by Casie Bazay
In March 2023, a research paper titled “Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies” was published in the journal Science. A joint effort of 87 scientists, archaeologists, and Native Plains peoples, the research project had aimed to provide a clearer picture of the historical role horses played in Native American cultures after their reintroduction to North America. The researchers were specifically interested in learning more about how and when horses spread across the West.
Collaborators in the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, included archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma, University of Colorado–Boulder, and University of New Mexico in addition to geneticists from the University of Toulouse in France and Indigenous scientists and knowledge holders from Native Nations, including Lakota, Comanche, and Pawnee. Team members came from 66 institutions in all.
Brandi Bethke, Ph.D., laboratory director and research faculty member of the Oklahoma Archeological Survey at the University of Oklahoma, was one such collaborator. She has shared further insights on this important research with Oklahoma Horses.
Horses Played a Role in Indigenous Cultures
Originally from South Dakota, Bethke has long had a keen interest in horses, and she worked closely with the Blackfeet Nation of Montana in writing her Ph.D. dissertation about Blackfeet culture and use of horses from a historical perspective. Because Bethke is passionate about the history of the horse in America and the role horses played in Indigenous cultures, she was thrilled to be part of the collaborative research project.
“When we think of horses, we think of them as part of colonialism,” said Bethke. “We think of them as something brought over by Europeans. But we’re learning that horses moved through Indigenous communities well before Europeans reached those communities directly.”
Bethke and her colleagues began by examining existing archaeological collections from museums across America to search for horse bones. She said that although many of the collections were exhumed a century or more ago, not all of them were thoroughly examined right away, and some bones might have been misidentified.
“Horses are relatively rare in archaeological collections,” Bethke relayed. “So there hasn’t been much work on them from these archaeological sites.” However, once Bethke and her team began to go through museum collections, more horse bones were discovered. The research team then dated horse remains and showed that horses were present across much of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by the early seventeenth century, before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
Horse Bones Are Found in Ancestral Oklahoma Site
In Oklahoma, Bethke worked directly with the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, studying archaeological collections at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman and Oklahoma Archeological Survey.
“All three major postcontact Wichita village sites that have been excavated in Oklahoma — Bryson-Paddock, Deer Creek, Longest — have yielded horse remains,” explained Bethke, “but these date primarily to the eighteenth century.” However, Bethke added, “More recently, a horse bone has also been discovered at the ancestral Wichita site, Little Deer, that may be the earliest example of horse bone in the state.”
By using radiocarbon dating and DNA sequencing and by collaborating with Native American Plains tribes, the team learned that horses were raised and ridden by Indigenous people well before European records previously suggested.
Oral Histories Support Research
Until very recently, the history of horses in America has mainly been seen through a European lens. It is true that horses were part of British, Spanish, and French colonialism as portrayed in historical records from that time period. However, radiocarbon data now align with Indigenous oral histories, showing that horses moved through Indigenous communities as much as a century before Europeans made lasting contact with those communities.
Bethke noted that Lakota elders and knowledge holders played a crucial role in the research project, and Lakota science helped to shed light on the importance of horses in their culture and the timing of when horses came to be an integral part of the tribe.
“Archaeology alone can’t tell the whole story,” noted Bethke, “but when combined with Indigenous knowledge, we have a much more expansive picture of the horse in North America, and it’s pushing dates earlier than originally thought.”
Bethke relayed that there are similar ongoing or recent research projects in different regions and countries around the world, including in Puerto Rico and Canada. Many of the findings in those studies support what her research group has learned — what we think we know about the history of the horse and its role in various Indigenous cultures isn’t always correct.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the public’s interest in this research,” said Bethke. “And I hope this research brings Indigenous science to the forefront.”
In continuing with research that highlights the historical importance of horses in Indigenous cultures, Bethke has a grant out for a book she plans to write, in which she will collaborate again with the Wichita tribe.
