Table of contents
Essay / Lost in Translation

Scientists Uplift Indigenous Human-Horse Histories

An archaeologist and a Lakota genomics scientist explain how combining archaeology, DNA, and Indigenous knowledge can help revise colonial human-horse narratives largely associated with the western U.S.
A person in a white poncho hugs the head of a horse wearing a colorful mask against a blue sky with white clouds.

Horses are an active part of life for the Lakota and many other Plains nations today and have been for centuries.

Jacquelyn Córdova/Northern Vision Productions

This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons.

FEW PLACES IN the world are more closely linked with horses in the popular imagination than the Great Plains of North America. Romanticized stories of cowboys and the Wild West figure prominently in popular culture, and domestic horses are embedded in everything, from place names, like Wild Horse Mesa, to sporting mascots, like the Denver Broncos.

Horses first evolved in the Americas around 4 million years ago. Then horses largely disappeared from the fossil record by about 10,000 years ago. However, archaeological finds from the Yukon to the Gulf Coast make it clear that horses were an important part of ancient lifeways for the early peoples of North America.

Millennia later, horses were reintroduced by European colonists, and eventually the Great Plains became home to powerful Indigenous horse cultures, many of which leveraged their expertise on horseback to maintain sovereignty even amid the rising tides of colonial exploitation, genocide, and disease.

But how did horses become part of life on the Great Plains? And are there pieces of that story that may be missing from today’s popular narratives?

One of us is an archaeozoologist who studies ancient animal remains. The other is a Lakota scientist who specializes in ancient horse genomics and is an expert in Indigenous Oral Traditions about horses. Together we created a large team of scientists and scholars from around the world, including those from Pueblo, Pawnee, Comanche, and Lakota nations, and set out to see what archaeology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and genomics together could tell us about the horse in the western U.S.

COMPLICATING THE COLONIAL VERSION OF THE STORY

Over recent decades, the story of people and horses has largely been told through the lens of colonial history. One reason for this is logistical—European settlers often wrote down their observations, creating documentary records that partially chronicle the early relationships between colonists, Indigenous cultures, and horses in the colonial West. Another reason, though, is prejudice: Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been excluded from telling their side of the story.

While historical records are a valuable tool for understanding the past, they also carry with them the biases and cultural context of the people who wrote them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many such documents tend to minimize or dismiss the interactions between Native peoples and horses. More importantly, the written record’s scope is limited to those places European colonists visited, which until the 18th and 19th centuries excluded much of the Plains and the Rocky Mountains.

An etching on a rock wall resembles a person riding a horse.

This panel of rock art at Tolar, Wyoming, depicts an ancestral Comanche or Shoshone horse and rider.

Pat Doak

Filtering of Indigenous horse cultures through a European framework left narratives unrecognizable to many Indigenous peoples.

Many models for the origins of Indigenous horse use on the Plains focus on one particular date: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. During this momentous uprising, Pueblo people living under harsh Spanish subjugation organized a rebellion that expelled Spanish colonists from New Mexico for more than a decade. Many historians link the revolt with the first spread of horses beyond the Southwest because with the Spanish gone, so was their control over their livestock at colonial settlements.

However, other scholars who prioritize and understand Indigenous knowledge and scientific frameworks have questioned these assumptions, pointing out historical inconsistencies and highlighting Oral Traditions that support a deeper antiquity to the human-horse relationship among many Indigenous nations.

Over recent years, archaeology has emerged as a powerful tool for exploring aspects of the human-horse story that may not have been written down in books. In Mongolia, for example, our analysis of ancient horse bones has shown that steppe cultures herded, rode, and cared for horses centuries before their first mention in historical records.

Our first studies in the western U.S. suggested there may be a rich archaeological record of horse remains in the West linked to Native cultures, even if this record was often overlooked or misclassified in museum collections.

REMAINS OF HORSES PROVIDE THEIR OWN CLUES

For our new study, published in the journal Science, we looked for horse remains in museum collections across the western U.S., from Idaho to Kansas. These horses ranged from single, isolated bones to nearly complete horses with incredible preservation.

Among the dozens of ancient horses we identified, precision radiocarbon dating revealed that several lived in the early 17th century or earlier—decades before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and in some areas, at least a century or more before the arrival of the first Europeans.

A 3D model depicts a white skull with a long snout.

This 3D model made in the archaeozoology laboratory at the University of Colorado, Boulder, re-creates a horse cranium and rawhide bridle.

William Taylor

We analyzed the ancient horses’ bones and found clues that across the Great Plains these early horses were not just present but already an important part of Indigenous societies. Some horses have skeletal features showing they were ridden or received veterinary care. Other information, like the method of burial or inclusion alongside other animals such as coyotes, shows horses were part of ceremonial practices.

We used isotope analysis to learn more about the ancient diet and movements of these animals by measuring heavier or lighter variants of molecules in their bones and teeth. We found that some of the earliest horses in southwestern Wyoming and northern Kansas were not escapees of Spanish expeditions but were instead raised locally by Native communities.

One baby horse we analyzed that lived in ancestral Comanche country around 1650 at Blacks Fork, Wyoming, was born and died locally, directly contradicting a 1724 European observation that the Comanche obtained horses only by “barter” and “had not yet been able to raise any colts.” In another case, a horse that also lived in the mid-17th century along the Missouri River was likely fed during the winter with maize, an Indigenous domestic crop.

DNA sequencing of archaeological horses, although revealing Iberian ancestry, shows important connections between ancient horses and those stewarded by present-day communities like the Lakota, for whom horses continue to be a key part of ceremony, tradition, and daily life. While future work will be necessary to establish exactly when and how horses reached northern areas of the Plains, our results point to Indigenous networks of trade and exchange, perhaps bringing horses across the Plains and Rockies from Mexico or the U.S. Southwest.

NEW EVIDENCE SUPPORTS OLD STORIES

A seated person with black hair in a ponytail and wearing a T-shirt and jeans holds and stares at a long white skull in a lab setting with other animal skulls on a shelf in the background.

Graduate student and Lakota archaeologist Chance Ward analyzes horse remains at CU-Boulder.

Samantha Eads

Our findings also validate Oral Traditions for many of the Native communities affected by the study.

Our study is the result of an intentionally collaborative approach. Our Lakota partners, led by Chief Joe American Horse and one of us (Yvette), published an accompanying introduction to the Lakota relationship with horses that helped serve as a foundation for our collaborative work.

Partnering archaeological science and Native perspectives ended up telling a very different story of horses in the western U.S. Comanche tribal historian and Elder Jimmy Arterberry noted, for example, that the archaeological discoveries from ancestrally connected areas of Wyoming “support and concur with Comanche Oral Tradition” that Comanche ancestors raised and cared for horses before their movement to the southern Plains.

We hope future work will continue to highlight the ancient connections between people and horses and prompt a rethink of assumptions built into society’s understanding of the past.

A person with short blonde hair wearing a blue flannel collared shirt is in front of metal shelves with a long-snouted skull visible on a top shelf behind them.

William Taylor is an archaeozoologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who specializes in the study of horse and large animal domestication. Since 2011, he has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Mongolia and the Eurasian steppe, with other research projects centered on ancient human-horse relations in China, Kyrgyzstan, Australia, and the Americas. Taylor is particularly interested in the application of emerging technologies, such as 3D scanning and biomolecular techniques, to archaeological questions.

Pictured from the shoulders up, a person with long straight brown hair wearing black rimmed glasses and a white blouse is in front of a background of green shrubbery.

Yvette Running Horse Collin is a Marie Skłodowska Curie IEF postdoctoral researcher in the AGES group. She is interested in the fields of equine genomics, archaeology, paleontology, metagenomics, Indigenous studies, sustainability, and climate change. Collin is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation (Oglala Sioux Tribe). For more than a decade, she has received specialized training from several Lakota Traditional Knowledge bearers in advanced Indigenous sciences, environmental practices, and medicines. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Upon completion of her doctorate in 2017, Collin served her nation as an appointed Presidential Ambassador and continued her work as an administrator for the Black Hills Sioux Nation Council. As is aligned with her cultural protocols, she spent the past three years returning her research to the communities who participated in her doctoral study. In many cases, this took the form of physically returning representative herds of the descendants of the original horses of such peoples to their communities and actively participating with elders in teaching and sharing the traditions and science surrounding them.

Republish

You may republish this article, either online and/or in print, under the Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 license. We ask that you follow these simple guidelines to comply with the requirements of the license.

In short, you may not make edits beyond minor stylistic changes, and you must credit the author and note that the article was originally published on SAPIENS.

Accompanying photos are not included in any republishing agreement; requests to republish photos must be made directly to the copyright holder.

Republish

We’re glad you enjoyed the article! Want to republish it?

This article is currently copyrighted to SAPIENS and the author. But, we love to spread anthropology around the internet and beyond. Please send your republication request via email to editor•sapiens.org.

Accompanying photos are not included in any republishing agreement; requests to republish photos must be made directly to the copyright holder.