| Cowboy Wash | |
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| Location | Montezuma County, Colorado, USA |
| Coordinates | 37°10′47″N108°50′43″W / 37.17972°N 108.84528°W [1] |
Cowboy Wash is a group of nine archaeological sites used by Ancestral Puebloans (previously known as Anasazi) in Montezuma County, southwestern Colorado, United States. Each site includes one to three pit houses, and was discovered in 1993 during an archaeological dig. The remains of twelve humans were found at one of the pit house sites, dating to the 12th century.
The site, designated 5MT10010, dates to between approximately 1150 and 1175 A.D. It is located on the south slopes of Ute Mountain near Towaoc, approximately 15 miles west of Mesa Verde, the famous Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. Some archeologists believe that the site was settled by immigrants from Chaco Canyon, or the Chuska Mountains. [2]
Five of the human skeletons at the site were from burials. The remaining seven exhibited many signs of cannibalism including defleshing, fragmentation of long bones to extract marrow, chopped, cut, and blackened bones. A stone tool kit appropriate for butchering a mid-sized mammal was found. [3] The initial excavation was supervised by University of North Carolina archaeologist Brian Billman, employed by a private firm contracted by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. The land on which the site was located is within the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation and was owned by a local Ute religious leader, who supervised the dig and reburied the bones once the examination was complete. [4]
What is particularly interesting about the Cowboy Wash site is that it appears to have been abandoned very quickly. Generally, the ancient peoples would have taken all salvageable materials with them, yet the excavators found everything had been left behind. [5]
The initial reports speculating that the seven humans had been cannibalized was met with skepticism from some scientists and criticism by Native American groups including the Ute tribe. (The Ute are a separate people from either the alleged victims or the alleged perpetrators.) The Ute have a strong oral tradition of peace between their ancestors and neighboring groups, which is not necessarily in agreement with the traditions of other groups or historical information. [6]
To investigate the theory that cannibalism had been practiced at the Cowboy Wash site, Richard Marlar, a University of Colorado molecular biologist examined the coprolite (fossilized human feces) found on site and discovered it tested positive for human myoglobin, which is found in human muscle tissue. This type of myoglobin was not found in 20 'control' coprolites in comparable sites. [7] This indicated the feces contained the remains of digested human flesh. [8] Marlar also found the myoglobin protein during a chemical analysis of a cooking pot at the ancient Ancestral Pueblo site.
There are conflicting theories about whether or not cannibalism occurred at Cowboy Wash. According to Billman, the current explanation for the apparent cannibalism was that drought struck the region, prompting groups to move and seek food. This led to territorial conflicts between groups and a decline in social order. The remains were dated to be around the time consistent with the demise of the Chaco system. Some researchers have found reference to warfare-related cannibalism within Puebloan culture, for example, that among the Hopi, "chewing on shreds of enemy scalps was thought to make children brave hearted". [9] However, others speculate that the coprolite found at Cowboy Wash contains remains of Ancient Pueblo people who were killed and consumed by a cultural outsider. [10]
Other theories include the bones reflect evidence of reburial rituals or perhaps ritual killing of those suspected of witchcraft. It has even been suggested that Billman's team mistook a coyote coprolite for human. [11]
Cowboy Wash is one of the key locations in the historical novel People of the Moon, By W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O'Neal Gear, published in 2005. A foreword identifies the fictional Saltbush Farmstead with the Cowboy Wash site.
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| Contemporary peoples native to Colorado |
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| Prehistoric cultures in Colorado |
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The Puebloans, or Pueblo peoples, are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Among the currently inhabited Pueblos, Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are some of the most commonly known. Pueblo people speak languages from four different language families, and each Pueblo is further divided culturally by kinship systems and agricultural practices, although all cultivate varieties of maize.
Mesa Verde National Park is an American national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado. The park protects some of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan ancestral sites in the United States.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park is a United States National Historical Park in the American Southwest hosting a concentration of pueblos. The park is located in northwestern New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Farmington, in a remote canyon cut by the Chaco Wash. Containing the most sweeping collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico, the park preserves one of the most important pre-Columbian cultural and historical areas in the United States.
The Fremont culture or Fremont people is a pre-Columbian archaeological culture which received its name from the Fremont River in the U.S. state of Utah, where the culture's sites were discovered by local indigenous peoples like the Navajo and Ute. In Navajo culture, the pictographs are credited to people who lived before the flood. The Fremont River itself is named for John Charles Frémont, an American explorer. It inhabited sites in what is now Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado from AD 1 to 1301. It was adjacent to, roughly contemporaneous with, but distinctly different from the Ancestral Pueblo peoples located to their south.
Hovenweep National Monument is located on land in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, between Cortez, Colorado and Blanding, Utah on the Cajon Mesa of the Great Sage Plain. Shallow tributaries run through the wide and deep canyons into the San Juan River.
Yucca House National Monument is a United States National Monument located in Montezuma County, Colorado between the towns of Towaoc and Cortez, Colorado. Yucca House is a large, unexcavated Ancestral Puebloan archaeological site.
Pueblo Bonito is the largest and best-known great house in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, northern New Mexico. It was built by the Ancestral Puebloans who occupied the structure between AD 828 and 1126.
Canyons of the Ancients National Monument is a national monument protecting an archaeologically significant landscape located in the southwestern region of the U.S. state of Colorado. The monument's 176,056 acres (71,247 ha) are managed by the Bureau of Land Management, as directed in the presidential proclamation which created the site on June 9, 2000. Canyons of the Ancients National Monument is part of the National Landscape Conservation System, better known as the National Conservation Lands. This system comprises 32 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management to conserve, protect, and restore these nationally significant landscapes recognized for their outstanding cultural, ecological, and scientific values. Canyons of the Ancients encompasses and surrounds three of the four separate sections of Hovenweep National Monument, which is administered by the National Park Service. The monument was proclaimed in order to preserve the largest concentration of archaeological sites in the United States, primarily Ancestral Puebloan ruins. As of 2022, over 8,500 individual archeological sites had been documented within the monument.
The Virgin Anasazi were the westernmost Ancestral Puebloan group in the American Southwest. They occupied the area in and around the Virgin River and Muddy Rivers, the western Colorado Plateau, the Moapa Valley and were bordered to the south by the Colorado River. They occupied areas in present-day Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. Their occupation of the area lasted from about 1 CE to around 1200 CE, which according to the Pecos Classification places the occupation from Early Basketmaker II Era to Early Pueblo III periods. Their neighbors were the Fremont culture to the north and the Kayenta Anasazi to the east.
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center is a 170-acre (69 ha) research center and "living classroom" located in southwestern Colorado, US, which offers experiential education programs for students and adults.
The Trail of the Ancients is a collection of National Scenic Byways located in the U.S. Four Corners states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. These byways comprise:
The Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum located in Dolores, Colorado, is an archaeological museum of Native American pueblo and hunter-gatherer cultures. Two 12th-century archaeological sites, the Escalante and Dominguez Pueblos, at the center were once home to Ancient Pueblo peoples. The museum's permanent and special exhibits display some of the 3 million mostly Ancestral Puebloan artifacts curated at the facility. The center also houses a public research library, educational resources and a museum shop. Wheelchair-accessible facilities include a picnic area and an interpreted nature and cultural trail.
The Ansel Hall Ruin, also known as Cahone Ruin, is located in Cahone, Dolores County, Colorado. A pre-historic ruins from the Pueblo II period, the Northern San Juan pueblo was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.
The Pueblo I Period was the first period in which Ancestral Puebloans began living in pueblo structures and realized an evolution in architecture, artistic expression, and water conservation.
The Pueblo II Period was the second pueblo period of the Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region of the American southwest. During this period people lived in dwellings made of stone and mortar, enjoyed communal activities in kivas, built towers and dams for water conservation, and implemented milling bins for processing maize. Communities with low-yield farms traded pottery with other settlements for maize.
The Pueblo III Period was the third period, also called the "Great Pueblo period" when Ancestral Puebloans lived in large cliff-dwelling, multi-storied pueblo, or cliff-side talus house communities. By the end of the period, the ancient people of the Four Corners region migrated south into larger, centralized pueblos in central and southern Arizona and New Mexico.
The Basketmaker culture of the pre-Ancestral Puebloans began about 1500 BC and continued until about AD 750 with the beginning of the Pueblo I Era. The prehistoric American southwestern culture was named "Basketmaker" for the large number of baskets found at archaeological sites of 3,000 to 2,000 years ago.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the prehistoric people of Colorado, which covers the period of when Native Americans lived in Colorado prior to contact with the Domínguez–Escalante expedition in 1776. People's lifestyles included nomadic hunter-gathering, semi-permanent village dwelling, and residing in pueblos.
The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture. The people and their archaeological culture are often referred to as Anasazi, meaning "ancient enemies", as they were called by Navajo. Contemporary Puebloans object to the use of this term, with some viewing it as derogatory.
The Indigenous peoples of the North American Southwest are those in the current states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada in the western United States, and the states of Sonora and Chihuahua in northern Mexico. An often quoted statement from Erik Reed (1666) defined the Greater Southwest culture area as extending north to south from Durango, Mexico to Durango, Colorado and east to west from Las Vegas, Nevada to Las Vegas, New Mexico. Other names sometimes used to define the region include "American Southwest", "Northern Mexico", "Chichimeca", and "Oasisamerica/Aridoamerica". This region has long been occupied by hunter-gatherers and agricultural people.
