UW Assistant Professor Randy Haas works at the Wilamaya Patjxa burial site in
Peru, where the 9,000-year-old remains of a female big-game hunter were found. (Bill
Matthews Photo)
University of Wyoming Assistant Professor Randy Haas’ research on the 9,000-year-old
Wilamaya Patjxa burial site in Peru suggests that women might have hunted big game.
During archaeological excavations in the Andes Mountains in 2018, a team of archaeologists
and Indigenous collaborators discovered an adult individual interred 9,000 years ago
with a large-mammal hunting toolkit that included six projectile points.
“At the time, we assumed the individual was a male hunter,” says Haas, of UW’s Department
of Anthropology. “However, osteological and proteomic analysis later revealed the
male hunter was actually female.”
This unexpected finding generated a lot of media interest, he notes, because it suggests
— contrary to prevailing theories — that both women and men participated in large-mammal
hunting in early human communities in the Americas. The research recently was published
in the journal Scientific Reports.
Haas teamed up with the University of Louisville’s Ashley Smallwood, who specializes
in lithic usewear analysis — a technique for examining microscopic wear patterns
on stone tools to identify their function. They did further research into whether
the projectile points at Wilamaya Patjxa were, in fact, projectile points.
“They could have been more like kitchen knives used in domestic activities, or they
may have been fashioned specifically as funerary objects to honor the deceased,” Haas
says.
The two researchers traveled to the Peruvian Andes with a microscope and laser scanner
to examine the artifacts. After further inspection, it turned out that all of the
supposed projectile points were indeed projectile points and showed the signs of projectile
wear.
“Interestingly, some of the projectile points also show signs of knife wear. The objects
were multitools,” Haas says.
In the end, they concluded that the projectile points associated with the female individual
were not just kitchen knives, nor were they strictly funerary objects. They were projectile
points used to hunt large mammals.
The findings indicated that both females and males were large-mammal hunters in some
times and places in the past.
“The widespread idea that hunting is for men and the home is for women does not apply
to all times and places,” Haas says. “Labor division, instead, depends on economic,
ecological and social conditions.”
Haas is an archaeologist who investigates human behavior in forager societies of the
past to better understand human behavior in the present. His topics of interest include
forager diets, mobility, technology, inequality, cooperation, gender and diversity.
Haas leads archaeological excavations and survey projects in the Andes and mountain
regions of western North America.
He also specializes in quantitative comparative approaches that integrate large datasets
across North and South America.
To learn more about Haas’ research, email him at whaas@uwyo.edu.
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