Meleagris gallopavo tularosa Schorger
date: label: Collection Date
content: 1905
name: label: Collector
content: W. Hough
notes: label: Notes
content: Draft Tularosa Cave discussion. Lipe, 2-2020 Another probable example of the early appearance of domestic turkeys and the beginnings of the production of turkey feather blankets comes from Tularosa Cave, a site located in the Mogollon Highlands of New Mexico nearly 450 km south of the Turkey Pen site. In a report of his excavations at the site, Walter Hough (1914: 3, 5-6, and Plate 1) observed that turkeys had evidently been confined in part of the cave at two different periods; evidence of turkeys included dried coprolites, desiccated chicks and an adult bird, and a number of eggs. Hough collected the adult carcass, which is curated at the National Museum. He also mentions finding both fur and feather-wrapped cordage, as well as a jacket or vest made of feather-wrapped cord, which was found with a burial at a depth of seven feet in the cave deposits (Hough 2014:71-72; Figure 159). His report does not provide evidence of stratigraphy or specific artifact associations, so the dates of the turkey evidence can't be inferred. However, it does indicate a close association between humans and turkeys, probable evidence of confinement of the birds, and the presence of eggs and chicks, indicating breeding took place at the site. In 1950, Paul S. Martin of the Chicago Natural History Museum conducted extensive excavations at Tularosa Cave (Martin et al. 1952). The only reference to turkeys is a statement that they appeared in the Pine Lawn phase (Martin et al. 1952:499) which Martin dates (p. 483) as extending from ca. 150 B.C. +/- 160 years to A.D. 500. (Current dating of the Pine Lawn phase in the western Mogollon area is approximately 200 to 500 or 550 A.D. [Wilson 1999; Anyon et al. 1981]. In a short article describing the desiccated adult turkey that Hough had collected, Schorger (1961) reports a personal communication from Martin to the effect that the Hough specimen “dates back to 1100 AD and perhaps earlier” and that “We found a couple of turkeys that dated from about the beginning of the Christian era and they were in fine condition.” Schorger (1961) then states that these specimens were subsequently destroyed, presumably also based on information from Martin. Another personal communication from Martin about Tularosa Cave turkeys appears in McKusick (1986). She reports that a group of desiccated turkey specimens, which Martin dated at about A.D. 250, were recovered from the Pine Lawn phase deposits at Tularosa Cave, but that Martin told her that he fell ill and they were not properly protected. As a result, they became infested with insects and were discarded (McKusick 1986:4). My interpretation of Martin's age estimate for the “Hough turkey” is that he was reluctant to make an age estimate for the Hough turkey earlier than the latest date of the cave's occupation because Hough (1914) had not described where in the cave or at what depth the specimen had been found. On the other hand, Martin was willing to give personal communications about estimated ages of turkey remains he had in fact excavated, but was not willing to discuss them in the 1952 monograph because they had been discarded prior to being analyzed for the report. Schorger (1961) also cut open the crop of the “Hough turkey” and extracted 190 cc of maize kernels—clear evidence that the bird was being provisioned by its keepers. Much more recently, Brian Kemp (personal communication) reports that he and Cara Monroe had analyzed the mtDNA of a small sample of tissue from the Hough turkey provided by the National Museum; its mtDNA is a-Hap-1, linking it to the widespread H1 “domestic” haplogroup documented by Speller et al. (2010). Koons and Nash (2005) report that AMS dating of sandals from the Tularosa Cave collections show a good deal of mixing in the deposits, which Martin's team excavated by arbitrary levels. Hence, the age of individual artifacts can't reliably be assumed on the basis of stratigraphic position. However, trends may be preserved that have a bearing on the question of the beginnings of turkey keeping at the Cave. In 1976, Maurice Heller, a graduate student at Texas Tech University, analyzed the faunal remains that had been collected during Martin's excavation. Using Martin's assignment of grid square levels to phases, Heller (Table 7) reports only three turkey bones from Pre-Pottery contexts, but 18 from Pine Lawn contexts, supporting Martin's assessment (1952:499) that turkeys appeared in the Pine Lawn phase. In the Martin et al. report (1952:Figure 75), Bluhm and Grange graph the occurrence of fur and feather cordage from Tularosa Cave by phase. Examples of fur cord are abundant in levels assigned to the Pre-Pottery period, but only one specimen of feather cord is so attributed. Fur cord continues to be predominant in most phases, but feather cord climbs in popularity, reaching a peak in levels assigned to the San Francisco/Tularosa phase deposits, when it outnumbers examples of fur cord. Given the current dating of A.D. 200 to 550 for the Pine Lawn phase, this suggests that production of turkey feather blankets began at about the same time as it did in the late Basketmaker II sites of the Cedar Mesa region of southeastern Utah, but that feather blankets did not replace the older style of rabbit fur blankets as rapidly as in the southeastern Utah area. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Overall, the widely separated Turkey Pen, Canyon del Muerto, and Tularosa Cave results indicate that by the early centuries A.D., domestic turkey husbandry had become widely but not uniformly distributed during the late Basketmaker II period (or temporal equivalent elsewhere) in the Ancestral Pueblo area. For example, virtually no evidence of turkeys or turkey feather-wrapped cordage has come from the prototypical “Classic” Basketmaker II sites in northeastern Arizona (Guernsey and Kidder 1921). Reynolds (2012) surveyed modern-era faunal analyses from 31 Basketmaker II sites in the San Juan area, and found that turkey or large bird bones were reported in only 9 sites (typically with only a single bone, even from sites with relatively large assemblages). The lower “desert” areas of the US and North Mexican southwest apparently did not adopt turkey husbandry until much later (e.g., see Ainsworth's chapter in this volume on turkey raising at Paquime in northern Mexico).
label: Record Last Modified
content: 10 Oct 2023
label: Specimen Count
content: 1
place: label: Place
content: Tularosa River, ancient cave at head, near Reserve, [Catron], New Mexico, United States, North America
setName: label: See more items in
content: Vertebrate Zoology
label: See more items in
content: Birds
publisher: label: Published Name
content: Meleagris gallopavo tularosa Schorger
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Vertebrate Zoology - Birds Division
identifier: label: USNM Number
content: 477501
objectType: label: Type Citation
content: Schorger. 1970. Auk. 87 (1): 169.
label: Type Status
content: Type
taxonomicName: label: Taxonomy
content: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Galliformes, Phasianidae, Meleagridinae
physicalDescription: label: Preparation
content: Skin: Whole
label: Remarks
content: mummified
label: Sex
content: Male