Washington State University research sheds light on indigenous turkey technology

Looking for a unique, warm and sustainable Christmas present?

Consider a handcrafted turkey feather blanket, although you likely won’t have the time, nor the skills, to make one this Christmas.

Ah well, there is always 2021. Which begs the question, how many turkey feathers would you need?

Roughly 11,500, according to new research from archaeologists at Washington State University.

The good news? Those feathers could come from Spokane’s resident turkey population. You’d need anywhere between four and 10 turkeys and you wouldn’t have to kill them.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in late November, examined the remnants of an 800-year-old 4-by-3-foot blanket housed in the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah.

The blanket is an artifact of the Pueblo people, predecessors to the modern Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblo nations. Although the turkey feathers are long gone – likely victims of dermestid beetle larvae – the shafts of the feathers are still visible, tightly wound around yucca fiber cords.

In a region with extreme temperature swings, warm and durable blankets were a must.

The research further highlights the synergistic relationship between Indigenous peoples in the Southwest and turkeys, shedding light on the economic and social importance of the bird, said Bill Lipe, a retired WSU anthropologist and lead author of the study.

“Bill and his colleagues research on turkey feather blankets is really a significant and exciting contribution,” said Cyler Conrad, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Conrad, who grew up in Spokane, studies ancient evidence of turkeys throughout the Southwest. He was not involved in the WSU study.

The findings, he said, “helps contextualize the role and importance of turkeys in a process which is often not considered in turkey studies – blanket manufacturing.”

For the past few decades, archaeological research has focused on domestication, husbandry and management questions. While important, that hasn’t directly examined the cultural and economic impact of the “turkey-human relationship” Conrad said.

Indigenous people in the American Southwest and the Mexican northwest hunted wild turkeys and raised domestic turkeys. They used turkey eggs for food, and then used the crushed-up shells to make paints and dyes.

What did they paint?

Turkeys.

“Turkeys held a very special role in past societies, just as they do in modern Native American communities,” Conrad said.

According to the WSU study, turkey feather blankets became popular roughly 2,000 years ago. That’s when “blankets or robes relying on turkey feathers as the insulating medium began to replace those made with strips of rabbit fur.”

Archaeologists believe turkeys were first domesticated in south-central Mexico around 800 BCE by pre-Aztecan people and again in the Southwest of the United States in 200 BCE.

The birds likely were first valued for their feathers, not their meat. The vibrant plumage was used in ceremonies and to make robes, blankets and more.

Exactly how turkeys were domesticated isn’t known, but it’s possible a rafter of turkeys – the technical term for a group of the birds – was hanging out by a village eating garbage and never left.

As the Pueblo farming communities flourished, it’s likely that “every member of an ancestral Pueblo community” had a blanket.

Although turkeys would later become an important food source, they were initially domesticated for their feathers and eggs. Fragments of turkey bones found in household garbage piles, indicating consumption, only start to regularly appear in the 1100s and 1200s C.E.

“Many of the turkey bones reported from sites dating to earlier periods are whole skeletons from mature birds that were intentionally buried,” the study stated. “Episodes of ritual sacrifice of intact adults and juvenile turkeys have also been reported.”

That fact pattern led Lipe to believe that the feathers used for the blankets were taken from living birds.

“In our article, we emphasize that the pre-molt loss of connections to the blood supply and nerves does make it possible for mature feathers to be (gently) collected from live birds without freaking them out, and we think that this was primarily how feathers would have been collected for use in making blankets,” Lipe said in an email.

This is the same process used to ethically harvest goose down.

By the time Columbus came to the Americas in 1492, it is estimated there were 10 million wild and domestic birds on the continent. Historians don’t know who brought the first turkeys to Europe, but the birds proved popular, both as ornamentation and sustenance.

Meanwhile, the ancient domesticated turkey in the Southwest, known as the Pueblo domesticated turkey or M. gallopavo ssp., likely fell victim to European violence. As Indigenous peoples succumbed to disease, slavery and the sword, their turkeys went extinct, as did Indigenous technologies and traditions.

The reliance on turkeys ceremonially and for attire was replaced by the use of European livestock, namely chickens and sheep. By 1920, turkeys were gone from 18 of the 39 states in which they’d originally lived. At their lowest, turkey numbers were generously estimated at 200,000, just 2% of the pre-European population. Throughout the continent, their numbers had declined by 90%, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation.

That started to change in the 1960s.

Turkeys aren’t native to the Spokane region, but starting in the 1960s they were introduced as part of a widespread conservation effort.

In recreating the blanket-making process, the WSU researchers received feathers from Merriam turkeys killed by hunters in Latah County, Idaho.

But what of the actual blanket-making process?

It’s time intensive.

The blanket examined by Lipe and his colleagues was made by wrapping the 11,500 downy feathers around nearly 200 yards of yucca fiber cord. Freshly plucked turkey feathers are flexible. As they age, however, they harden. In all likelihood, feathers were collected, dried and then soaked before being wrapped.

Mary Weahkee, an archaeologist and anthropologist with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, has recreated turkey-feather blankets, and consulted on the WSU study.

“It’s tedious, I’ll tell you that,” she said.

In 2018, she created a 2-by-3-foot blanket, slightly smaller than the blanket examined by Lipe. That took 18 months and 17,000 feathers from 68 turkeys. She was able to add feathers at about a foot of warp length per hour.

But the result is impressive, she said. The downy feathers trap heat and are soft to the touch. Weahkee used ground-up yucca to wash the feathers, a sort of natural shampoo. That stripped any grease or odors from the feathers. What’s more, most insects avoid yucca, which meant that even if the turkey feathers were eaten, “You still had the cordage, so you didn’t have to spin another 190 feet,” she said.

“The science behind it is fascinating.”

Weahkee, who is of Comanche and Santa Clara descent, teaches these traditional technologies to Native school children in New Mexico. Research like the WSU study furthers her efforts at reviving an ancient technology.

“I looked at how the ancestors were creative and patient,” she told the New Mexico Wildlife magazine in 2018. “It’s a labor of love.”