Holes in our Moccasins, Holes in our Stories: Apachean Origins and the Promontory Caves

In 1930-31, Julian Steward recovered hundreds of well-worn moccasins in Utah’s Promontory caves—along with mittens, bison robe fragments, bows, arrows, pottery, bone and stone tools, cordage, gaming pieces, and abundant faunal remains—making for one of the most remarkable hunter-gatherer archaeological records in western North America. Steward recognized that the moccasins and other artifacts were out of place in the Great Basin and instead were characteristic of the Canadian Subarctic and northern Plains. He further suspected they reflected ancestral Apachean populations who left the Canadian Subarctic, ultimately making their homes in the Southwest and southern Plains. Steward’s findings languished for decades, with the Promontory materials regarded as enigmatic.

Dr. Ives Apachean Origins research has involved new excavations in Promontory Caves 1 and 2 that reinforce Steward’s conclusion that the early Promontory Phase resulted from an intrusive, large game hunting population, particularly of bison, very different from nearby late Fremont communities. While lingering for just one or two human generations, the cave occupants began to accept people as well as material and symbolic culture from surrounding AD 13th century neighbors. They employ a trans-disciplinary search image to evaluate the possibility that the Promontory Phase materials reflect the presence of Apachean ancestors, with a treatment that expands to Franktown Cave (Colorado) and other sites suspected of having Apachean connections. In these records lie the seeds for the intensive Plains-Puebloan interactions of the centuries that followed.