DEFENDING THE CANYONLANDS

Rare shields from the American Southwest are a legacy of a turbulent time in Native history

- ERIC A. POWELL

AMONG THE ESTIMATED 500,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), some 800 artifacts, including pots and stone tools, are from a site known as White House. This small village is tucked into a cliff alcove in northeastern Arizona's Canyon del Muerto and was inhabited by a farming community from approximately 1150 to 1300. In 2009, University of Arizona archaeologist Edward Jolie was in the museum's extensive Southwest collections looking through drawers holding objects excavated in the early twentieth century from White House when he came across something remarkable.

Jolie, who studies perishable artifacts, had come to the museum to examine textiles and basketry from New Mexico's Chaco Canyon, where a large cluster of settlements at the center of an important cultural network reached its zenith around 1100. While at the museum, he thought he would take advantage of the opportunity to survey perishable objects from other Southwestern sites which is how he found himself holding a two-foot-wide shield fashioned from sumac fiber basketry coils that had been discovered in 1925 and then sat unnoticed in the museum's collections for almost a century. "Basketry shields are incredibly rare in the archaeological record," says Jolie. "To that point, there were only three known from the entire Southwest." Based on his experience studying the previously identified examples, Jolie was confident the artifact from White House was a basketry shield.