Magdalenian Mythology

The magnificence of the ceiling at Altamira leaves you wanting to know more. It can’t have been meaningless. Artists took so much time honing their techniques and experimenting with pigments to create their effects. That was time granted them by others, a leave from hunting or knapping or preparing food.

Some who had read James Frazer’s The Golden Bough looked at the animals - the steppe bison, red deer and horses - and suggested the paintings were a form of magic executed to ensure a successful hunt.

That argument made more sense for the portable art, the points and artifacts that were carried from place to place. Earlier, the Solutreans had created beautiful, finely crafted laurel leafs to use against their prey. Magdalenian knappers produced more utilitarian stone work, but they incised their antler and bone tips with symbols.

When they depicted a species it was one that actually was hunted like a female red deer or hind. More than four times as many of the bones found at Altamira were from red deer as other species: 19 as opposed to four from horses and four from bison.

Others, familiar with the mythology of groups like the San Juan and Jicarilla Apache mentioned in the post for 23 April 2015, saw the special relationship with stone as evidence of attempts to contact spirits who dwelt below ground. Jean Clottes believed the process of creation was more important than the finished image.

That hypothesis better explained the hand stencils, the circles painted around holes in cave walls, and the simpler designs found in remote passages in caves.

Some went farther to suggest places like Altamira became communal centers were bands came together to share seasonal rituals, exchange goods, and find mates.

André Leroi-Gourhan looked at the composition of paintings in France and Spain, which he thought reflected social values with female animals in the center and males on the edges. Others have seen the 17 bison at Altamira as a herd of males and females joined for the rutting season. Two horses and two hinds were on the periphery.

Leslie Freeman tried to calculate the number of pounds of meat each species yielded. He believed a steppe bison might have produced 881 pounds, a horse 396, and a red deer 220.

It’s harder to convert those pounds into units of nutrition. The USDA provides information on modern animals, and not always on comparable classes. An ounce of ground raw bison provides 63 calories of energy and an ounce of ground raw deer 45. An ounce of raw deer meat, however, provides 34 calories and an ounce of raw horse 38.

For the equally important measure of protein per ounce, the USDA calculated ground raw bison provided 5.29 grams of protein compared to 6.16 from ground raw deer meat. Raw deer meat provided 6.51 grams and raw horse 6.06.

In cold years, the amount of fat was critical. USDA report probably underestimate the glacial period because animals are bred for leanness today. Still, bison would have been better. An ounce of raw ground meat contains 5.13 grams; the same cut of deer has 2.02. Raw deer has .69 grams per ounce and horse has 1.3.

Red deer may have provided fewer calories than the ones used by the USDA. Still, it seems, a pound of red deer was more nutritious than a pound of horse or steppe bison, but there were fewer pounds available per animal and it didn’t provide the same insulation against the cold. It took more hunting effort to provide the same amount of usable food. It may be one reason anthropologists believed Magdalenians developed mass hunting techniques for red deer.

What nutrition data really means was individuals who didn’t live through famine times had a better chance of reaching maturity and having excess energy to invest in activities that weren’t essential to physical survival.

One can dismiss the various explanations for the fluorescence in Magalenian art, but you’re still left with the basic evidence of symbolic language as well as verbal, of visual and intellectual imagination, of some form of a cosmology.

When I look at the herd of bison I think of a paradise lost, a mythic time remembered when animals were more plentiful and people didn’t eat so many mollusks. That implies not just an apprentice system for training knappers and artists, but story telling and history, a sense of past and present.

We associate such cognitive skills with modern Homo sapiens. They may well have existed among the Aurignicians and the Solutreans, but something in the experience of the Magdalenians 14,000 years ago stimulated them to express themselves in ways that left a record for us.

It may have been the sheer increase in population in a limited area with animals confined by climate that allowed such specialization among a small group.

When the climate warmed many plant and animal species migrated north. Their hunters followed. Art returned to daylight sites. The Magdalenian cultured ended 12,000 years ago.

Notes:
Bahn, Paul G. and Jean Vertut. Journey Through the Ice Age, 1997.

Clottes, Jen and David Lewis Williams. The Shamans of Prehistory, translated by Sophie Hawkes, 1998.

Conkey, Margaret W. "The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira [and Comments and Reply]," Current Anthropology 21:609-630:1980.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, and expanded in later editions.

Freeman, L. G. "The Significance of Mammalian Faunas from Paleolithic Occupations in Cantabrian Spain," American Antiquity 38:3-44:1973.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. The Dawn of European Art, translated by Sara Champion, 1982; both Bahn and Clottes summarize his ideas.

United States Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. National Nutrient Database.

Graphics:
Utilisateur:120, "Great Hall of Policromes of Altamira," published by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1880, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 14 March 2006.

Magdalenian at Altamira

Once plant and animal life recovered in a warming climate, the Homo sapiens population more than quadrupled in Europe. A new culture appeared in France and Spain about 17,000 years ago. Magdalenians’ shared technology and their iconographic system reflected "an underlying cultural unity" that suggested "the circulation of traditions on a vast scale in time and space."

Their symbols appeared on both portable and immovable objects. Most sites had one or the other. Altamira, 20 miles west of Santander, was one of the few in Cantabria with both. It was also one of the few caves with both art and evidence of habitation.

Margaret Conkey noted 27 places in northern Iberia engraved bone or antler. Many adorned tools or points. Altamira was one of five where more than 10 artifacts have been found. Those five shared six design elements organized by one of three structural principles. Only two had unique motifs: Altamira and Cueto de la Mina. She believed that marked them as centers of innovation where groups may have gathered.

The earliest sign on a wall at Altamira was some black marks that have been dated to 16,480 years ago. A turtle-like profile or tectiform goes back 15,400 years. Both were found in a terminal gallery.

Another form of portable art was carved or painted limestone tablets or non-utilitarian bones. At Altamira and El Castillo left engraved heads of female red deer on both shoulder blades and walls. The shoulder blade at Altamira has been dated to 14,480 years ago. Paul Bahn and Jean Vetut believed the two incised bones were either the work of "the same person, or two who knew each other’s work." One had either seen the other’s work, or been trained by someone trained in much the way workshops or studios functioned in later European art.

The progression from artisans working independently within a shared tradition to artists working within a school is more obvious in the images left on cave walls. Early in the period, images were executed near the mouths of caves, sometimes just beyond the farthest point reached by daylight. At Altamira, the opening was the only area with hearths.

Jean Clotttes noted there came a time in the mid-Magdalenian period when people explored caves. They may have been aided by improvements in their stone lamps that burned animal fat. Art began appearing in large internal caverns and in remote passages assessable by few.

At Altamira an 60 by 30 foot ceiling was painted in stages on an area The height of the chamber varied from 3.8 to 8.7 feet. One large bison was added 14,820 years ago, another twenty years later. A small bison was painted 13,570 years ago. They first were engraved on the wall, then outlined in back. The bodies were colored in shades of red and brown. The same techniques appeared earlier at Lascaux, in the French Dordogne, and later at El Castillo.

Clottes noted, when archaeologists tried to replicate their techniques, they discovered it was difficult to find walls that met their requirements. They needed to be large and smooth and relatively unmarred by calcite dripping from the ceiling.

Artists incorporated irregularities in the walls into their art. Nodules and depressions were exploited to give dimension to animals. At Altamira, Bahn and Vetut noted, all the bison on the ceiling were on convex surfaces, while the horses and deer were on concave. Rough textures also were incorporated into the bison.

The sensitivity to the contours of walls may have been more than an aesthetic sensibility. It may have been a consequence of special attitudes towards rock that had manifested themselves in the Aurignacian with hand stencils. Such stencils continued to be made at Altamira, along with hand prints.

Most of the pigments were mineral based. Ochre was still the primary colorant, used for reds and browns. Chemists have determined artists experimented to discover the best source for black. At Altamira they used two types of manganese, pine or juniper charcoal, and charred remains of burned bone. Anthropologists found some white paste in a shell made from mica and illite.

Some pigments were used in sticks and some were powdered. The latter may have been turned into paste. André Leroi-Gourhan said, experiments showed water was the most effective binder, either in the pastes or in the dampness of the walls. Cave water would have been rich in calcium. At Altamira, powdered fossil amber was used.

Notes: For more on population numbers see post for 22 November 2015. All dates are given by scientists with ranges; I’ve simplified them here.

Bahn, Paul G. and Jean Vertut. Journey Through the Ice Age, 1997. He gives the following dates for the bison at El Castillo: 13,570, 13,060, and 12,910 years ago.

Clottes, Jen and David Lewis Williams. The Shamans of Prehistory, translated by Sophie Hawkes, 1998.

Conkey, Margaret W. "The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira [and Comments and Reply]," Current Anthropology 21:609-630:1980. The other Cantabrian sites she used were El Cierro, El Juyo, and La Paloma.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. The Dawn of European Art, translated by Sara Champion, 1982; quotation in the first paragraph.

Graphics: Rameessos, "Reproduction of a Bison of the Cave of Altamira," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 25 December 2008.

Solutrean in Cantabria

Scientists now think the great ice ages of the past were caused by regular modifications in the location of the Earth’s elliptical orbit and one resulted in less summer solar radiation in the northern latitudes around 23,000 years ago. That in turn lead to progressively less ice being melted each year, which in turn nurtured the expansion of ice sheets.

The northern ice sheets began shrinking about 19,000 years ago when changes in the sun’s angles led to more heat in the summer. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet was affected between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago. Both led to increases in sea levels. The middle and late Solutrean fell between these two events.

Ironically, the first warming in France and Iberia led to worse conditions. If you think back to the changes in the Nebraska prairies in the 1930s, mentioned in the post for 28 January 2016, you realize that when the rains returned in 1938, bluestem could reclaim land on its western frontier lost to western wheatgrass. Wheatgrass, however, could not compensate for its lost range by returning farther west because that area had been devastated.

Similarly, the ranges of grasses that fed reindeer, horses and red deer would have changed, and likely shrunk. The humans dependent on them would have had to adapt to fewer or smaller animals.

Bands apparently moved south along the coastal plain of the Bay of Biscay bypassing the Pyrenees to the east. The lightest area in the map below would have been exposed. The large estuary up the French coast is the mouth of the Garonne river. Many of the early Solutrean sites are in its upstream valleys.

In Cantabria, the earliest evidence from El Mirón has been dated 19,230 years ago. It was located on the Río Asón between Balboa and Santander, in the second indentation from the east on the map. The earliest Solutrean date for La Riera was 19,820 years ago. It sat on the limestone La Llera ridge between Santander and Oviedo, somewhere in the shallow indentation, about 70 miles west of El Mirón.

Steven Mithen said La Riera was a treeless landscape where bands hunted red deer and ibex. Lawrence Straus was told the only tree growing at El Mirón was Scots pine. The most common herbaceous plants were in the wild lettuce group of the composite family. He argued, that with the increasing population in the area, bands began foraging for mollusks along the shore in winter.

The climate improved at bit by 18,890 years ago, when birch trees and members of the heath family appeared at El Mirón. The newer Solutrean tool forms were found for the first time: an antler sagaie and two unifacial points with possible shoulders. The next layer higher had a bifacial willow leaf. The antler throwing spear was "‘decorated’ with parallel, oblique engraved lines."

Some semblance of social life returned by 17,420 years ago. La Cueva de Chufín saw its cave art revived. Earlier artists had made red outlines of figures and dots. Now, they left engravings of deer, bison, aurochs, and horses with more abstract patterns.

Although portable art like the incised spear was more common in the Solutrean period than cave art, someone engraved a deer on a wall at Altamira around 18,000 years ago. Later, people left hand prints and simple outlines of horses and goats. Francisco Jordá Cerdá documented Cueva de La Pasiega where he saw outlines and figures painted in red. Archaeologists found 25 painted figures at El Castillo.

Straus believed bands spent most of their time in coastal sites that were close to sources for shellfish and fish. The caves were all in sheltered locations, with their entrances alee to the winds.

From their coastal locations, Straus argued, groups moved up adjacent river valleys to hunting areas that often overlooked "gorges, passes, box canyons" used by animals moving between high and low pastures. These high hunting locations were often so windy and uncomfortable they wouldn’t have been used for long time periods.

Straus thought pairs of coastal and montane sites represented group territories, and that each was associated with a ritual center. Near the coast, La Cueva de Chufín was east of La Riera. Altamira and El Castillo were both about 30 miles west of Santander on neighboring rivers. Cueva de La Pasiega was upriver from El Castillo.

Notes: The wild lettuce group is the liguliflora section of Composite family. Paleobotanists often can’t distinguish pollens and other plant remains below groups levels.

Bahn, Paul G. and Jean Vertut. Journey Through the Ice Age, 1997; on Altamira paintings and El Castillo.

Clark, Peter U., et alia. "The Last Glacial Maximum," Science 325:710-714:2009.

Gálvez Lavín, Nerea. "Chufín (Riclones, Rionansa)," Universidad de Cantabria Arte en Cantabria web site

Hays J.D., J. Imbrie, and N. J. Shackleton. "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages," Science 194:1121-1132:1976.

Jordá Cerdá, Francisco. "Los Estilos en el Arte Parietal Magdaleniense Cantábrico," in Universidad de Zaragoza, Curso de Arte Rupestre Paleolítico, 1978; cited by Wikipedia.

Mithen, Steven. After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC, 2006.

Straus, Lawrence Guy. "Cantabria and Vascongadas, 21,000-17,000 B.P.: Toward a Solutrean Settlement Pattern," Munibe 31:195-202:1979.

_____. "On Maritime Hunter-Gatherers: A View from Cantabrian Spain," Munibe 33:171-173:1981.

_____, F. Bernaldo de Quirós, V. Cabrera, and G. Clark. "New Radiocarbon Dates for the Spanish Solutrean," Antiquity 51:243:1977.

_____, _____, _____, _____. "Solutrean Chronology & Lithic Variability in Vasco-Cantabrian Spain," Zephyrvs 28-29:109-112:1978.

_____, Manuel R. González Morales, Igor Gutiérrez Zugasti and María Jose Iriarte Chiapusso. "Further Solutrean Evidence in El Mirón Cave (Ramales de la Victoria, Cantabria)," Munibe 31:195-202:1979

Turner, Kernan. "Altamira Cave Art in Spain Is Being 'Cloned' for Visitors," Associated Prees, published 13 August 2000 by Los Angeles Times; on Altamira engraving.

Graphics: Eric Gaba, English translation of "Carte Bathymétrique de la Mer Celtique et du Golfe de Gascogne," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 1 July 2014.

Solutrean

The Last Glacial Maximum was a time of scarcity. Bone tools disappeared, charcoal needed for radiocarbon dating became scarce. Horse’s teeth were more common than long bones in sites. Fragments of points were more common than in tact ones. No human remains have been found.

It’s likely bone was burned when Scots Pine wasn’t available. The feeling of deprivation carried over to stone, which was worked and reworked, never left behind until it became unserviceable.

It became so important, it was treated as a ritual medium. Michael Jochim said Solutrean craftsmen selected stones of "particularly high quality and often banded in several colors." Thierry Aubry noted, translucent stone was always chosen for the larger points.

Solutrean stone points went through four forms, beginning with a simple one sharpened on one side of the edge. The second was shaped like a laurel leaf with both sides of the edge sharpened. Then came the willow leaf, and the shouldered point.

Early archaeologists assumed one followed the other. More recently, they’ve found tool styles co-existed, either in the same site or in neighboring ones. That’s probably because each evolved to serve different problems, and each survived so long as it was useful.

Large laurel leaves primarily have been found in France where they may have been used for reindeer. André Leroi-Gourhan thought them too thick to fit on the end of a spear. Instead, they must have been "propelled with great speed."

One possible factor limiting their production to parts of modern France was the availability of material. In the Portuguese Estremadura, craftsmen made smaller laurel leafs by heat treating local stone to made it strong enough for pressure flaking work. The points were more fragile, but then the prey was different in that part of Iberia.

Aubry’s team of experimental knappers found manufacturing large laurel leaves was embedded into a complex economy based on mobility. Tool makers mined flint near Maîtreaux where they used "hammer percussion" to make rough pieces they took back to their work camp near the Massif Central on the upper reaches of the Loire. There they used "organic percussion" to thin and shape their blanks. However, they didn’t apply the finished edges at Maîtreaux.

On the eastern side of the Atlantic-Mediterranean watershed, William Banks believed hunters arrived in the area "prior to the arrival of migratory game animals, refurbished their toolkits, and then moved to Solutré to procure and process game." He noted, that in all the levels hearths appeared with debris from refining the edges and that the crystalline stone was not local.

Bands hunted horses at Solutré so often, the bones were still being used for fertilizer in the nineteenth century. Analysis of those bones suggested they were mainly slain in the spring and fall, probably by being backed against the cliff.

At Fourneau du Diable on the western side of the French watershed, Laure Fontana found reindeer were the primary prey. Does and fawns were slain in winter and spring, males in fall. Adult horses were taken in spring. Foals apparently were spared.

Hunters at Solutré were eating somewhere else in summer and winter. Likewise, the ones at Fourneau spent their summers elsewhere. They may have moved downstream toward moister flood plains. We know they drilled holes in the shells they found, and wore them as ornaments. Beyond the fine stone, they are the only luxury item that has survived.

Notes: I don’t wish to imply bands moved from Maîtreaux to Solutré. Each was in its own ecological network. They are examples of two types of nodes within such a network.

Aubry, Thierry, Miguel Almeida, Maria João Neves, and Bertrand Walter. "Solutrean Laurel Leaf Point Production and Raw Material Procurement During the Last Glacial Maximum in Southern Europe: Two Examples from Central France and Portugal," in Marie Soressi and Harold L. Dibble, Multiple Approaches to the Study of Bifacial Technologies, 2003

_____, _____, _____, _____, et alia. "Solutrean Laurel Leaf Production at Maîtreaux: An Experimental Approach Guided by Techno-economic Analysis," World Archaeology 40:48-66:2008.

Banks, William E. Toolkit Structure and Site Use: Results of a High-Power Use-Wear Analysis of Lithic Assemblages from Solutré (Saône-et-Loire), France, 1996.

Combier, Jean. "Les Fouilles de 1907 à 1925. Mise au Point Strategraphique et Typologique," in M. Thoral, R. Riquet, and J. Combier, Solutré, 1955, cited by Banks. He refuted earlier suggestions the horses were driven off the top of the cliff. He hinted anyone who thought hunters could drive a herd up a steep slope hadn’t been around horses.

Fontana, Laure. "Archaeozoological Study of the Aunal Remains Fourneau du Diable (Bourdeilles, Dordogne): An Example of Potential of Faunal Series Derived from Old Excavations," Paleo 13:159-182:2001.

Jochim, Michael. "The Upper Paleolithic," in Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory, 2001 second edition.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. Les Chasseurs de la Préhistorie, 1983, translated as The Hunters of Prehistory, 1989, by Claire Jacobson.

Last Glacial Maximum

The relative warmth that nurtured the Gravettian began disappearing about 33,000 years ago when Europe’s glaciers began expanding. They reached their maximum extent 26,5000 years ago. The vast ice sheets remained stable until 19,000 years ago when sea levels began rising.

The growth rate in the Homo sapiens population didn’t change, according to Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and his colleagues. What did change was those people were compressed into a smaller area. In Cantabrian Spain, Lawrence Straus noted 18 sites have been located for the Aurignacian era, and 33 in the last glacial maximum. That wasn’t simply a doubling of density: the 18 were spread over 15,000 years while the 33 ranged over 3,000 years.

Simple arithmetic suggests that was one site every 100 years. However, while many locations may have been used only once, La Riera had twenty layers of human occupation. Carbon fragments have been dated to 16,420 years ago in layer 11 of the Asturian cave, to 16,900 years ago in layer 13, and to 17,010 years ago in layer 18. Roughly 240 years or 12 generations passed between each visit between layers 11 and 13. Earlier, bands had stopped there every 55 years.

The scale of human adjustment to climatic change was still vast. Fifty-five years represented more than two 20-year generations. Each stop was a new discovery.

It’s hard to know from marine isotopes if the onset of cold, drought and winds was gradual, sudden, or fluctuated. What we’re learning from global warming today is there can be a long period when undetected changes slowly accumulate that result in sudden cataclysms like the calving of ice sheets.

Before the drought of the 1930s, the western and central parts of Nebraska had different communities of grass. The one was a mixture of tall and short grasses, the other was dominated by blue stem. When the rains failed year after year, western wheat grass took blue stem’s place. The lower-growing blue grama and buffalo grass came with it. In some places, side oats grama became dominant.

While the western mixed prairie was moving east, the west slowly died. First the grass stubble shattered, exposing perennial root crowns to wind and sun. When they died, the remaining mulch of dead leaves blew away, and the lichens and mosses that build soil died. Winds left dirt where once there’d been organic soil.

That transition occurred quickly. The summer of 1933 had been dry. The rains failed in 1934. John Weaver was describing the transformation in 1939 - five years later.

One can take this as an analogy for the process of glacial expansion. Within five years, a 300-mile-wide stretch of land had been altered, its vegetation transformed in the east, destroyed in the west.

By modern calculations, it’s a tad under 400 miles from Ulm near the center of the Aurignacians in Swabia to Mâcon, near a Solutrean center in France. Solutré is item 12 on the map below.

It’s more than 400 miles from Ulm to the Gravettian centers in Moravia. The combined distances are four times the span of change in Nebraska.

It’s unlikely everything happened within a generation. More than likely, some dry years that modified the vegetation alternated with a few years that had enough rain to maintain a status quo. During each dry spell, the line of vegetation moved a little, followed by the animals that depended on it. To the rear, more land was abandoned by Nature.

At the same time the climate was becoming drier, it also was becoming colder. Françoise Delpech noted the horse was the faunal equivalent to side oats grama and western wheatgrass. It adapted "faster than any other species to the most diversified conditions, even the most severe."

Everyone and everything was on the move. At some point, refugees from central Europe must have realized they were being pulled away from their base camps and were becoming more transient, perhaps able to settle for a while in one area, then forced to move again.

There was little they could take with them, beyond their mental attitudes. They were having to adapt every year to changing conditions.

The one thing they maintained was an appreciation for bone as a fuel and implement. Their mental agility would have been reinforced as their constantly changing locations were dictated more by the availability of food rather than by natural resources like flint or burnable trees.

A new technology, the Solutrean emerged about 22,000 years ago in France. The stone points were an adaption of an old insight to a new need. Instead of using a harder rock to chip a form from flint, they used bone or wooden tools to dislodge slivers. Technically the change was from percussion to pressure.

Solutrean techniques spread west to the rivers flowing into the Bay of Biscay. Carbon remains from Laugerie Haute in the Dordogne have been dated to 20,890 years. That’s in the general area of item 9 on the map.

At the same time people from the north and east were moving towards one of the refuges in the south, people in those areas were moving farther south with their particular biomes. Solutrean points have been dated to 21,710 at Les Mallaetes and to 20,170 at Parpalló. Both caves in Valencia are near item 4 on the map.

Notes: Bocquet’s group’s calculations were described in the post for 22 November 2015. The distance from Lincoln, Nebraska to Holyoke, Colorado is 335 miles by interstate 80E.

Clark, Peter U., et alia. "The Last Glacial Maximum," Science 325:710-714:2009.

Delpech, Françoise. "Biostratigraphy of the Solutrean Layers of Laugerie-Haute (Les Eyzies, Dordogne). Archaeological Implications," Paleo 23:105-116:2012.

Straus, Lawrence Guy. "On Maritime Hunter-Gatherers: A View From Cantabrian Spain," Munibe 33:171-173:1981.

_____. "Once More into the Breach: Solutrean Chronology," Munibe 38:35-38:1986.

_____, F. Bernaldo de Quirós, V. Cabrera, and G. Clark. "New Radiocarbon Dates for the Spanish Solutrean," Antiquity 51:243:1977.

Weaver, J. E. and F. W. Albertson. "Major Changes in Grassland as a Result of Continued Drought," Botanical Gazette 100:576-591:1939.

_____ and R. W. Darland. "Grassland Patterns In 1940," Ecology 25:202-215:1944.

Animals:
Horses - Equus caballus gallicus

Grasses:
Bluestems - Andropogon
Buffalo grass - Buchloe dactyloides
Grama, blue - Bouteloua gracilis
Grama, side oats grama - Bouteloua curtipendula
Wheat grass, western - Agropyron smithii, now Pascopyrum smithii

Graphics: Sémhur, "Carte de Localisation de la Culture Homo Sapiens du Solutréen, Environ entre -20 000 et 15 000," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 28 October 2009.

Apache Hegemony

Apache hegemony on the plains was ending in the 1720s. At one time they were the only ones with portable housing. But, when Carlana was tracking the Ute and Comanche in 1719, he followed "the track of the tent poles which they were dragging along."

For years the Apache were the only ones with pack animals. In 1719 Antonio Valverde noted "the dogs, on which were loaded the poles for tents and other utensils they used," at El Cuartelejo. However, when Bourgmont visited the Kansa in 1724, they also were using dogs. When they started west toward their hunting grounds, they had "about 300 women and 500 children and at least 300 dogs that dragged part of their baggage." His chronicler recorded, "one dog drags the skins to make a shelter big enough to sleep 19 or 20 persons, along with their dishes, pots, and other utensils, weighing around 300 pounds."

Bourgmont discovered that, while dogs were better than nothing, they could only travel a few miles a day, with stops during the midday heat.

The Apache had grown so comfortable with their life style, they didn’t see the possibilities of horses. The Sierra Blanca living near the Rockies killed deer by surrounding them, then driving them into camp. Valverde recorded, they provided "good fat meat."

The Cuartelejo on the plains hunted buffalo in groups of 50 to 60 mounted men. "They start to torment them and run them hard until their tongues stick out a foot. Then they choose the fattest ones and shoot arrows into them which penetrate a foot into the animals’ bellies." Philippe de la Renaudiére added, "Many of the horses are killed also. They never have colts, for their mares always abort on the hunt."

One day the Comanche would become the only tribe that understood horse breeding. In the meantime, the chief of the Skidi Pawnee accepted the French proposal of peace with the Apache "in order to have horses, which will help us carry our equipment when we go into winter quarters, because our women and children are terribly overburdened on our return."

The Apache were confronted with the dilemmas faced by any innovator grown too complacent to face unexpected competition. Most bands adapted the way many would on the rim of the herds. They abandoned what agriculture they knew to live all year on the plains. They joined El Cuartelejo.

The rest, who stayed with La Jicarilla, saw themselves more as merchants who traded dressed skins than as hunters who killed the animals and tanned the hides. After the rout of Pedro de Villasur by the Pawnee, and before Bourgmont’s successful diplomacy between the Pawnee and El Cuartelejo, the Comanche attacked "with such daring and resolution that they killed many men, carrying off their women and children as captives."

Three chiefs traveled to Santa Fé in November of 1723 to bargain with Valverde’s successor, Juan de Bustamante. They offered to accept baptism and oversight by a priest and alcalde in return for protection. The governor visited the rancherías of Churlique, Carlana and El Coxo on the Cimarron river, then sent a letter to the viceroy asking authority to implement the existing order to build a presidio at Jicarilla.

The Faraón Apache continued to attack the eastern borders of Nuevo México. Soon after Bustamante announced plans for a campaign against them, the Comanche attacked the Jicarilla in January of 1724. Bustamante led troops on a recovery mission that recovered many of the "women and children."

This time when he notified the viceroy, he added the Jicarilla were considering moving west to join the Navajo. The viceroy’s agents urged him to prevent that alliance. In October, the viceroy forwarded plans for a presidio to Pedro de Rivera Villalón.

Rivera finally visited Santa Fé in 1726 as part of his review of military installations and collection of information on the former governor’s role in the Villasur massacre. While he was there, "a group of Apaches of the nations Escalchufines and Palomas brought prisoners who were Comanches" The Comanche captives told Bustamante the Apache had been aided by the French at El Cuartelejo.

Bustamante also was told by the alcalde mayor of Taos "a number of the nation Xicarilla are in that pueblo." They apparently had fled there to avoid a retaliatory attack.

Rivera was not impressed with the Apache. He believed they were more interested in protection than they were Catholicism, and that the defensive needs to the area south of El Paso were more important than those on a remote frontier. He recommended the band move to the area of Taos and that no new presidio be built. Instead, he "asked the local priest to ‘advise, induce, and persuade them to remain in the vicinity of that pueblo’."

The Taos priest at the time was Juan José Pérez de Mirabal. He had urged Bustamante to recover the Jicarilla captives in 1724 because some had been baptized. He left Taos in July of 1727. Dolores Gunnerson suspected he went to serve the Apache who had settled in a high valley on the Río de las Trampas that flowed north to the Embudo. It was on the east side of the Sebastían Martín grant and southwest of land associated with Cristóbal de la Serna.

Notes: Fat was still needed by people who lived through cold weather. The viceroy in 1724 and 1727 was Juan de Acuña. Rivera’s visit was mentioned in the post for 28 June 2015.

Bustamante, Juan Domingo de. Decree for Council of War, Santa Fé, 8 November 1723, translation in Thomas; quotation on 1723 Comanche attack on Apache.

_____. Diary of Governor Bustamante, visit to Jicarilla rancherías, November 17-27, 1723, translation in Thomas.

_____. Report to viceroy, 30 May 1724, translation in Thomas; quotation on 1724 Comanche attack on Apache.

_____. Letter to viceroy, 30 April 1727, translation in Thomas.

Gunnerson, Dolores A. The Jicarilla Apaches, 1974.

Renaudiére, Philippe de la. Journal of the Voyage of Monsieur de Bourgmont, translation in Frank Norall, Bourgmont, 1988; quotations on El Cuartelejo buffalo hunting. Norall called them the Skiri Pawnee.

Rivera, Pedro de. Report to viceroy, 26 Sept 1727, translation in Thomas; quotations on Comanche prisoners, on Jicarilla in Taos, and on advise to Taos priest.

Thomas, Alfred B. After Coronado, 1935.

Valverde y Cosío, Antonio. Diary of the campaign against the Ute and Comanche, 1719, translation in Thomas; quotations on tent poles of Comanche, on Apache use of dogs, and on deer as fat meat.

Map: United States, Department of the Interior, Geological Survey. "Trampas Quadrangle New Mexico, 7.5 Minute Series (Topographic)," 1952; references to Tramps Grant boundaries are to a grant made later to Spanish-speaking settlers that shared some of the same territory.

Apache Culture

The Apache were living in a flexible society of scattered settlements when Juan de Ulibarrí encountered them in 1706. The Jicarilla, Sierra Blanca and Flecas de Palo were "under the leadership of different chiefs." Carlana was head of the second. They told the commander their "head chief was a lame man whom they called Ysdalnisdael." Ulibarrí also called him "Ucase."

The head of the Jicarilla in 1719 was El Coxo, a name that also meant lame. If he was the same man, it suggested an alliance between the western bands under El Coxo.

When Antonio Valverde arrived at his settlement, his two sons told him their father was with the Navajo. One can assume he was pursuing his own military alliance with Athabascan speakers to the west, rather than relying on those to the east.

Ulibarrí had been sent to El Cuartelejo to extricate people who had fled the Reconquest. The most important was Juan Tupatú, son of the interregnum leader. The other headmen weren’t named by him or by Valverde.

When Bourgmont arrived at the eastern Apache settlement in 1724, the twelve villages each had a chief. The head told the Frenchman: "I am heeded and obeyed in all the villages of our tribe. I am the emperor of all the Padoucas, and they go neither to war nor to the Spaniards without my permission. I am like you, my father. I make my people obey me, and when I need a party of my warriors to go to war, to hunt, or to go to the Spaniards, I have only to announce it in my village and notify the other villages."

His exact words have been translated twice, first for maximum rhetorical impact into French, and then into English. Even with that caveat, it sounds like their social organization had become more disciplined with the threats to its security and the increased density of the population.

Still, the man who was never named did not rule alone. He claimed, when he announced a need for action, "all my war chiefs assemble at my dwelling, and we hold a council." While he suggested they automatically supported him, one suspects the councils had more powers. During his first meetings with the French he was accompanied by the twelve chiefs. Only after they had all evaluated Bourgmont, did he meet with him with a smaller number of subordinates.

Beneath them there were small, autonomous units, probably based on economic units, who voluntarily submitted to the chiefs. When Antonio Valverde had met Carlana in 1719, he was told half his people had deserted him for the protection of a headman called Flaco.

The chiefs still needed to earn, then continually justify their positions by success. The Apache were empirical enough to test the utility of everything.

Valverde was following the Ute and Comanche north along the Sangre de Cristo when he came across a house at La Fleca with a cross on the roof. Both the Jicarilla and the Cuartelejo met him with crosses. The chief of the last group told him his men wore "many crosses, medals, and rosaries around their necks" because the Spanish were strong and "no nation that can conquer them."

The Roman Catholic symbols were integrated into the existing Apache set of rituals. When 69 Sierra Blanca warriors under Carlana joined his troops, "they circled the camp on their horses, jubilantly singing and shouting. In the evening these same messengers dances according to their custom, some covered with red and others with white paint."

Bourgmont’s scribe, Philippe de la Renaudiére, did not mention crosses or rosaries, though he did describe how men and women dressed. Perhaps the fact troops commanded by Pedro de Villasur had been defeated by the neighboring Pawnee destroyed the Spaniards’ aura of invincibility.

Five warriors accompanied the El Cuartelejo chief to the general peace conference in Kansa territory. There, after they had all eaten, they "danced and sang for about an hour and a half in the presence of the chiefs of the Missouris, Otos, Iowas, and Kansas and all smoked together."

When Bourgmont arrived at El Cuartelejo, they didn’t great him with a cross and religious procession. Instead, "they spread a bison robe on the ground and place M. de Bourgmont" and others on it. "Fifteen men then bore them to the dwelling of the head chief."

At the final peace conference, when the Apaches formally broke their alliance with the Spanish and transferred it to the French, the chief referred to symbols important to his traditional religion, not to that of the Europeans. He "grabbed a handful of earth and shouted: ‘Now I regard the Spaniards as I do this dirt.’ Turning to M. de Bourgmont, he said: ‘And you, I regard you as the sun’."

Notes: Juan Tupatú was the son of the revolt leaver, Luis Tupatú. Valverde didn’t mention direction the horsemen rode, clockwise or counter clockwise. Thomas said, there was no further mention of Flaco.

Renaudiére, Philippe de la. Journal of the Voyage of Monsieur de Bourgmont, translation in Frank Norall, Bourgmont, 1988. He wrote the men "wear trousers of dressed skin, with the lower part pulled together in the Spanish manner" and tucked into high moccasins. The women wore "robes of dressed skins. Their blouses and skirts have fringe all around, made of the same material."

Thomas, Alfred B. After Coronado, 1935.

Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706, translation in Thomas.

Valverde y Cosío, Antonio. Diary of the campaign against the Ute and Comanche Indians, 1719, translation in Thomas.