Landscape and Environment
The roots of the earliest “New Mexicans,” the current day Puebloans of the Rio Grande valley, can be traced to two of three groups referred to as the Desert People. These nomadic people of the ancient hunting and gathering life changed location with the seasonal movement of game and the ripening of wild plant life.
The Mogollon, the Hohokam, and the Ancestral Pueblo people all belonged to the same cultural congregation but occupied different environmental regions. Several Mogollon groups clustered within roughly a hundred miles east and west of the New Mexico and Arizona border and extended some unknown distance southward into Chihuahua and Sonora. The heart of the ancestral Pueblo region lay across the southern Colorado Plateau and the upper Rio Grande drainage. It spanned northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado—a land of forested mountain ranges, stream-dissected mesas, arid grasslands and occasional river bottoms.
The Hohokam and their cultural cousins, the Patayan, lived in the relentlessly hot Sonora desert country of south-central and western Arizona, southeastern California and northern Sonora.
Each group had to adapt to the growing seasons, temperature ranges, rainfall patterns, resources, game and wild food plant communities of their region. This in turn meant that each culture had to develop their own farming practices, technological capabilities, hunting strategies, gathering techniques and food preparation methods aligned with their surroundings.
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Desert USA
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Hunting
Mogollon hunting parties, armed with the traditional spears hurled with the throwing device we call the "atlatl," in the earliest centuries, and with bows and arrows in the latter centuries, killed mule deer along the mountain flanks and took buffalo, or bison, from the northern Chihuahuan Desert.
They flaked stone to make projectile points and tools; fashioned spears and atlatls and later, bows and arrows; and ground stream cobbles to make ax heads. They trained their sons in the use of their weapons, the language of the trail, and the art of the hunt.
The early Ancestral Pueblo people emerged from their 6000-year-old Desert Archaic hunting and gathering traditions about the turn of the first millennium. They began to settle down although they continued to engage in seasonal hunts and to wild-plant harvests.
Apparently unaware of the bow and arrow, the men hunted the larger game animals with the spear, hurled with the atlatl for greater strength. Large game, including mountain sheep, elk, mule deer and black bear occupied the mountain slopes, valleys and meadows.
Farming, Food and Home
Origins
The roots of the earliest “New Mexicans,” the current day Puebloans of the Rio Grande valley, can be traced to two of three groups referred to as the Desert People. These nomadic people of the ancient hunting and gathering life changed location with the seasonal movement of game and the ripening of wild plant life.
The Mogollon, the Hohokam, and the Ancestral Pueblo people all belonged to the same cultural congregation but occupied different environmental regions. Several Mogollon groups clustered within roughly a hundred miles east and west of the New Mexico and Arizona border and extended some unknown distance southward into Chihuahua and Sonora. The heart of the ancestral Pueblo region lay across the southern Colorado Plateau and the upper Rio Grande drainage. It spanned northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado—a land of forested mountain ranges, stream-dissected mesas, arid grasslands and occasional river bottoms.
The Hohokam and their cultural cousins, the Patayan, lived in the relentlessly hot Sonora desert country of south-central and western Arizona, southeastern California and northern Sonora.
Each group had to adapt to the growing seasons, temperature ranges, rainfall patterns, resources, game and wild food plant communities of their region. This in turn meant that each culture had to develop their own farming practices, technological capabilities, hunting strategies, gathering techniques and food preparation methods aligned with their surroundings.
Mogollon Culture
The Mogollon culture was named after the Mogollon area of southwestern New Mexico. This first phase of the culture was characterized by pit houses, dwellings that formed the basic domestic architecture in the area for more than a thousand years. They were built by forming a pit in the ground, pounding the dirt floor and roofing it over with a framework of heavy sticks which were covered with grass, sticks and earth.
In cadence with the seasons, families planted corn, beans, squash, cotton and perhaps other crops along riverbanks, in washes and on bluffs, hoping that any failure in one location would be offset by success in another. Crops were gathered into woven baskets, and carried back to the villages for initial processing and caching. Gathering parties, also equipped with woven baskets, ascended the mountains to harvest wild fruits and seeds.
Some families built cook fires in the centers of their pithouses, sometimes in no more than a depression in the floor, and other times in clay- or stone-lined hearths. Other families built their fires outside, although they may have carried fire-heated stones inside to radiate warmth into their lodges on cold winter nights.
In the second phase of Mogollon development, the western Mogollon bands apparently felt less threatened by their enemies, and began building their villages in more accessible areas nearer their fields. Some began to build larger pithouses, rectangular in shape, with well-finished interiors. They also built larger kivas near the center of the villages.
Rather than their signature brownware ceramics, potters began to experiment with more highly decorated pottery, producing new designs with red paint or brown clay backgrounds and later, with red or black paint on white backgrounds.
In the third phase of development, which began at about the end of the first millennium, archaeologists believe that the Mogollon experienced an intensification of influence from the ancestral Pueblo peoples, either as a result of migrations or a cultural “budding” process. With stimulus from the north and an increase in population, the Mogollon people began to give up their traditional pit house lodging, and like the ancestral Pueblo peoples, they started to build communities of above-ground masonry structures, one-or two story clusters of rooms, often with common walls.
The new, above-ground, more populous Mogollon towns now cultivated larger fields, raised larger crops and constructed larger ditch-fed irrigation systems. They cached food, not in underground storage pits or large pots, but in masonry rooms with rock slab floors.
After the early innovations, the Mogollon culture evolved very little and was gradually swallowed up by the more dynamic cultures of the north. Archaeologists speculate that the collapse of the culture may have been attributable to drought, resource exhaustion, warfare, disease, religious system collapse, "greener pastures" or some combination. In any event, the western Mogollon peoples began abandoning their communities in several areas in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico early in the 12th century. By about 1450 they had merged physically and culturally with the ancestral Pueblo peoples.
Ancestral Puebloan Culture
The earliest traces of Pueblo culture are reflected in characteristic kinds of basketry, (the culture is sometimes called Basketmakers), sandals, art, tools, architecture, settlement patterns, and agriculture. According to Pueblo oral traditions, different groups came from different directions and points of origin before joining together to form the clans and communities of today.
The ancestral Puebloan homeland was centered in the Four Corners region of northwest New Mexico and northeast Arizona, and in adjacent areas of Colorado and Utah, where their occupation lasted until 1280 or so. By 1300 the population centers had shifted south, to the Rio Grande Valley in north-central New Mexico and the Mogollon Rim in central Arizona, where related people had already been living for centuries.
The early Pueblo peoples lived in shallow depressions in the ground covered by a canopy of brush and mud called pithouses. They did not make pottery during this period, but they did raise Meso-American corn and squash with dry farming and some flood irrigation. The introduction of corn allowed the ancestral Pueblo peoples to settle in one area. Over several hundred years, the agriculture of the Ancestral Pueblo people advanced to the point that they could live and sustain themselves in permanent villages.
About the middle of the first millennium, the Ancestral Pueblo people quickened their pace of change and increased the diversity within their culture. They began to build some larger villages, with far more storage bins, possibly signifying increased yields from their fields. Reflecting growing populations and increasing crop yields, they began building still larger and now more nearly permanent villages, which they set in clusters of structures around plazas. They occupied their villages throughout the year, though hunters, in pursuit of game and possible assertion of territorial claims, sometimes occupied temporary campsites some distances from their villages. As more serious farmers, they began to improve the growing conditions of particular fields by terracing, irrigation, and gridding. The Ancestral Pueblo people continued to hunt and gather to supplement their crops, which were always subject to failure in an arid land with capricious rainfall.
Three important changes took place before A.D. 750: the old atlatl (spear thrower) that had been used to propel darts (small spears) from time immemorial was replaced by the bow and arrow; the bean was added to corn and squash to form a major supplement to the diet; and the people began to make pottery.
By A.D. 750 these farming and pottery-making people in their stable villages were on the threshold of the lifestyle that we think of as being typically Puebloan, and from this time on we call them Pueblos.
Chaco Canyon
It has been theorized that Chaco Canyon served as a Central Place or ceremonial nexus for its outlying communities, connected to the core by a network of converging roads. The Chaco Canyon great houses communicated with their "outliers" by way of signaling stations perched on the crests of hills. The territory included nearly 40,000 square miles, an area larger than Scotland. The Chaco Canyon Great Houses stood as the Puebloan equivalent to England’s Buckingham Palace or France’s Versailles, built many centuries later.
The almost perfectly D-shaped Pueblo Bonito, the largest and most celebrated of the Chaco Canyon Great Houses, stood five stories in height along its back perimeter rooms. Located in the canyon on the north side, it faced south and encompassed a large plaza. At its peak, it had more than 700 rooms, thirty-seven family kivas, and two community kivas, or Great Kivas. Built in several stages, it covered more than four and one half acres. Over time, workers shaped an estimated one million blocks of sandstone weighing a total of some 30,000 tons to construct the walls of Pueblo Bonito. According to a University of Arizona study, the workers hauled more than 200,000 spruce and fir timbers more than fifty miles, from the Chuska Mountains to the west and the San Mateo Mountains to the south, to construct floors and roofs. Chaco and its communities shared a common ideology, which almost certainly revolved around agriculture, astronomical observations, the seasons, water and hoped-for prosperity, prayed for and celebrated through ancient hunting and gathering rituals.
By the middle of the 12th century, possibly as a result of some combination of drought, overpopulation, depleted resources and discredited political and religious leadership, the Chaco Phenomenon collapsed. The population scattered, probably in a series of migrations. To the south of the Chaco and Kayenta regions, immigrants from areas in decline apparently settled the Hopi villages in northeastern Arizona and the Zuni, Acoma and Laguna villages in west central New Mexico.
To the east of Chaco Canyon, in the upper Rio Grande drainage with its more dependable water flows, the ancestral Pueblo populations began to increase during the 13th century, presumably a result of displacement from the waning Chaco and Mesa Verde regions. True to their roots, the new immigrants raised large, multistoried pueblos, some with populations in the thousands, along both sides of tributaries as well as the main stream of the river.
It is the pueblos of northwestern Arizona and western New Mexico and those of the upper Rio Grande drainage which greeted the Spanish expeditions into the Southwest in the 16th century.
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Desert USA
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Arts and Crafts
In both the mountains and desert basins, the Mogollon gathered plant fibers and barks. They wove the plant fibers, turning them into baskets, sandals and cradles, and fleshed and cured hides, sewing them into clothing. The women gathered clay from nearby sources, coiled clay "ropes" into various vessel shapes, polished the moist surfaces with scrapers and smooth stones, added minimal if any decoration on the brown or reddish surfaces, and fired the vessels in hot coals.
A typical Mogollon family’s household possessions would include plain brown or reddish ceramic bowls, pots, jars and other vessels; yucca-or stool-fiber woven baskets and cradles; grinding and crushing stones; fire drills and tongs; and grass beds, reed or straw mats, and feather or rabbit fur blankets. Individual possessions could include clothing made from animal skins or plant fibers; shoes and belts made from woven yucca fibers: pendants, necklaces, rings and bracelets made from shell, bone or semi-precious stones; awls, needles, fleshing tools, flaking tools and other tools made from bone; projectile points, drills, knives, choppers, axes and scrapers chipped from stone; and atlatl-spear-thrower-weights, balls, disks and pipes made from ground stone.
The Ancestral Pueblo people did not make and use pottery until centuries after their southern neighbors did, but they did raise the ancient craft of basket making to a high art. They made one style of basket from tightly coiled pliable plant fibers and another from plaited plant fiber, and fashioned their baskets into a wide array of shapes and sizes, often incorporating elaborate designs into the texture. The baskets were used not only for carriage of possessions, preparation of meals and offerings in burials, but also for sifting of seeds and flour, storage of grain and personal and ceremonial items, and the transportation of water.
Their early pottery was at first, a simple gray ware with a corrugated surface, and later, decorated gray and white wares. As their villages grew, they turned increasingly to pottery as their containers and cooking vessels of choice, and their age-old skills in basket making began to decline.
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Desert USA
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Ceremonies and Celebrations
In the heart of their hamlets, the Mogollon built larger semisubterranean structures which probably served as community ceremonial structures, or kivas. With roughly circular or D-shaped floor plans, the kivas, contained articles of ritual, for instance, clay effigies of humans or animals, prayer sticks of shamans, the claws of powerful animals, stone pipes for wild tobacco, colored mineral ingredients for body paints, crystals of quartz, and stones with exotic shapes. Most had central fire hearths.
When their Creator, sometimes called “The Grandmother,” summoned the Ancestral Pueblo peoples from the underworld through a portal, or sipapu, onto earth’s surface, she directed them to find the “Center, or Middle, Place” to build their pueblos. She spoke of both a geographical and a spiritual core, a location which promised harmony and balance. She imbued them with a high regard for the resources of the earth, recognition of the importance of direction and village orientation, a deep awareness of the march of the seasons, veneration for spirituality and sacred places, and a reverence for their origins.
Probably all Ancestral Pueblo people anticipated and marked the summer and winter solstices. The importance of astronomy to all ancient cultures stemmed from a practical need to establish a precise method for telling time, monitoring agricultural events, performing religious ceremonies, and regulating governmental activities. Early people discovered that the progression of the seasons was matched to the rhythmic motions of the heavens, and that the sky was a far more accurate indicator of these cycles than making systematic observation of the weather. As in many other agricultural societies, important rituals were keyed to annual celestial events like the solstices and equinoxes. Among the most famous solstice markers is the so-called "Sun Dagger" at Chaco Canyon.
Acknowledgement:
Desert USA
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