Archaeologists working against the clock in Carlsbad
have unearthed another nearly intact skeleton of a horse that may
have lived and died 50 years before the Spanish began their
conquest of California. Last week's discovery, high on a hill overlooking the Agua
Hedionda lagoon, follows the discovery in June of the skeletal
remains of another horse and a small burro, said project manager
Dennis Gallegos of Gallegos and Associates, the contractor hired to
explore the site. The finds are significant because native North American horses
were thought to have been extinct more than 10,000 years ago, and
the remains are older than the recorded conquests by the Spanish,
who reintroduced horses to the New World. "This is a story untold," said Mark Mojado, the cultural
representative for the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians. Why the animals were buried at all, why they were buried
together, and why they appear to have been buried in a ritualistic
way is a matter of academic conjecture, according to
archaeologists, paleontologists and others who have seen the
site. Radiocarbon dating of 340 years, plus or minus 40 years, puts
the death of the horse sometime between 1625 and 1705, Mojado said.
Therefore, the horses died at least 50 years before San Diego
Mission de Alcala, the first of the California missions, was
founded in 1769. The other horse and the burro were buried at the
same level, suggesting that they were buried about the same
time. The bones of the horses and the donkey showed no signs of having
been shod, an indicator that the horses were not brought by the
Spanish, who fitted their horses with iron shoes, said Larry Tift,
a researcher with Gallegos. The radiocarbon date, if corroborated by more elaborate tests,
may be remarkable since North American horses were thought to have
been extinct by the late Pleistocene era more than 10,000 years
ago, said Bradford Riney, a paleontology specialist with the San
Diego Natural History Museum. "That would make (the site) extremely important," he said
Thursday. "It would be an early example of domestication." Alternately, Mojado postulated that the horses may have been
Spanish in origin, perhaps from an ill-fated exploration that never
returned and so was lost to history. Perhaps the lost Spanish
explorers offered the horses and donkey to the American Indians as
a gift, Mojado said. As a gift, and an unusual gift at that, the animals most
certainly would have been revered, which could explain why they
were buried high on a hill in the same way some Indians buried
their own, Mojado said. One horse and the donkey appear to have been buried
ritualistically with their heads to the north, faces to the left,
and their bodies "flexed" in the fetal position, an American Indian
method of burial. The newly discovered horse, its ocher-colored
bones already fading to yellow from exposure to sun and air, was
not similarly posed. Researchers said they know horses were deliberately buried
because they can see definite lines where someone cut into the
shell layers to dig a burial pit...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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There are numerous horse creation stories among my tribe the Navajo. They are in depth and go back centuries
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