Traces of Ancient Native American Migration

When many people think of Native Americans they tend to think of them as a somewhat "static" group of people, even many Native Americans see their groups as having alway been in their ancestral homelands.
But Native Americans moved around quite a bit, after their initial migrations into North America. Some of notable movements were, the spread of Uto Aztecan speakers from Califonia into Mexico and the desert
southwest, another would be the migration of Meso Americans into the Missippi drainage.
There have been other migrations in NA in the last few hudred years. One such One suchmigration was the movement of Na Dene' speakers from sub arctic Canada into the lower 48, that was the founding population for the Apache and the Navajo.
Its been somewhat of a guessing game as to when this happened, until now.
At a site along The Great Salt Lake new insigths have come to light at Promentory Caves.

Archaeologists on the trail of a little-known ancient culture have found a cache of clues that may help unlock its secrets: a cave containing hundreds of children’s moccasins.

The cave, on the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, was first excavated in the 1930s, but the artifacts found there — and the questions that they raised — were largely forgotten until recently.

Dr. Jack Ives of the University of Alberta and his colleagues resumed excavations in the cave in 2011 to better understand its occupants, some of whom Ives believes may have been part of one of the greatest human migrations in the continent’s history.

The site — part of a complex of natural shelters known as the Promontory Caves — contains “exceedingly abundant” artifacts numbering in the thousands, Ives said, marking a human occupation that began rather suddenly about 850 years ago.

More about the Promentory Culture

This wealth of artifacts may go a long way in demystifying the distinctive, little-researched populations often referred to as the Promontory Culture.

“The beauty of the Promontory Culture is, probably 99 percent of the material culture that the people used was perishable,” Ives said in an interview.

“So, normally in the archaeological record, we only see the durable items — the pottery, the stone tools, the animal bones.

“[But] we have, with the Promontory Culture, spectacularly, more material culture, so we can see all aspects of daily life, together with nuances likely to reflect different cultural identities.”

Large piles of butchered bison and elk bones, for example, suggest that the Promontory lifestyle was based, almost exclusively and quite successfully, on big-game hunting, while other groups around them were farming and foraging.

Scant ceramic sherds and basket fragments, meanwhile, bear strong signs of influence from other Great Basin cultures, including the Fremont.

But it was the staggering amount of footwear in the caves that captured the attention of archaeologists, past and present.

Evidently children made up a large part of the population.

With soles made from a single piece of bison leather, lined with fur, and sewn together at the heel, the moccasins are made in a style typical of the Canadian Subarctic, Ives said, a fashion his team describes as being “decidedly out of place in the eastern Great Basin.”

These moccasins and other cues have led some experts to theorize that the caves’ inhabitants were part of a great migration from the far north, a wave of people who moved into the Great Basin in the 12th and 13th centuries, and eventually gave rise to cultures that include the Apache and the Navajo.

To better understand the role that the Promontory may have played in this event, Ives and his colleagues used the moccasins to gauge the size and makeup of their population.

As i personally suspected, climate changes had a lot to do with this movement.The time period puts it at the very begging of what is known as the little ice age in europe.

This was a time, Ives points out, when other cultures in North America’s interior were undergoing dramatic changes, as a drying climate and shifting social landscapes forced entire communities to relocate, most notably among the Ancestral Puebloans.
[Read about two new Puebloan villages found last summer: "Twin 1,300-Year-Old Villages Discovered in Arizona Sand Dunes"]
“It’s a tumultuous time period in which this is happening,” he said.

“We know there’s a significant environmental change going on.”

And yet, the large number of children in the Promontory population — along with other clues like the abundance of burned bones of large game — suggest that the Promontory people were “thriving,” Ives said.

This is also a period of great conflict among the peoples of the SW and great basin, might the sudden influx of people have caused friction over hunting grounds?









Utah Cave Full of Children’s Moccasins Sheds Light on Little-Known Ancient Culture

That's exactly why we can't study much. They were highly nomadic.

When the Spanish came to California their diaries of the Natives were amazing.

One of my favorite quotes from the writings was...

"They wore their nakedness like a beautiful golden suit."

The time frame is not far off from what is known as the little ice age . It could be that living in the higher north during the warm period softened them up a bit and with the onset of the little ice age the cold arctic caused them to migrate to warmer climates . just sayin .

ETA seeing that your op mentions they lived mostly on big game while other tribes were into agriculture it is not likely they fought over food sources . They may have actually traded with one another . In my neck of the woods the boundaries were usually respected and yearly meetings occurred and places were discussed as to who would be where . If game was not plentiful enough for a tribe they may have to go where it was plenty and so the meetings hashed all these things out .

Up near Williams Lake BC there is a group that traded obsidian.
They were called the Carrier Indians at one time...
Their Obsidian from a nearby volcano has been unearthed at digs as far south as Florida I believe....
.....Then theres the great canal system, stretches from Maine to Louisiana
These peoples were way different than the archaeologists paint.
A lot of new digs are tipping over old ideas......S&F!

Interesting thread...bumping to see if there is more input.

At the moment, this is my top interest. What the native americans were doing, and how the turbidity in their migration created the tribes we found.

Of supreme interest: what tribes led into the Aztecs.

I was thinking the little ice age too when you said the migrations were back in the 12th century. Peoples of the sub artic are very good hunters which may have given them an edge when forced to fight other tribes. We know many of the SW indigenous people were suddenly displaced. An earlier wave of migration probably forced the Aztec South into Mexico just prior to the onset of the medieval cooling.

The style of the moccasins and tools are very good indicators of their origins. Linguistic groups are another identifier so I'm inclined to believe their conclusions. It's incredible how spread out some of these groups became, spanning across the entire continent in some cases.

Excellent find.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Interesting thread...bumping to see if there is more input.

At the moment, this is my top interest. What the native americans were doing, and how the turbidity in their migration created the tribes we found.

Of supreme interest: what tribes led into the Aztecs.

Not sure. The textbooks are always nondescript with the answer.

My main question is: what evidence is there of a North American migration?

Came across this just the other day. It speaks to more migration evidence altho based in Linguistics. It was interesting to me the idea that the Dene's travels are probably the reverse of commonly what has been taught to date. There is quite a bit of information in this article that was just fascinating.


It has long been suggested, and the issue is not particularly controversial, that peoples speaking Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené moved back and forth between Asia and the Americas. A new study published on March 12 in the journal PLoS, “Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia,” found that Na-Dené is not descended from Yeneisian (as the Bering Strait Theory would infer) but the other way around, that there was a “back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America.” (As an aside, the study, true to “science by press release” fashion, argues that this supports the “Beringian Standstill” hypothesis–that Indians paused in Beringia for thousands of years before colonizing the New World–but the study only examined the Na-Dené language stock, whose speakers still live in the Alaskan part of Beringia to this very day, and so it would seem the study would just as easily support the Na-Dené view that they have been there since time immemorial.)
Read more at indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com...
indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com...

Stirling I'm assuming you know the Carrier Nation is Dene?

a reply to: gorsestar

Traces of humankind was left all over the Americas. most of central/south America has yet to even have the surface scratched. And the more time that passes, the more of our assumptions get tossed aside.

As far as evidence of migration, the best we typically have are items that are recognized from one culture showing up more frequently in another. Like the OP.

Very cool read!

Now if only we can get to the bottom of the ancient feud these guys have (even today) with the original basin culture. How that feud somehow caused a rift within the Na Dene culture giving way to an isolated group of "Skinwalkers".

a reply to: Rosinitiate

The popular notion that native americans were a peaceful lot goes right out the window in the desert southwest.
The ancient puebloans(Anasazi) were in constant conflict with their Fremont neighbors to the north, long before the Dene people show up and put more pressure on every body.

Cowboy wash is but one example of just how violent the area was during the onset of the great drought that hit the area, this drought is related to the cold snap the drove the Dene speaking people south.

Five of the human skeletons at the site were from burials. The remaining seven exhibited many signs of cannibalism including defleshing, fragmentation of long bones to extract marrow, chopped, cut, and blackened bones. A stone tool kit appropriate for butchering a mid-sized mammal was found.(3)The initial excavation was supervised by University of North Carolina archaeologist Brian Billman, employed by a private firm contracted by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. The land on which the site was located is within the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation and was owned by a local Ute religious leader, who supervised the dig and reburied the bones once the examination was complete.(4)

What is particularly interesting about the Cowboy Wash site is that it appears to have been abandoned very quickly. Generally, the ancient peoples would have taken all salvageable materials with them, yet the excavators found everything had been left behind.

To investigate the theory that cannibalism had been practiced at the Cowboy Wash site, Richard Marlar, a University of Colorado molecular biologist examined the coprolite (fossilized human feces) found on site and discovered it tested positive for human myoglobin, which is found in human muscle tissue. This type of myoglobin was not found in 20 'control' coprolites in comparable sites.(7) This indicated the feces contained the remains of digested human flesh.[8] Malar also found the myoglobin protein during a chemical analysis of a cooking pot at the ancient Anasazi site.

Cowboy Wash

What is sad is that there is a lot of revisionism in todays Native American culture and a lot of solid science is being rejected out of hand bolster a fictional narrative.

For anybody interested in the history and archeology of the desert SW

I reccomend Westerndigs.org
Here is a link to their south western archeology pages.
Southwestern Archeology

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Hi Bfft,

Of supreme interest: what tribes led into the Aztecs.

The Aztec legend of Aztlan, their original home land, has been co-opted by the Atlantis crowd to the detriment of everybody truely interested.

What we do know is that Aztec is part of the Uto aztecan languages which have their roots in ancient central cal. The aztec creation legend speaks of the place of the seven caves, just as the creation mythos of the southern miwok speaks of the seven caves ,where the seven great "chiefs" (the central cal indians didnt really have chiefs) weathered out the great cataclysm that befell ancient california.
The word Aztlan, literally means, "the land of blue herons", and according to their mythos aztlan lay to the north of the valley of mexico.
Last year researchers found that the drepession that filled in to form the salton sea, was a fresh water lake up to about 1000-1200 ad, and the most prominent shore bird found their was the great blue heron. The lake dried up during the same drought that led to conflict among the peubloans.

I can't find the source (which I read a long time ago) but it was a Native American legend about how one tribe (Pueblo? Navajo? Hopi?) came to this land and went through a series of migrations (north to south, west to east, south to north, east to west) -- all that my poor brain cells can pour out was that they were led by the Water Coyote society (who, if memory serves, were good at finding water resources in the land.) I always thought that might be a legend of one of the groups coming from Beringia.

For some reason, I thought it was a legend of one of the more recent Beringia influxes (perhaps because what I read at the time indicated linguistically that they were a group of relative late-comers.)

a reply to: Byrd
morning byrd, its morning here anyway
i too rember that migration myth, and i think its apache

originally posted by: punkinworks10
The word Aztlan, literally means, "the land of blue herons", and according to their mythos aztlan lay to the north of the valley of mexico.
Last year researchers found that the drepession that filled in to form the salton sea, was a fresh water lake up to about 1000-1200 ad, and the most prominent shore bird found their was the great blue heron. The lake dried up during the same drought that led to conflict among the peubloans.

Linguistically, they're one of the later groups to enter America. I do .remember that the Chumashan group was one of the first.

originally posted by: punkinworks10
a reply to: Byrd
morning byrd, its morning here anyway
i too rember that migration myth, and i think its apache

Yeah, morning here in Texas. I'm sorta getting my coffee (late riser.) Hmm. Apache? I can't find it ... thought it was Navajo or Southwest cultures.

a reply to: punkinworks10

somewhere along the way i found something that came across as woo that insinuated that the aztecs came from the pueblan culture in arizona, and prior were the mountbuilders in the mississipi delta.

the Aztlan "mythos" has (and will continue to be) a sociopolitical issue in the southwest.

a reply to: Byrd

Yes, the Chumash are remnants of the mixing of earliest coastal people and the clovis who showed up at the end of the YD.

A clovis site is directly underneath the earliest know chumashan site, in malibu(farpoint), and clovis points have been found in the coast range between the san joaquin valley, (witt clovis site) and the ocean.
Its My opinion the the Yokuts are the inland manifestaion of the mixing of the clovis and the early widmiller people from the coast. The basal yokut language, the earliest of the 30+ different yokuts languages, has its home land in one of the valleys that is a pass through the coast range to ocean.
Carter wrote very good paper in the 50's about the how the dieguto culture, terminal plierostocene/erly holocene and no blades only pebble tools, transforms for a brief period, maybe 2-300 years. During this transformation they started using bifacial blades and started hunting inland game, before reverting back to the earlier ways. This paper was written before it was known that clovis was in california, and decades before clovis was acknowledged in coastal cal(the 2009? farpoint site).
I was surprised to learn that clovis was all over cal., points turned up in the high sierra drainages (above the 8k' elevations) of the Kings and San Joaquin rivers, and in the Tuolumne and Stanislau river canyons a little to the north, and all the way up into oregon and finally washington. And this is all after they supposedly vanished, even the clovis experts Bradley and stanford never mention that the largest concentrations of clovis lithics, out side of the eastern seaboard are found in cal, and were surprised by the farpoint site.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

The linguistics make that unlikely,

A recent proposal by David L. Shaul presents evidence suggesting contact between proto-Uto-Aztecan and languages of central California such as Esselen and the Yokutsan languages. This leads Shaul to suggest that proto-Uto-Aztecan was spoken in California's Central Valley area, and formed part of an ancient Californian linguistic area.

The yaqui of sinaloa and sonora mexico share a theft of fire mythology with the yokuts and miwok of central cal.
And the farthest east uto aztecans, were the comanche, who were Owens valley piutes that took up the equstrian lifestyle in the early 1700's and moved east.

a reply to: punkinworks10

Comanche were the locals. They apparently came and took over the land around here from the Apache.