Pueblo Peoples on the Pajarito Plateau by David E. Stuart

Author:David E. Stuart [Stuart, David E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9780826349125
Google: DjHVswUdKxsC
Publisher: UNM Press
Published: 2011-02-16T02:39:02+00:00

A mineral-painted Chaco Black-on-white mug dating to about 1000 CE, from site BC 59 10/10. Courtesy Michael P. Marshall, Maxwell Museum Collections.

The Red Mesa Valley, one of Chaco’s earliest and most reliable corn-producing districts, had already begun to languish as its better soils were depleted by two centuries of continuous harvesting. Corn depletes soil nitrogen, something that is still a problem in contemporary agriculture. Thus, the efficiency of growing corn, even in once-favored localities, was in decline. Not surprisingly, an eleventh-hour push took place toward horticultural expansion as far east in New Mexico as the Pecos River valley.

But these large, scattered populations, which the Chaco road system never effectively incorporated, suffered from inefficiencies of transportation and local food shortages. Archaeological evidence from the middle Pecos Valley shows that as the first small waves of desperate farmers moved out of the declining, overcrowded Red Mesa Valley, those who pioneered farmsteads on the eastern frontier in the late 1000s faced both new agricultural hardships and confrontations with hostile, non-Puebloan plains people, who were still primarily gatherers and hunters.

Small horticultural settlements also sprang up at this time in the middle Rio Grande Valley and in the Mora area to the northeast. They repre sent the greatest geographical spread of horticultural colonization until the 1700s, when Spanish farmers recolonized much of the upper Pecos Valley. Some of these ancient farmsteads combined a few shallow pithouses with adobe or wattle-and-daub, above-ground rooms. Two to six structures were common, and construction techniques tended toward the expedient—that is, the efficient. Local variations of gray pottery typically appear in these archaeological sites along with a combination of local black-on-white bowls and imports from elsewhere. The imports can include variants of Mogollon pottery from southwestern New Mexico; black-on-whites from farther south along the Rio Grande, between Albu querque and Socorro; and scarce, late Chacoan black-on-whites. Plant and animal remains in these settlements point to a mixed economy similar to that of mid- to late Basket maker times—the 400s to 600s CE—in the Four Corners country. Researchers find some corn and lots of gathered foodstuffs, including yuccas, agaves, mesquite, chokecherries, wolfberries, and all the productive grasses. Unlike in the core Chacoan world of the time, they also find bones of large game animals, showing that hunters in the east gained renewed access to such prey, including bison at the margins of the high plains of eastern New Mexico.

Other emigrants from the Chacoan core, including some from the Red Mesa Valley, began to move into uplands surrounding the San Juan Basin—the foothills of the Chuska and Zuni Mountains—as early as the mid-1000s. Although few in number, these people, too, built pithouses and pursued a mixed subsistence economy almost identical to that of their Basketmaker forebears. In both cases of relocation—to the San Juan uplands and to the Rio Grande and beyond—the archaeological evidence strongly implies a lifestyle refocused on low-intensity labor, low-cost construction, and life on a frontier with neither elaborate infrastructure nor elaborate social structure. In short, these people embraced efficiency and eschewed risk.

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