The Mogollon: Prehistoric People of the Desert Southwest (original) (raw)

The desert basins, dissected by mountain washes and streams and by a very few rivers, lie between the elevations of 1000 and 4500 feet. They comprise a mix of desert grasslands, various scrub brushlands, mesquite dunelands, sand dunefields, lava flows, playas (shallow lake beds) and river basins. Black gramma, creosote bush, tarbush, honey mesquite, soaptree and datil yucca, lechuguilla, ocotillo, common cholla, sotol, various prickly pear cacti, hedgehog cacti and numerous other species – many of them useful as food and resources to the Mogollon – form a crazy quilt of vegetation across the desert sands. Cottonwoods and willows formed dense woodland environments, or "bosques," along the banks of rivers and some drainages. Average precipitation now ranges from less than 8 to as much as some 12 inches, most of it falling in the July, August and September. Maximum summer temperatures hover near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and winter temperatures can drop to well below freezing.

In addition to wild edible and utilitarian plants, the mountain flanks and desert basins harbored a thriving community of game, including bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer, white-tail deer, antelope, beaver, badger, blacktail jackrabbits, desert cottontails, turkeys and various other species. Rock exposures served as quarries for the raw materials for making projectile points and tools. Clay exposures provided the raw material for making ceramic vessels and figurines.

Even as the Mogollon people gradually adopted village life and farming, they would continue to count on the ranges and basins to supplement their larder and provide essential material resources. They would never be able to rely on corn, beans, squash and other crops to the exclusion of wild plant foods because the Mogollon region held relatively few areas suitable for agriculture. Most of them occurred along lower mountain river valleys, along the few desert river basins and near a few desert playas. Even those areas which were suitable experienced erratic rainfall year in and year out.

The Mogollon Culture

Several Mogollon groups clustered within roughly 100 miles east and west of the New Mexico and Arizona border and extended some unknown distance southward into Chihuahua and Sonora. These westernmost groups – with their signature brownware ceramics – give definition to the Mogollon culture, but another group, closely related culturally and called the Jornado Mogollon, spanned another two hundred miles eastward, almost to the Great Plains, and some unknown distance southward, into Chihuahua. The Mogollon groups, widely separated in different environments, progressed at different rates through three basic phases of cultural development.

In the first phase, which began sometime around the start of the first millennium, the western groups probably still accepted agriculture somewhat grudgingly even though it had been around for at least 2000 years. Some lived in rock alcoves or caves. Others, probably extended families of a few dozen people, built small hamlets of scattered lodges atop easily defensible knolls, ridges and bluffs, overlooking their fields. They sometimes erected crude fortified walls to help protect their communities. They may have lived in fear of raids by nomadic bands who still clung to a predominantly hunting and gathering way of life.

The early Mogollon lived in semi-subterranean lodges, or "pithouses," which consisted of excavated holes typically covered by domed roofs. The holes, roughly circular in shape, measured two to five feet deep, with a diameter of 10 to 15 feet. The roofs, made of brush and grass with a thick mud plaster cap, rested either on four upright forked posts set in a square or on a single upright post set in the center and other posts set at the perimeter. A ramped crawlway or a stepped doorway served as an entrance.

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.

A typical family’s household possessions would include plain brown or reddish ceramic bowls, pots, jars and other vessels; yucca- or sotol-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 Mogollon stored food, including grain from crops and seeds from wild plants, in bowl-sized to barrel-sized pits excavated inside or immediately outside their homes. They probably covered the floors of the larger storage pits with rough planking, and they capped the tops with flat stones. They sometimes buried family members, tightly flexed, in the large interior storage pits, and they continued to live in their lodge, above the remains.

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, with ramped or stepped entrances, usually faced easterly. Perhaps all 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. Some had interior storage pits. A few had parallel floor grooves, apparently formed by logs which might have provided mooring for tautly stretched animal hide foot drums.

In cadence with the seasons and with the inspiration of elaborate ritual, families planted corn, beans, squash, cotton and perhaps other crops along river banks, in washes and on bluffs, hoping that any failure in one location would be offset by success in another. Children likely watched over the crops, chasing away raiding rodents and birds. The Mogollon gathered their crops, presumably into their woven baskets, and carried them back to their villages for initial processing and caching. They celebrated good harvests with ceremony and joy.

Hunting parties, armed with the traditional spears and atlatl’s 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. (We usually think of buffalo as an animals of the plains, not the Chihuahuan Desert, but a few years ago, my wife, with a group of archaeologists, visited a prehistoric buffalo kill site in the heart of Mogollon country, a few miles north of our border with Mexico. Buffalo bones still litter the area.) The Mogollon hunters also trapped wild turkeys well up into the mountains, muskrat and beaver along the streams, and blacktail jackrabbits in the desert basins.

Gathering parties, equipped with woven baskets, ascended the mountains to harvest wild fruits and seeds. They likely picked currants and berries from alpine meadows; wild raspberries and elderberries in the Douglas fir and aspen forests; acorns, juniper berries, manzanita "apples" and chokecherries in the ponderosa pine and Gambel oak zone; pinyon nuts, acorns, grapes, mulberries and many other fruits from the pygmy forests. In the desert basins, they harvested the fruit and the roots of the yuccas, bloom stalks of the agave, the fruits and pads of the prickly pear cacti, the seed pods of the devilsclaws, the beans of the honey mesquite and the acorns of the shinnery oak. In both the mountains and desert basins, they gathered plant fibers and barks for use in manufacturing basketry, sandals, clothing and cradles.

In the mountains and deserts, medicine men and shamans collected plants they could use for medicines, for instance, ephedra, manzanita, barberry and ceanothus, or for vision-inducing narcotics, for instance, mescal and sacred datura.

Near the villages, we presume – we don’t know how the Mogollon people divided their work – that men and women both planted and harvested their crops, possibly directing water through small ditches to irrigate their fields.

We presume that the women gathered clay from nearby sources, coiled clay "ropes" into various vessel shapes, polished the moist surfaces with scapers and smooth stones, added minimal if any decoration on the brown or reddish surfaces, and fired the vessels in hot coals. We might also presume that the women, in a kind of gossipy community, used mortars and pestles and milling basins (metates) and hand stones (manos) to pound and grind grains and seeds into flour for cooking. We can imagine that they wove plant fibers, turning them into baskets, sandals and cradles, that they fleshed and cured hides, sewing them into clothing. We can assume that the women cared for the children.