Almost all of the households of Amache’s neighbors at Boggsville were multiethnic families, headed by Hispanic women from Taos and their Anglo husbands. One of her dearest friends was Mary Bent Moore, another Cheyenne woman who was married to an Anglo trader and lived on a nearby ranch. She seems like such a singular character that one might be tempted to dismiss her life as one of a kind, but, in fact, many women like Amache served as cultural mediators in early Colorado. It is one thing to say that the state has always been a place of ethnic diversity it is another to envision Amache Prowers sitting in her tattooed adobe house sharpening stone tools and greeting both travelers on the Santa Fe Trail and the rising sun in the east. The archaeobiography of Amache Prowers speaks to the promise of that approach for understanding Colorado history. Because Amache spent so much of her time spatially separated from other Cheyenne, if her stone tools needed sharpening or refurbishing, she would have had to do it herself. Not only were stone tools a part of Cheyenne women’s hide-working kits, the women also used stone implements for cutting meat and to sharpen their digging sticks. In this case it seems quite clear that these stone tools were the result of a woman’s labor. Only since the 1990s has the discipline taken seriously the proposition that, because women’s tasks so often involved the use of stone tools, they were likely making them as well. Traditionally, archaeologists have believed stone tools were made almost exclusively by men. Because the artifacts were recovered from deposits located below the floorboards but above the bottom of the floor joists, we know that they date to the historic occupation of the site. Both flaked stone tools and debris from sharpening those tools were recovered from inside the Prowers house. The material record also provides evidence of some of Amache’s activities that were completely undocumented. To date, no botanical studies have been performed at the Prowers house, but the recovery of a broken pestle from the deposits inside the house implies that Amache engaged in Cheyenne methods of food and herb preparation. Amache also used wild plants important in Cheyenne ethnomedical practices. In a 1945 article for The Colorado Magazine, Amache’s oldest daughter, Mary Prowers Hudnall, described Cheyenne foods Amache made or gathered-her use of wild plums and chokecherries in preserves, pickling prickly pears, and gathering fresh wild greens like lamb’s quarters. They do, however, coincide with her children’s memories of the many Cheyenne traditions that she continued to practice. The results of these excavations stand in contradiction to histories that portray Amache as an assimilated Victorian wife and mother. Contact National & State Register StaffĪ series of excavations both inside and surrounding the Prowers house at Boggsville have yielded a material record of one of the most important periods in Amache’s life, when her identity was established as a mother, as the wife of a successful businessman, and as an adult member of her tribe.Recent Listings in the National & State Registers.Colorado State Register of Historic Properties.Preservation Planning Unit Resource Center.Information for Archaeologists, Paleontologists and Researchers.Information for Students and Volunteers.Information for Museums and Curatorial Repositories.State-Approved Museums and Curatorial Repositories Expand.Office of Archaeology & Historic Preservation.Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation.Federal Historic Tax Credit Impact in Colorado.Archaeology & Historic Preservation Month.Program for Avocational Archaeological Certification (PAAC) Expand.About the State Historic Preservation Office Expand.
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