Drawn by people, dogs or, later, horses, travois were a mainstay of traditional Native American life in the West. Up through the 19th century, nomadic peoples used these sleds – typically fashioned of two long poles lashed together into an A-frame – to transport their belongings.
Now, a Chihuahuan Desert find reveals the antiquity of this phenomenon. The find may be some of the earliest evidence of transport technology.
Matthew Bennett is a professor at the UK’s Bournemouth University.
“And I love to tell stories,” Bennett said. “It's the stories written in the mud of the White Sands lake bed that I think are fantastic and that connect with people.”
Bennett is a specialist in ancient footprints, and he’s studied them around the world. In 2016, he received a message from David Bustos, resource manager at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, then a national monument. Bustos said he thought he’d found human footprints, but that “nobody believed him.”
But Bennett and others soon confirmed Bustos’s find. White Sands is now known to contain thousands of prints left by Ice Age animals – mammoths, ground sloths, camels – and Ice Age people. The prints have been dated to more than 21,000 years old.
In 2019, researchers were using ground-penetrating radar to locate buried prints when they spotted something strange – long, straight grooves. Straight lines aren’t common in nature, and the researchers immediately suspected they’d been created by people.
Indigenous consultants had the same response, Bennett said.
“And they looked at them and said, ‘Oh, they’re drag structures!” he said. “‘They were dragging firewood, or they were dragging transport of some description.’”
Nevertheless, the researchers considered a range of possibilities for these “linear features.”
“What if it was firewood?” Bennett said. “And what would it be like if it was a boat or the keel mark of the boat? What would it be like if it was some form of animal, like a giant beaver, dragging something? And you work through and you systematically have to look at the evidence in relation to those hypotheses and ideas.”
They consulted ethnographic literature, and they conducted what Bennett called “modern analog experiments.” He constructed his own A-frame travois, and dragged his daughter along the ocean shoreline near Bournemouth. The tracks that remained were similar to those at White Sands.
The linear features are generally found alongside human footprints, not the prints of other creatures. Bennett and his colleagues ultimately concluded that these traces were those of Ice Age travois.
These ancient transport devices were likely not “curated” items – ones their creators fashioned for repeated, long-term use. Rather, Bennett said, they were “expedient,” made from wood that might later have gone into a fire, or been put to other use.
“We're talking about somebody saying, ‘Oh shucks, I've got to move camp,’” Bennett said, “or, ‘Oh shucks, I've got half a leg of mammoth here that I've got to move. What can I lash together out of a few poles? What can I invent on the spur of the moment in order to deal with that need?’”
Laid down at the margins of an Ice Age lake, the White Sands prints offer a vivid glimpse into the lives of the continent’s first people. But there were lakes across the Southwest in the Ice Age, from West Texas to Nevada. Inspired by the White Sands discoveries, Bennett and his colleagues are now moving on to those locales.
“There'll always be something older,” Bennett said. “There's always a better record. The lasting legacy of White Sands is to point the way to an archive of evidence. There is an unread archive out there for people to discover and to literally trace the footfalls of early Americans across the American Southwest.”
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