Posted on 04/25/2008 7:30:07 PM PDT by blam
Buried Dogs Were Divine "Escorts" for Ancient Americans
Anne Casselman for National Geographic News
April 23, 2008
Hundreds of prehistoric dogs found buried throughout the southwestern United States show that canines played a key role in the spiritual beliefs of ancient Americans, new research suggests.
Throughout the region, dogs have been found buried with jewelry, alongside adults and children, carefully stacked in groups, or in positions that relate to important structures, said Dody Fugate, an assistant curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Fugate has conducted an ongoing survey of known dog burials in the area, and the findings suggest that the animals figured more prominently in their owners' lives than simply as pets, she said.
"I'm suggesting that the dogs in the New World in the Southwest were used to escort people into the next world, and sometimes they were used in certain rituals in place of people," Fugate said.
To conduct her research, Fugate collected data on known dog burials and urged her archaeologist colleagues to note when canine remains were found during excavations.
"I have a database now of almost 700 dog burials, and a large number of them are either buried in groups in places of ritual or they're buried with individual human beings," she said.
Many of the burials are concentrated in northwestern New Mexico and along the Arizona-New Mexico border, she said (see map).
"All of that area was full of doggy people," she said.
She reported her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada, last month.
1,900 Years of Burials
Fugate's database indicates that dog burials were most common between 400 B.C. and A.D. 1100.
"The earlier the [human] burial, the more likely you are to have dog in it," Fugate said. By the 1400s and 1500s the practice of burying people with dogs had stopped. Indeed, she noted, today's Pueblo and Navajo Indians believe it is improper to bury dogs.
What the ancient dogs looked like is an open question, she said, but their remains suggest that they were far more diverse than was previously believed.
Fugate has seen remains of ancient canines with floppy ears and pointed ears, long tails and curly tails, small builds and lanky ones.
There were even white ones, found buried on the Arizona-Utah border, whose fur was used to weave ritual garb, she noted.
"They were a motley crew," she summed up.
Archaeologists' Best Friend?
Susan Crockford is a zooarchaeologist at Canada's University of Victoria who has studied dog breeds in the Pacific Northwest.
She agreed that dog remains have often been overlooked during archaeological excavations.
Archaeologists tend to examine animal bones at excavation sites with an eye to what humans were eating, rather than what their relationships with dogs were like, she said.
"Because dogs are very seldom come across in a way that suggests they were used for food, they tend to get dismissed as being not very significant … so they tend to not be reported in very much detail," Crockford said.
Crockford suggested that dogs' spiritual role was among their most important functions in the region, second perhaps to their value as hunting or herding companions.
"Basically [ritual dog burial] is a pattern that's found around the world, and [Fugate]'s doing some really important work in documenting in detail the instances of that phenomena in her part of the world," Crockford said.
For her part, Fugate said the data she is collecting will give dogs their day as key players in understanding the past.
"Not thinking that dogs might have had a religious relationship [with people] as well means that you're leaving out a chunk of [ancient] religion," she said.
"If [you make that assumption], you are losing enormous amounts of information about the ritual context and the mindset of these people."
These dogs (See below) have been in the Americas for about 10,000 years. Today they live wild in the lowlands of the southern US.
To see my doggies, click on my name.
Arf!
I wonder if Dody Fugate is related to The Blue Fugates
Cute little guy. How long ago was he buried?
After all the palavering, the only thing that can be said with certainty is, the buried dogs in groups, individually, and with human remains. Everything else is speculation.
This is such a perversion of the scientific method. All one has to do is state a hypothesis and it stands until further research can supplant it. When the tales and fables are spun in the first instance out of just imagination, where would one go to get further information. Since this is prehistoric, there will be no smoking gun; ergo, the first fiction stands. This is what represents scientific inquiry in so many fields.
There is such an incestuous relationship in the “scientific” community that few will challenge others else they run the risk of being branded a heretic.
I have a basenji dog. The ancient Egyptians were frequently buried with them. Some people feel that the Egyptian god of the Dead, Anubis, was inspired by basenjis. Basenjis were considered “guardians of the tombs.”
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Thanks Blam. |
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Never heard of them. Cool, thanks and uhh...woof!
burroak - not only is it a perversion of the scientific method, it doesn’t state the obvious - “large groups” of dogs buried with humans means one of two things - the dogs were massacred, or the dogs were buried alive - so much of the scientific reporting on pre-Columbian peoples exaggerates their achievements and conceals their barbarity - compare that to the scientific reporting on the primitive peoples of Europe.
Thanks for the sceptical, scientific view of the story. I’m a dog lover, and this comment may upset some, but unless there are written records to explain the reason the dogs were part of the burials, there are other possible explanations. One other possibility is that they intended to send the dogs along as a box lunch for the departed.
That’s cool - looks like an album cover. :-)
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