A segment of fiber twine wrapped in turkey feathers along with a single down feather. Photo credit: WSU
Ancient residents of the American Southwest used around 11,500 feathers to make a turkey feather blanket, according to a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The people who made such blankets were ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians such as Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande Pueblos.
A team led by archaeologists from Washington State University analyzed an 800-year-old turkey feather blanket from southeast Utah that was 39 by 42.5 inches (99 by 108 cm) to get a better idea of how it was made has been. Their work found that thousands of down feathers were wrapped around 180 meters (nearly 200 meters) of yucca fiber to make the blanket currently on display at the edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah.
Researchers also counted body feathers made from wild turkey skins that were purchased from ethical and legal vendors in Idaho to get an estimate of how many turkeys would have been required to provide feathers for the blanket. Their efforts show that between four and ten turkeys would have required feathers to make the blanket, depending on the length of the feathers selected.
Bill Lipe and Shannon Tushingham collect feathers from a wild turkey skin in Tushingham’s laboratory at WSU. Photo credit: WSU
“Turkey feather blankets or robes as an insulating medium were widely used by the Ancestral Pueblo in what is now the southwestern highlands, but little is known about how they were made, as so few such textiles have survived due to their perishable nature.” said Bill Lipe, emeritus professor of anthropology at WSU and lead author of the paper. “The aim of this study was to shed new light on the manufacture of turkey feather blankets and to examine the economic and cultural aspects of raising turkeys to nourish the feathers.”
It is generally believed that clothing and blankets made from animal skins, furs, or feathers were innovations that were critical to human expansion into cold, higher latitudes and higher elevations, such as the highlands of the southwestern United States, where the most of the early settlements were at altitudes above 5,000 feet.
Previous work by Lipe and others indicated that turkey feathers began to replace strips of rabbit skin in the construction of twin blankets in the first two centuries CE. Ethnographic data suggests that the blankets were made by women and used as cloaks in cold weather, sleeping and ultimately as burial bags.
“When the indigenous pueblo farmer populations were in bloom, there would probably have been many thousands of feather duvets in circulation at any given time,” said Shannon Tushingham, co-author of the study and assistant professor of anthropology at WSU. “It is likely that every member of an ancestral Pueblo community, from infants to adults, owned one.”
Another interesting finding from the study was the turkey feathers, used by the Pueblo ancestors to make clothes, and most likely painlessly harvested from live birds during the natural molting periods. This would have enabled a sustainable collection of feathers several times a year during a bird’s life that could have exceeded 10 years. Archaeological evidence suggests that turkeys have generally not been used as a source of food since they were domesticated in the early centuries AD until the 1100s and 1200s, when overhunting depleted the region’s game supply.
Prior to that time, most of the turkey bones reported by archaeological sites were whole skeletons of adult birds that were intentionally buried, indicating ritual or cultural significance. Such burials also took place when more turkeys were raised for food.
“When the blanket we analyzed for our study was made, the birds that took care of the feathers were likely treated as important household individuals in the early 12th century and would have been completely buried,” Lipe said. “This reverence for turkeys and their feathers is still evident today in pueblo dances and rituals. They are right up there with eagle feathers as being symbolically and culturally important. ”
In the long run, the researchers said their hope is that the study will help people appreciate the importance of turkeys to Native American cultures in the southwest.
“Turkey was one of the few domesticated animals in North America until the Europeans arrived in the 1500s and 1600s,” Tushingham said. “They had and still play a very culturally significant role in the lives of the Pueblo people, and we hope that this research will help shed light on this important relationship.”
Reference: “Keeping Warm in the Highlands of the Southwest: A Supply-Side View of Turkey Feather Blanket Production” by William D. Lipe, Shannon Tushingham, Eric Blinman, Laurie Webster, Charles T. LaRue, Aimee Oliver-Bozeman, and Jonathan Till, Nov. 25 2020, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
DOI: 10.1016 / j.jasrep.2020.102604
