A DEER TRAP IN NORTHERN NEW MEXICO:

Caption:  "Fig. 23. LA 12612. The deer

trap at the rim of the mesa. Note the

easy access to the pit from Mortandad

Canyon at the right." (Steen 1977:29)

The subject of this posting is not technically rock art, but it is a piece of stone work, impressive in its own way. This hole, carved into the bedrock, is believed to have been used as a pitfall trap for deer. In his 1977 report on " Pajarito Plateau Archaeological Survey and Excavations", Charlie Steen described it as follows:

Deer trap on trail to Mortandad ruin,

Los Alamos County, NM. Photograph

Aug. 2003, Peter Faris.

"Deer pits were dug on low saddles between canyons. They were probably hidden with a covering of light brush and given wing walls of juniper and pińon branches, so that a deer could be driven from a canyon up a slope to the saddle and forced to the pit where, hopefully, it would step on the cover, fall through, and break a leg or its neck.

Sometime during the late 1940s, I visited the game pit near Navawi ruin, and at that time there were vestiges of heavy brush wing walls on either side of the pit.

The only game pit in the survey area which can safely be called a deer trap is that at LA 12612. It is located on a low saddle between two mesas, at the head of a rather gently slope out of Mortandad Canyon. It could easily have made the apex of two brush wing walls and have been used to trap game driven from the canyon." (Steen 1977: 29-30)

Cavates,  Mortendad ruin, Los

Alamos County, NM. Photograph

Aug. 2003, Peter Faris.

This feature is relatively near the large prehistoric pueblo in Mortandad Canyon at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Judging from what remains at the Mortandad ruins is was a fairly large pueblo built against the cliff face. As at Long House in Bandeliere, cavate rooms were then excavated into the soft volcanic tuff to add additional space behind the constructed rooms. About all that remains to be seen now is a number of cavates illustrating various degrees of erosion. A few seem to be complete, while many provide evidence of how far the cliff face has eroded in intervening centuries. We were led to this site in 2003 by our friends Bill and Jeanne Gibson from nearby Los Alamos.

Deer trap on trail to Mortandad ruin,

Los Alamos County, NM. Photograph

Aug. 2003, Peter Faris.

Although the excavation of the hole would have been fairly easy for these Ancestral Pueblo people, it is after all not as large as the cavate rooms they excavated into the canyon walls, it is still an impressive feature. What I find interesting is that the easiest access, and the assumed drive lines, come out of Mortandad Canyon which was, as mentioned above, well occupied by people. How many wild deer would have felt comfortable enough around that many people to be in place to be driven. Perhaps the situation then was the same as the situation in many suburbs today, where suburban deer have gotten comfortable enough around people to be seen virtually daily. But then, would not the easy hunting have led to a heavy predation on the deer by hunters eliminating any of the animals that were not fully wild? I will have to leave this question to those who know deer behavior better than I do.

REFERENCE:

Steen, Charlie R.

1977    Pajarito Plateau Archaeological Survey and Excavations, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory of the University of California, Los Alamos.

SPORTS - ANIMAL FREAKS IN ROCK ART:

The descriptive term of “sport” in the natural world is used to define an animal that is somehow different or non-typical for its species. According to Webster it is an “animal or plant that shows an unusual or singular deviation from the normal or parent type; mutation”. I have discussed elsewhere my opinion that in a culture that endows all of nature with spirit power, the sighting of a unique animal - a sport - would be interpreted as a spiritual occurrence by the witness.

Carrizo Creek, Baca County, CO.

Along Carrizo Creek in southeastern Colorado there is a remarkable petroglyph panel that includes three very strange animals. On the right side is a deer with a head of antlers that has 27 or 28 points depending on how you count it – definitely a sport. The topmost animal of the three appears to be a desert bighorn sheep with partially curled set of horns, and another set of horns growing out of the first set, and another set growing out of that set, etc., etc., etc. These stacked sets of horns climb up the rock face and disappear over the top. Between those two animals is the third which can be interpreted as a Push-me-pull-you, a quadruped with an antlered head at each end. This animal has a fairly normal head on the left side, and what appears to be another head with large, looping horns at the other end. There are a couple of other quadrupeds on this panel but they seem essentially normal.

Carrizo Creek (close up), Baca County, CO.

I had wondered for many years at the possible meanings of the animal with the 28-point antlers. Not unrealistic enough to be dismissed as a whole fantasy, but certainly not totally accurate and realistic it seemed. Then one day, while in the waiting room at my dentist’s office, I was browsing through an outdoor magazine and ran across an article about deer hunting which told about a deer hunt that had bagged a non-typical buck. This article mentioned that the Boone and Crockett Club, which maintains the list of records for animals taken by hunters has a category for non-typical (or sport) deer. Indeed, visiting the page for non-typical Mule or Blacktail deer on their website, you will find a picture of a set of deer antlers with 28 points, just like the deer on Carrizo Creek. Linea Sundstrom has mentioned the possibility that such an image might be a record of an unusual animal. Could the petroglyph actually be a picture of a real deer seen, or even bagged, by a Native American hunter – could this panel be a prehistoric Boone and Crocket register? And even if that explains the deer with the 28-point antlers, it does not address the other two figures.

In his book Thunder and Herds: Rock Art of the High Plains, Lawrence Loendorf has proposed (p. 138) that some figures with outsized or exceedingly complicated antlers have shamanic purpose. Loendorf stated; “The antlers of a number of quadruped figures resemble nets as much as they do antlers and, on some figures, the net-like antlers have replaced the figure’s head entirely. Since, in reality, the antlers of deer captured by net hunting are invariably entangled in those nets, it is easy to appreciate why antlers and nets might have become combined in the hunter’s mind and substituted for each other in an instructional rock art panel.” This also seems to be a possibility. In addition to these there will be a certain number of people who will want to credit hallucinogenic plants, and the entoptic images crowd as well.

One other possible motive for these sorts of exaggerations would be to emphasize the trait of the animal that the exaggerated organ is believed to represent. In the case of phallic figures, whether human or animal, if the phallus is exaggerated we have absolutely no trouble in crediting that to an intended emphasis on fecundity and sexuality. If the example is a bear with an emphasis on its claws or teeth we automatically assume that the meaning has something to do with the fierceness and danger represented by that animal. Well, just like the bear’s claws and teeth are its weapons, the antlers of the deer, and the horns of the bighorn sheep, are their weapons. Perhaps these are just an attempt to portray the greatest and most macho of each of these species, perhaps with spiritual meanings.

As for the Push-me-pull-you, other than vague hints of trying to show more than one aspect of a creature in a single image, such as its physical presence and its spiritual meaning at the same time, I haven’t the faintest idea - do you?