Pueblos

Abandoned pueblos are scattered throughout the southwestern U.S. and at many, archaeologists have uncovered a curious artifact: the skeletons of scarlet macaws. The birds' bright red feathers are known to have been an important status symbol, a signifier of prestige for people throughout the American tropics and the southwest, both in the ancient world and today. But macaws are a tropical bird, whose range never extended north of today's U.S.-Mexico border. So how did the Pueblo people obtain the birds? To examine the birds' origin, scientists sequenced mitochondrial DNA found within macaw bones from two sites in New Mexico: Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region. Turns out, nearly three quarters of the birds had identical mitochondrial genome sequences--meaning the ancient birds came from the same maternal line. That suggests they were all the products of a breeding operation, perhaps in modern-day northern Mexico, rather than a random collection of wild-caught birds.