Horse'n Around the Archaeological Record: Saddling Archaeological Science with Indigenous Knowledge
An archaeologist and a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, Dr. Shield Chief Gover co-authored a recent study in the journal Science that transforms the conventional understanding of when Native Americans across the Southwest and the Great Plains integrated horses into their lifeways. Traditional historical narratives, based on European records from the colonial period, have long asserted that Indigenous people didn’t begin caring for and breeding horses until decades after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Drawing on tribal oral histories, zooarchaeology, radiocarbon dating, and DNA sequencing, Dr. Shield Chief Gover’s collaborative research shows that horses were deeply integrated into Indigenous societies as much as a century before European accounts allow for them having horses at all. His approach exemplifies how Indigenous scholars are advancing a model of archaeological research done with, by, and for members of Native descendant communities.
** If you can’t join in person, the talk will be live-streamed on Zoom: https://uky.zoom.us/j/83027358255
This talk is co-sponsored by 2nd Story and the University of Kentucky Department of Anthropology.
Carlton Shield Chief Gover is a citizen of the Pawnee Nation. He received his B.S. in Anthropology from Radford University, his M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Wyoming, and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder, with Professional Certificates in Museology and Native American & Indigenous Studies. His research area is in the Central Great Plains of the United States, focusing on ancestral Pawnee and Arikara heritage. His research utilizes Pawnee and Arikara oral traditions regarding population movement and social change as foundational evidence for interpreting the archaeological record from the 9th to 16th centuries C.E. He has published in American Antiquity, Plains Anthropologist, Science, and Advances in Archaeological Practice.