Rock art shows Comanches armored horses for battle
Aozotorp
http://mas.scripps.com/DRMN/2004/03/31/c5lo-armor_e.jpg
Armored steeds started from scratch
CU archaeologist finds 300-year-old art carved in stone
By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
April 1, 2004
A Boulder archaeologist has found the first Colorado examples of Indian rock
art depicting warriors astride leather-armored horses.
University of Colorado doctoral student Mark Mitchell found the 300-year-old
images scraped into sandstone walls at three sites in southeastern Colorado.
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The pictures likely represent Comanches who acquired horses from the Spanish in
what is now northern New Mexico, Mitchell said Wednesday.
"There is some recorded history, but virtually no archaeology of the Comanche,
which makes these rock-art depictions very valuable," Mitchell said.
"It demonstrates that their adoption of cavalry technology was very rapid," he
said. "They weren't just passive recipients of horse technology." The Spanish
brought horses to the New World in the early 1500s.
American Indians first acquired horses from the Spanish a century later.
Apaches and Pueblo Indians in the Rio Grande Valley in what is now northern New
Mexico may have been the first.
Almost immediately, various Indian groups - probably emulating the Spanish -
began armoring the beasts to shield them against spears and arrows. While the
Spanish used metal armor, Indians fashioned sheathing from stacked bison hides.
Sometimes, a thin layer of sand was glued between the hides to help deflect
projectiles.
The era of leather shielding lasted a century, from 1650 to 1750. After that,
access to firearms put an end to the practice.
"If your opponent has bows and arrows, it works," Mitchell said. "But as soon
as firearms were available, it was no longer an effective tactic and was
dropped."
Other than the three Colorado examples, only seven sites with rock art
featuring leather-armored horses have been identified, Mitchell said. They are
in Wyoming, Montana, Kansas and Alberta, Canada.
"Although we've recognized them for quite a while, they're really quite
uncommon," said New Mexico State University archaeologist and rock-art expert
Lawrence Loendorf. "I do a lot of work in southeastern Colorado, and I've never
found them there."
"They are very scarce," said Linda Olson, a rock-art expert at Minot State
University in Minot, N.D.
"I've seen thousands of examples of rock art, but probably half a dozen that
show armored horses - and I've seen those in slides, not in person," Olson
said.
Mitchell reports his findings in the March edition of the journal Antiquity.
Two of the Colorado rock-art sites are along the Purgatoire River, south of Las
Animas. The third is in Baca County, in the state's far southeastern corner.
The images are a type of rock art known as incised petroglyphs. A piece of bone
or stone tool was rubbed along a sandstone surface to scrape a figure's
outline.
The horse armor is trapezoid-shaped in the petroglyphs. At one of the
Purgatoire River sites, the trapezoid's base is 5 feet across.
Comanche Indians moved into eastern Colorado from the west around 1700.
Since leather armor disappeared around 1750, the Colorado petroglyphs probably
were created between those two dates, Mitchell said.
"These (petroglyphs) are telling us that there were horses and armor at that
location, or that someone who saw horses with armor went to that location,"
Loendorf said.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2054711,00.html
rticle Published: Thursday, April 01, 2004
Rock art shows Comanches armored horses for battle
By Mike McPhee
Denver Post Staff Writer
About 300 years ago, Comanche warriors placed heavy layers of buffalo hides
over their horses and riders, then marched them through enemy lines in the same
way that armored tanks lead infantry troops in modern warfare.
These 18th-century Comanches were unstoppable. It was an early form of shock
and awe as their steeds - layered in glued buffalo hides with occasional layers
of sand - were turned into cumbersome battle animals.
Similar evidence of armor-clad horses in Native American warfare had been found
in rock art on cave walls and on stones in Alberta, Canada, and in Wyoming.
But it took a University of Colorado doctoral anthropology candidate to confirm
that armor was used in the grasslands of Colorado and Kansas by the Comanches.
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Mark Mitchell, 41, found the Comanche illustrations on stones and in caves in
Baca County and along the Saline River outside of Salina, Kan. He identified
two separate rock-art depictions of armored horses on the Purgatoire River in
southeast Colorado, both showing the horses' armor as rough trapezoids of
leather on each side with straight to slightly flaring front and back margins
and curved at the top and bottom.
"Both also clearly show an armored collar from which horses' heads protrude,"
he said.
The finding has won considerable acclaim in the scientific community and among
the Comanche Nation. Mitchell's work was published in the March issue of the
British publication Antiquity, a quarterly journal of important new finds in
archaeology around the world.
Jimmy Arterberry, a historic-preservation officer for the Comanche Nation in
Lawton, Okla., said Mitchell's discovery was important because it contributes
to the physical evidence of Comanche history.
"We knew orally from our ancestors about the use of armor on horses," he said.
"But this confirms our oral traditions."
It's also a confirmation of the Comanches' relationship with the land,
Arterberry said.
Southeastern Colorado has "a ton" of rock art, said Mitchell. But the
armored-horse drawings - the only known depictions of Comanches using such
armor - stand out because they allow researchers to finally date the drawings,
"sort of like the Rosetta stone," he said, referring to the tablet found in
1799 that unlocked the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The Colorado rock art, which was incised or scratched onto cave walls instead
of being pecked or pounded with another stone, dates back to roughly 1700 to
1750.
"There is some recorded history but virtually no archaeology of Comanches,
which make these rock art depictions very valuable," Mitchell added. "Rock art
is undervalued as data by archaeologists. Many see it as pleasing and
aesthetic, but they undervalue it as a research tool."
Mitchell said the archaeological sites he explored were well known among
researchers but that he was the only person to identify the Comanche drawings
at the sites.
"The other researchers at the sites weren't looking for these, and it's very
hard to find something you're not looking for," said Mitchell, who became
interested in rock art when the U.S. Forest Service assigned him to the
Comanche National Grasslands outside La Junta.
"Colorado has one of the major concentrations of rock art in North America. The
problem here is that much of it is on private land," he said.
Mitchell, whose doctoral dissertation will focus on Plains warfare, said he has
yet to see actual leather armor.
"I don't think any of it was preserved," he said. "We are almost certain it was
buffalo because we have historical descriptions of how it was made.
Mitchell said the armor was highly effective against arrows and swords but
vanished overnight when rifles appeared. The Comanches used the armor technique
to drive out the Apaches, who ruled the area from about 1500 to 1700, he said.
Finally, the Comanches were driven into Oklahoma and Texas by the Cheyenne and
Arapaho Indians around 1820, he said.
Mitchell said rock art in Colorado goes back 3,000 to 4,000 years. "It's very
difficult to date," he said.
And there remains another mystery about the illustrations, he said: "We don't
know who did it."