Much of our work on the Promontory archaeological record has been founded upon creating a realistic search image for ancestral Dene movement away from the Canadian Subarctic and toward the American Southwest and southern Plains. To avoid circular reasoning, this search image used transdisciplinary perspectives to see where linguistic, genetic, anthropological, oral tradition, and archaeological evidence converge in understanding one of the most extraordinary processes in western hemisphere human history. I will outline the search image and provide a framework for our initial Promontory findings—a high precision chronology of the Cave 1 and 2 occupations, the strong focus on large game (and particularly bison) hunting, the sophisticated hide processing capabilities, the remarkable moccasin assemblage, and results of space syntax as well as artifact accumulation analyses. Apart from significant push and pull factors, Promontory research has led us to more specific indications of migration, including evidence of counterstreaming or return visiting and scouting activities. These findings will set the stage for session papers covering diverse findings arising from existing collections, oral traditions, in the many other Plains, eastern slopes, and Southwestern locales where an early Dene presence can be anticipated in a turbulent AD 13th-century world.

In this paper, we examine the significance of incised sinuous lines, known as “lightning lines”, which have recently been identified on two late pre-contact birch arrows recovered from melting ice patches within alpine regions in Canada’s subarctic. Ethnographic-era observations demonstrate that the practice of inscribing similar lines on arrows was especially widespread across Plains and Southern Athapaskan groups. Given the known cultural affiliations between Northern and Southern Athapaskan groups, we evaluate the temporal and geographic distribution of the motif as well as its cultural meaning. Archaeological evidence suggests that the trait may be associated with a hunter-gatherer influence within the Southwest, western Central Plains and Great Basin regions in the pre-contact era, possibly affiliated with Promontory Phase dating to AD 1200-1400. We hypothesize that the two arrows found within the NWT, which are the most northerly known examples of the trait, suggests an axis of interaction between Subarctic Athapaskan and Plains groups, and perhaps extending even further south.

The thirteenth-century human occupants of the Promontory caves, Utah, distinguished themselves from surrounding Fremont populations by being successful hunting specialists of bison in a peripheral region for that species. The hunters’ success is evident from the abundance of faunal remains excavated from the caves. The dry cave conditions preserved hundreds of worn moccasins, which are of particular interest because of the Canadian-Subarctic style in which they are made, and for their potential to reveal more about the hunting strategies of their wearers. Here, we isolate ancient DNA from 38 Promontory Cave 1 moccasin and hide fragments and use these data to determine the animal species and sex used to construct the moccasins. We found that moccasins were all made from bison and most (87%) were females. The strong female bias in our data, which we demonstrate is a significant departure from sex ratios in present-day bison herds, suggests that the occupants of the cave were purposefully targeting female bison for moccasin manufacture. Our study is the first to our knowledge to determine faunal sex ratios from an assemblage of archaeological leather and highlights another potential avenue for ancient DNA technologies to augment what can be learned from the archaeological record.

Julian Steward’s (1937) report on archaeological materials from the Promontory Caves included the description of a woven rawhide artifact (42BO1 11595) for which he provided no interpretation. Recent re-analysis suggests this object may be part of a rawhide basket for a dog travois, a type of drag-sledge used for pulling loads. We explore this interpretation using comparative evidence from ethnographic sources and examples of historic travois curated in museums across North America. Our findings offer an additional line of evidence in support of the hypothesis that the Promontory Caves were inhabited by a proto-Apachean people. Though travois use was probably not common in the Great Basin, it was widely used throughout the Great Plains during the proto-historic period, and early ethnohistoric accounts indicate that a fully developed dog travois culture existed in this region prior to the introduction of horses in the early 18^th century. The presence of a possible dog travois at the Promontory Caves is significant not only for its connection to Plains adapted cultures, but also as evidence that this technology existed as early as the 13^th century. In fact, the Promontory specimen may represent the only archaeological dog travois in North America.

Similarities in culturally diagnostic artifacts from the Promontory Culture (AD 1180–1280) component at Franktown Cave in Colorado and the Promontory Phase (AD 1250-1290) at the Promontory Caves in Utah provide evidence of a pre-A.D. 1300 migration of proto-Apacheans into the Rocky Mountain west using both Intermountain and Plains margin migration routes. Recent dates, descriptive, and isotopic analysis of artifacts from Franktown Cave has strengthened the association between the sites, as well as with early Dene sites in the Canadian Subarctic. Moving away from relatively simple comparisons of charismatic perishable artifacts toward examination of diachronic cultural change has been difficult due to the incompleteness of Franktown’s excavation records. However, the collections from Hugh Capps’ (1942) excavations at Franktown, which were accessioned based on stratigraphy, allows the separation of Early-Middle Ceramic, Promontory, and Western Dismal River assemblages. Returning to the Capps collections allows us to question whether the problematic “Franktown focus,” interpreted as a transitional Woodland-Upper Republican manifestation, may instead represent a blending of traditions that were the result of intermarriage between proto-Apachean migrants and local women potters. Intermarriage is supported by DNA evidence in modern Southwestern Apachean lineages and represented at Franktown by gendered technologies from different ethnicities.

The Promontory Caves 1 and 2 have yielded the largest archaeological assemblage of leather moccasins currently known in North America. Of the nearly 300 examples, almost all of these moccasins are made in a distinctly subarctic style. For decades these moccasins have been seen as extremely unique and isolated in a wider regional context. However, these moccasins were made for walking, and walking is what they did: all over the American Plains. In recent years, several examples of these subarctic style moccasins are coming to light from Colorado, to Wyoming, and as far south as New Mexico. This paper will discuss the unique quality of this footwear, highlight the recently identified examples outside of the Promontory Caves, and will examine the wider implications of Apachean emergence in the Southern Dene world.