The Human Experience of Transporting and Raising Scarlet Macaws at Paquimé in Chihuahua, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the US Southwest and northwest Mexico, prehispanic people valued birds as dietary resources, for their ritual significance, as integral elements of Indigenous cosmologies, and for the economic value of their feathers. Their multifaceted significance is clearest at the site of Paquimé in northern Chihuahua where archaeologists have found evidence for the long-distance transport and local raising of scarlet macaws (*Ara macao), despite a nearest natural habitat hundreds of kilometers to the south in eastern and southern Mexico. Though the macaws of Paquimé have been well-studied, traditional zooarchaeological approaches occasionally lose sight of how human-animal interactions shaped the daily lives of people in the past. This paper employs an Archaeology of the Human Experience approach to examine what the experience of transporting and raising scarlet macaws would have been like for traveling tradespeople and the prehispanic inhabitants of Paquimé. We draw on ethnohistoric accounts of human-macaw interaction, archaeological understandings of exchange and long-distance transport, and contemporary macaw biology to point out challenges and potential solutions their human keepers could have employed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32639