constituents. Do you anticipate continuing on that same sort of trajectory in the future and continue to adapt to post-pandemic life as well? Yeah, I think, you know, we were, you know, the funny part is like we were teaching, you know, this emerging technologies class. There was a narrative and an understanding
00:16:00
Speaker
right? That this is the direction that museums are shifting like it or not, right? I just think it's sort of forced our hands to really shift our infrastructure and invest in that in a more rapid way. You know, universities, museums, these institutions are like, sort of, there's an inertia to it, right? Because especially a museum, our job is literally to like,
00:16:26
Speaker
ensure nothing changes. We're supposed to protect the past and things that are hundreds of years old or whatever. In that aspect, I think there was definitely a silver lining because I do think we were headed here regardless and we're now really prepared to do that in a way that we weren't before. It just was kind of a bumpy road there.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, it was interesting because the readings that Will had us go through were like, how do you project the museum's knowledge base outside of the physical walls? Like, how do you get different demographics involved? And then so I remember being in a couple of meetings where the museum was like, well, how do we get stuff out? And I was like, well, I read this article that Dr. Taylor has signed, and this is how they did it out in like Czechoslovakia or something like that. So all the students were already in the mindset of like, oh, well, we have all these case studies and examples to pull from to do a lot of this stuff. So it was kind of.
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah. I never realized that. I don't know if it's irony, but I, yeah, I didn't realize kind of how that was, how that played out until you just got a lot more serious than it might've seemed in January. It went from theoretical to like practical within your five to 10 year plan is now like a two month plan to get all that stuff together.
00:17:42
Speaker
On that note, I think we are going to end this first segment. Chris Webster is going to talk to you about some awesome things. So we'll catch you on the next segment. Welcome back to episode 80 of a life and ruins podcast. 80 was my number back in football. Fun fact, not relevant to the slightest, but whatever. I kept thinking about that. I think this is going to be named Carlson's football number with William Taylor.
00:18:08
Speaker
Last time that we had you on, Dr. Taylor, we briefly talked about the lehi horse, the project that you're doing with that archaeological specimen. Could you recap what the lehi horse project is and why that was significant in your research?
Exploring the Lehi Horse Project and Its Significance
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, so I think we talked a little bit last time, right, that like one of the main focuses of our ongoing work, right, is trying to use archaeozoology to see what we can learn about the story of the horse here in North America.
00:18:42
Speaker
And one of the first things that folks said and it became a kind of refrain as we got started is, I'm not sure that the archaeology is there for you to do much with it. I'm just not aware of folks that really knew their stuff. Oftentimes you would still get comments like, I just don't think there are that many horses out there. So this horse in particular came to our attention
00:19:10
Speaker
during New York Times article about an Ice Age horse found in someone's backyard, kind of in the salt lake, greater salt lake area, right? And it's a horse, complete horse that was found in these kind of sandy Pleistocene lake deposits. And because of that, right, it made a lot of headlines as, wow, this beautiful horse. But one of the things that,
00:19:38
Speaker
jumped out to me and my colleagues as we were reading it is they mentioned that the horse was old and that it had arthritis, which it's not unheard of in a wild animal. But if you just think about the basic mechanics of life as a wild herbivore, it's like, in general, when we encounter these things, they tend to be pretty healthy. They tend to not be
00:20:02
Speaker
particularly old and you certainly would not expect a mobility impairment type of problem on an old animal making it into too many paleontological deposits, right? Because there's just too many natural processes that remove some animal like that from the pool. So that kind of raised some eyebrows and we thought that we
00:20:30
Speaker
should have a look, right? And so we arranged a research visit in collaboration with a lot of the, you know, some partners at University of Utah, some partners, you know, with paleontologists that work in the area. And kind of a whole group of us went down and had a look at the very first thing that we saw as we were going through the skeletal collections here, are these really, really characteristic fractures to the lower back.
00:21:01
Speaker
which you really don't find very often at all in archaeological assemblages. But when you do, where are the most common? It's the first millennium BC when people were horse riding
00:21:14
Speaker
without a saddle. And this is the area of the lower back that bears most of the burden from a rider's sort of butt bouncing up and down repeatedly on a pretty sensitive part of the horse's anatomy. So we thought, oh boy, I think we have a domestic horse here and something has gone wrong in the pipeline. Well, of course, many folks stuff
00:21:41
Speaker
forward with the great Mormon horse, right? There was a tendency for folks to really want to
00:21:49
Speaker
put this in that bin. And we really had to, I mean, I was of course like, no, I really, I don't think so. But we had to prove it, right? And so we started going into the context a little deeper. And one of the things we noticed as we went back through like the original, you know, videos of the horses discovery stuff is we look like actually there's a
00:22:11
Speaker
pit carved into this plasticine deposit that folks actually even sort of identified and talked about when it was coming out and ultimately decided, okay, we don't think this is a pit. Everyone knows that stratigraphy can be more of an art than a science sometimes. But as we were going through the collection, I also pulled out a bag
00:22:36
Speaker
that came from the bactere, basically, that has a flaked piece of chert in there, right? And so we started to think, okay, there's really a emerging straw argument here that we're looking at a misclassified specimen of indigenous cultural heritage from the Salt Lake region. And ultimately, we decided that because we had this complete specimen and because there was so much
00:23:05
Speaker
Back and forth over demonstrating what this horse actually was we hit it with as many different methods as we could DNA to establish that this was.
00:23:16
Speaker
you know, Equus cobalis, a domestic horse. DNA also told us that it was a female horse. So there are other ways you can find this out osteologically, but those parts of the skeleton were not really present or well preserved for us. And so for us, that tells us something important, that this is an old female animal. It's the kind of animal that you might keep, even if they had a severe arthritis or mobility impairment for one reason,
00:23:46
Speaker
And that would be if you're breeding them, right? We did some stable isotopes and strontium isotopes help us identify that this horse sort of lived its life locally. And then we pulled out all the different clues that we could from the skeleton in terms of what we could learn about how the animal was kept, whether it was ridden. And ultimately, we kind of got this
00:24:08
Speaker
Ultimately, it's just one horse, but what we tried to do with this horse is point out the potential of this approach for the rest of the archaeological record as well. And one of the first things that jumps out is that how much of that sort of record of indigenous heritage of horses has gone in the wrong bin.
00:24:30
Speaker
whether it be because we have such a rich record of fossil horses, or whether it be in other cases, right? I know that many times archaeologists might encounter one or two horse bones, sometimes even a whole horse, but they come in with an assumption that this is a dump, that they come in thinking of the horse as a Western Euro-American kind of animal. And oftentimes, I've seen cases where folks might have encountered an entire horse,
00:25:00
Speaker
and simply dismissed its relevance to the archaeological site as something intrusive or something associated with 20th century ranchers or something like this. Not all the time, but these are processes I think that have really shaped this
00:25:16
Speaker
And I think that this paper kind of engaged with that a little bit to show us, hey, I think there actually might be a lot more archaeological basis for this kind of thing. And if we do archaeology, maybe we can tease out some of the biased assumptions or some of the misclassification that might have stripped away those associations.
00:25:42
Speaker
I think when I was at a, and I think you know, Cassie Thornhill who did her master's thesis up in Wyoming.
00:25:48
Speaker
we had that conversation over beers, as you do about the stuff, because there's so many ways that you could miss horses in the archeology, archeological record. I mean, I think, at least in North America, like you said, you highlighted like, oh, it's a modern, someone dumped their horse out of that thing, or it's a nice age horse, you know, something like that, or just not being able to identify horse remains versus cow.
00:26:17
Speaker
something like that, you know, not, not really thinking about it. It's cool to hear about this, doing all these tests and studying it because that's, it's super interesting. And it, you can really, like you said, you can really get these really personal, almost personal kind of things about this horse. And yeah, no, I just, it's super cool. So yeah, I think that's, that's one of the important pieces here is even if you don't have, I mean,
00:26:42
Speaker
When we're in grad school, everybody's harping on sample size all the time, and archaeologists are notorious for wanting to do a bunch of statistics when they probably shouldn't. But the truth is, especially with something like a domestic animal, where the remains of that animal are chronicling a lifetime of intimate interactions with humans, you don't need
00:27:06
Speaker
Uh, sometimes any more than a small handful of specimens to tell an incredibly rich story. Right. And I think that's one thing that distinguishes maybe the study animal domestication a little bit from other kinds of zoarchaeology.
00:27:23
Speaker
is that we really can be totally happy with a deep story told in three or four data points. They can still totally reshape the way we think about a big topic, and I think horses are a great example. You know, Cassidy has done some really great work with that, and that's one of a small handful of similar sites where all of a sudden we're getting all kinds of information into that human horse story, and there may not be
00:27:51
Speaker
15 such sites in the state of Wyoming, but that one at Black Fork, that's still telling a big piece of story that might not be showing up elsewhere. That's our perspective. We're taking a wide lens and then every time we have a chance to do a deep dive,
00:28:11
Speaker
trying to take that chance. And moving off of that, I mean, there's kind of a tell using a small sample size to tell a huge story. There is that horse skeleton out of Kansas that you've been looking at. And I don't know, you haven't published on that, right? Not yet.
00:28:32
Speaker
There'll be some at the Plains Conference. I can talk about this. We have a publication that should be sent to the, you know, to the research gods here sometime in the next month or two. And so I can definitely talk about it because it's something that you've also been pretty significantly involved in, right? And I think it's nice as a sort of a reflection of the Lehigh story.
00:28:57
Speaker
Right? Because the broad strokes of it are extremely similar in the sense that this is just a head, right? It's the cranium and mandible of a horse that was found on the banks of a river right in the middle of Lawrence, Kansas in 1910, 1911.
00:29:16
Speaker
And the paleontologist who came across it said, aha, we have this beautiful, and this is a well-known Pleistocene fossil locality. So you see how the logic works. It's like, we know this is a Pleistocene age deposit. Next door, we found a bison femur or something.
00:29:38
Speaker
And it literally became a type specimen for a new species of horse that was named after the city of Lawrence, Kansas, Equus Laurentius. And it stayed that way for exactly a hundred years until a team of really, really expert paleontologists came along and were kind of like, we came in and look at the type specimen for Equus Laurentius and
00:30:01
Speaker
We're pretty sure this is a domestic horse, and they even went so far as the radiocarbon data, and they came away being like, sorry, guys, but no Equus Laurentiis anymore, or at least not from this specimen. But we had a different set of questions from that, which is, OK, this is an immaculately preserved
00:30:25
Speaker
a horse here, what's the story behind
Insights from the Kansas Horse Skeleton Discussion
00:30:29
Speaker
it? Because the radiocarbon dates associated with it in this 2010 paper are really early. They're essentially
00:30:42
Speaker
Again, it's one of these situations where we poked our heads in to see what else could be learned from the skeleton, right? And I think that's another example where there was just, I'm sure that we didn't capture all the things that could be learned, but just as an example from the osteology, I think we can actually reconstruct the kind of bit that it was controlled with.
00:31:06
Speaker
And there are a number of reasons which I won't get into too much here, but if you're at the Plains Conference, swing by and I can show you on a poster. But a very unique kind of bit was in use, you know, metal bridle equipment was in use in the 17th century and it worked in a pretty specific way that has osteological implications.
00:31:30
Speaker
But once again, the question becomes, have we found the remains of Coronado's expedition into Kansas? And every time, the very first thing out of certain demographics and battles, we'll be like, oh my god, this is a Spanish horse.
00:31:48
Speaker
So we did other things to try to understand that relationship further. And the most important and interesting piece is that through the sequential sampling of stable isotopes, I think we can show pretty clearly that this horse was fed corn in the winters. And again, once again, we seem to have this local signature in terms of the mobility and the other isotopes there. And so, yeah, I think we now have a
00:32:16
Speaker
Specimen that started off in the wrong bin and came back to tell us hey the there is a really really rich amount of detail about essentially all these innovations in indigenous horse pastoralism right the integration of
00:32:31
Speaker
Well, we know we can tell that horse riding was happening, right? Integration into an existing framework in terms of maize, right? As a local domestic crop being used to fodder. And the timing here might suggest that these religious missionaries at 1700 who were going around noting
00:32:57
Speaker
things in the journal about when people did or didn't have horses may not have appropriately captured the antiquity of that relationship, which may not be surprising to a lot of folks. But in general, that's actually the basis for most of our chronology about when we think about people having horses in the Western US in particular. It's kind of a proxy map of when did the first white person with a notebook show up.
00:33:27
Speaker
And so Lawrence is in Eastern-ish Kansas, right? Like it's where the University of Kansas is. Yeah, I don't know where Kansans like to draw the line there, but it's like somewhere central Eastern. Yeah. But the isotope analysis wasn't like last time I checked wasn't from that part of Kansas though, right? It was from a different geographic area. No. So I mean, you might not have seen all of our isotope analysis, maybe
00:33:54
Speaker
Maybe not. I just remember that. Yeah. So that's, I mean, that's relatively, that's sort of the final piece of this puzzle. And I think it's one thing that's hard always when you're doing isotope analysis is to get the right reference databases and stuff. Yeah. But I think, I think we've zeroed in on, on the right ones.
00:34:16
Speaker
Cause I remember I think last time we talked, there was talk of it possibly coming from like central Nebraska, Northern Kansas. Yeah. We, that, that piece of the narrative isn't probably totally hammered out yet. So probably that's something that we should sit down and do and chat with someone, an isotopes, one of the isotopes authors here and see what we can sort out. Cause I got really excited at the prospect of it being a pony horse being traded to the Oto's at some point in time.
00:34:42
Speaker
Well, I think that's something that's definitely on the radar here. So I think basically we have to, we have to be cautious with how much detail we go into an isotope narrative, unless we're going to get out with our sampling kit and sample every stream and every, you know, between Lawrence and Bismarck. Yeah, fair enough. I think we need to get a petition to name the horse Lawrence because they didn't get the species name, you know,
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure that that would go over particularly well and to add, let's find another way to put some sort of a European name on this. This has been misclassified for more than a century. This is it. This is why you're a professor and I run a podcast. On that note, we will end this segment. This is episode 80 of Life Intermittent's podcast. We are talking with Dr. William Taylor and we'll catch you in the third segment.
00:35:42
Speaker
And welcome back to episode 80 of Life from Roots podcast here with Dr. Taylor. So going back across the ocean to some of the research that we talked about on the last episode, your roots in Central Asia, Mongolia, and looking at horse domestication, like the earliest forms of horse domestication around the globe, you are involved in a research project at the Botei site. And that, that's not in Mongolia, right? I want to say it's in one of the stan countries. Or is it Mongolia?
00:36:13
Speaker
No, so it's not Mongolia. It is in the great nation of Kazakhstan. I also have not done any research there. What's happened here is that the longer that I've worked in Asia with most of my work being primarily Mongolia in China,
00:36:32
Speaker
the deeper that I've become engaged with the big picture of horse domestication, right? And ultimately, the study of horses and horse domestication has come a long way in 50 years. It is one of the most purely archeozoological problems in archeology, right? And the reason for that is that almost no artifact types
00:37:02
Speaker
really trace those incipient earliest stages of human-horse relations other than horse bones themselves, right?
Controversy Over Horse Domestication at the Botei Site
00:37:12
Speaker
So from day one, the hypothesis about how do we understand how we study horse domestication has really been centered around how do we trace human activity in the equine skeleton, right?
00:37:28
Speaker
This is a question where there's been back and forth for decades and basically as the methods have emerged, the answer has changed sometimes every few years. So when people first started thinking about how we can identify human activity on horses,
00:37:42
Speaker
It was purely focused on the teeth and one tooth in particular, right? The second premolar of the horse, something called bitwear. Scholars identified first in the 70s and then through the 80s and 90s that, hey, in certain conditions looks like this tooth, which is the first of the big cheek teeth of the horses that might interact with anything in its mouth. This tooth actually occasionally seems to have a very unique
00:38:11
Speaker
kind of damage to it, right, which has to be caused by human activity. So if we find this in the archaeological record, boom, we've got horse domestication. The problem, right, is that context is still needed, right? And so what first happened was we found, I say we, I was like still in diapers at this point, found a tooth in the steps of the Ukraine, which had bitware,
00:38:40
Speaker
and which, based on stratigraphy, seemed to be from 3,000 or 4,000 BC. And it was like, whoa, the first horse riding is 6,000 years ago in the steppes of Ukraine. And it stayed that way for probably a decade. A site called Derivka as the poster child for, yep, this is where it started. And it literally was based on the tooth, one tooth, right? Well,
00:39:08
Speaker
Eventually, there was enough of a kind of a back and forth on this and somebody said, well, we should radicarbonate that. And oops, this tooth is from about 800 BC. And it was like accidentally like maybe there was a pit buried in this
00:39:25
Speaker
So, okay, and then all of a sudden the debate becomes untethered again and people start saying, well, this part of Asia is the earliest and this part of Asia is the earliest. And it's sort of untethered the question again. And the second focus that people finally settled on is a place called Botai in northern Kazakhstan. And in the interim, people had started to develop some newer techniques for tracing damage to
00:39:57
Speaker
And the new approach seems to be slightly more reliable than the problems of the first approach, right? And looks like these bow-tie teeth have this kind of damage. Not a lot of the bow-tie teeth, but some of them seem to have a pretty characteristic damage pattern, which based on what we knew in 2008, 2009 was like
00:40:23
Speaker
leading techniques for linking human behavior to the horse kiln.
00:40:28
Speaker
So that story has sort of been the status quo for more than 10 years now. Not a long time really, when you think about how long it takes to publish something, how long ideas sort of then disseminate out into the wider world. In the interim over the last 10 years, what we've been able to do with other archeological analyses has also just totally ballooned to the point where ancient DNA
00:40:58
Speaker
gave us the ability to reconstruct the whole nuclear genome from something like a tooth or a little piece of, you know, a petroleum bomb or something. So a few years ago, all the horses from that site were studied and they discovered, oops, this is actually not the same species as domestic horse.
00:41:24
Speaker
The outcome of that narrative was we have a second failed horse domestication event that preceded the eventual domestication of the horse. That analysis really jarred something loose for me, where I just started to see that, think that, okay, I don't really think the pieces are all fitting here because I know what's called the Przywalski's horse. It's been reintroduced to Mongolia. I spent time out on these reserves.
00:41:53
Speaker
there are some really compelling arguments as to why the Frisvall suit horse, you know, has never been domesticated or, you know, managed as a domestic animal by Mongolians in several thousand years of Mongolian history, right? And I started to go back through the logic of those original debates, which preceded everyone agreeing on bow tie. And it turns out that there are a number of
00:42:19
Speaker
really big, what I would call red flags, right? One of them being some of the horses at bow tie have literal like arrowhead harpoons wedged in their ribs, right? Another red flag is that we in every pastoral assemblage
00:42:38
Speaker
I've ever encountered in Eurasia, there's a predictable pattern of culling of particular demographics of horses, which you do to manage your breeding herd, right? You cull young males and you cull older females. We actually would find the exact same pattern repeating itself at Black's Fork in Lehigh as well, right? It's almost a universal because it's very anchored in horse biology that to manage a herd of domestic horses, you
00:43:06
Speaker
you choose certain demographics. Well, crazily enough, Botai is the only domestic horse associated site that I've ever encountered where it's a 50-50 split male female and it doesn't have any of this patterning which is otherwise universal to the archaeological record of horses. So these are all kinds of things that got us
00:43:30
Speaker
squinting a little bit at, well, maybe it's worth a second look at the evidence for horse transport at Botai. So I started talking about the tooth. Ultimately, the argument for horse riding and horse transport at Botai comes down to one tooth in particular, and then a couple of other kind of supplementary bits and pieces there, in which it looks like there's very unique damage to this tooth.
00:44:01
Speaker
I started talking with a friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Christina Baron Ortiz, who is the world expert on
00:44:10
Speaker
developmental defects in ice age horses, right? Especially teeth. And it started, you know, showing her some of this evidence and talking through. And in our discussions, we realized that the unique patterns that were being put forward as the basis for here's human activity at bow tie.
00:44:35
Speaker
shared a lot of characteristics with things that she actually was very familiar with in a huge database of wild horse remains from this continent, from North America. And so what our study did, we didn't do anything
00:44:51
Speaker
one way or the other with potai, right? We did a deep dive into the prevalence of some of these natural developmental or nutritional or otherwise kind of happenstance defects that occur in wild horses. And we discussed what the implications of those defects were for our interpretation
00:45:14
Speaker
Other sites like potai and the results are not very encouraging for your belief in the strength of the potai analysis right they raise a lot of questions about whether things like enamel hypoplasia.
00:45:32
Speaker
or natural variation in the shape of teeth can and do produce things that are essentially perfectly comparable in wild specimens. And that's what we found. And we said, based on our analysis,
00:45:47
Speaker
you're going to have to revisit this tooth and do some follow-ups, you know, follow-up analysis, do a thin section, kind of dive a little deeper here if we're going to now base our whole understanding on one tooth or a very small handful of isolated specimens.
Reevaluation of Evidence at the Botei Site
00:46:05
Speaker
So I think we build a really strong scientific argument, not to dismiss bow tie as relevant to the center of horse domestication, but to prompt people to go back and take another look. Right. And the final thing that we did, which I think generated a lot of controversy is we pointed out, right, that we now have in 2021,
00:46:31
Speaker
We don't have to focus on a single tooth anymore, a particular smoke and gun. We have a whole host.
00:46:39
Speaker
of multiplicity of methods, right, ranging from the biomolecular, right, to the osteological, and any best practices now would be using all of those, not just to say yes or no on horse domestication at bow tie, but if it was domestication, how are folks using these horses? Were they riding them? Were they pulling carts? You know, what were all the, were they taking care of their health, all these things? And none of this, all this stuff has been totally set aside at bow tie and not revisited.
00:47:09
Speaker
And it's time, I think, one way or the other for us to take our toolkit and go back there. And unfortunately, this statement was not particularly well received. It caused a huge controversy and quite a lot of backlash, which I'm probably not going to get into here at this particular time, but which I think has unfortunately distracted from the
00:47:39
Speaker
So I would just encourage folks that are listening and interested in this, go back and read the original paper and read our response. Because I think what's needed now is not that I think, well, our papers is somehow solved all the answers, but I think it's time for some dialogue. And I think that the paper hopefully starts that little bit, even if it was not a pleasant start.
00:48:08
Speaker
I think it's an important point that we have assumptions or we have things that we think are true, these models of things. As we get new technology, we should be there to reevaluate them. We should be able to ask these questions in any sort of format.
00:48:26
Speaker
Yeah, as as we gain more There are different ways to analyze stuff. It's important to go back and ask these questions I know it's yeah, and one of the things that's kind of crazy is that the world of biomolecular Archaeology, right? It's it's a hardcore Laboratory science stuff and they generate, you know billions of data points and all this complicated stuff But they're building their models based on whatever
00:48:55
Speaker
in some ways, right? And it might be, right, that our archaeological hypothesis was a little bit cobbled together from whatever we had available, because that's how we do it, right? But unfortunately, it means that as the archaeologist, we can never be too confident in our own ideas, right? We have to try to poke holes in them. And 10 years later, be like, oh, yeah, that was what it looked like to me.
00:49:21
Speaker
I see now that with the new, you know, so it requires a lot of vigilance on our part because it doesn't matter how brilliant of a molecular scientist.
00:49:30
Speaker
might be, they actually, they still can't easily navigate our world. There's a lot of things with cut marks, spiral fractures. These are just a completely different language to even the most brilliant geneticists. So we have to be transparent about our sources of uncertainty.
00:49:53
Speaker
Excellent. I think that's a good place to wrap up. So you had a call to action, Dr. Taylor, to read the paper. So I mean, here's a good chance.
Further Reading on Horse Domestication Research
00:50:03
Speaker
Before we end the show, one or a couple sources, one to three books, articles, videos that you would recommend for anyone interested in animal or horse domestication or even your recent publications, if they're curious about your research. Yeah. So I think some things that would be good to check out on the basis of our chat today, check out the Lehigh Horse Paper. That one is
00:50:22
Speaker
Everything I'm going to say here is totally open access, so you should be able to find it online without too much trouble. I think it would also make sense, obviously, to dive into this rethinking of evidence for early horse domestication at Botei. In that paper, you can also find a link to the original earliest horse harnessing and milking paper from 2009 that is in response to. I'm going to give two more things, even though that's one more than you asked for.
00:50:52
Speaker
One is there's a new a really great paper out just this last week by librato and all the origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian Steps. That's a really multi-disciplinary mega study with a lot of important implications. You'll see as you read through that there's a lot of
00:51:12
Speaker
There are a lot of things unresolved here about the bow tie question and everything else, but it really interesting application of some of these new techniques. And then the final thing is if you want to know about Mongolia and chariots, we just had a paper come out in antiquity that I think hopefully is a little less controversial than any of these other things.
00:51:33
Speaker
But it kind of shows the way you can use, you know, osteology, something like dentition. Maybe they even learn in some interesting detail something like the difference between riding or pulling chariots, how people were used. What did chariots and horses mean in the, you know, the life of Mongolia in the Bronze Age? I think that's also one probably useful to check out.
00:51:59
Speaker
Cool. Well, thank you for passing those along. And where can I listeners find you on social media? Yeah. All right. So the hottest read these days is probably Twitter, right? Which is WTT underscore Taylor on Twitter. We also have a more muted presence on that CU archaeology on Facebook and Instagram. The Instagram page has got a few cobwebs up since Carlton
00:52:26
Speaker
abandoned that role as our lab manager, but it does still get some interesting pus once a while. Then on Facebook, you know, normally we share research articles and that sort of thing. I didn't abandon it. I was no longer there. You're not getting paid anymore either. I didn't just leave you with that. You didn't rehire me.
00:52:50
Speaker
I really have to force myself to do social mediates. It's not a natural gift for me the way it is forgotten. So it is a little dustier than it used to be. I'll come back on a contract basis. Well, excellent. We just interviewed Dr. William Taylor. You can find him on Twitter at WTT underscore Taylor, as well as the CU archaeology lab on Instagram and Facebook. And you have that Facebook page, horses and domestication societies.
00:53:18
Speaker
So now that that one's actually a little even a little bit more active horses and human societies on Facebook Yeah, you're welcome for the reminder excellent
00:53:28
Speaker
Yeah. And please be sure to rate the podcast and provide us with feedback on whatever platform you are on. We'd love to hear from you. Email us at a life ruins podcast at gmail.com. Yell at us on any sort of social media stuff. Make sure and put Carlton's name in there. So he understands it's for him. Yeah. Don't, don't send message to ethnology. Like we love David in the work, but don't talk, don't talk to ethnology about the life ruins podcast. We have the handles. You can talk to us.
00:53:56
Speaker
Yeah. But please talk to us, engage with us. We love talking to you. Absolutely. And we love you, Caleb Welch. And with that, we are out. 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.
00:54:23
Speaker
And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So, who do ponies call when they're possessed by demons? I don't know. An ex-horsest. Oh boy. I feel like I might be an ex-horsest. That's something I could put on a business price. Excellent. And with that, we are out.
00:55:05
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.