Life on the Frontier Cañada Alamosa was once a frontier between the territories of two of the Southwest’s major prehistoric cultures, the Mogollon and the Anasazi. What happened when these two cultures interacted? By Denise Tessier Photos by Liz Lopez To reach the archaeologically rich canyon known as Cañada Alamosa, visitors must ford the Alamosa River dozens of times.The river flows year-round, fed by a robust warm spring. The water is what lured prehistoric people to this southwestern New Mexico landscape that lies between the territories of two muchstudied cultures—the Mogollon to the south and the Anasazi to the north. Over a 10-year period, archaeologists with two New Mexico-based organizations, the Cañada Alamosa Institute and Human Systems Research, Inc., have investigated four sites in this area, concluding that Cañada Alamosa is a classic frontier site, or “zone of interaction,” where people lived for hundreds of years. “Frontiers tend to be the termination point for migration streams,” says archaeologist Karl Laumbach, the associate director of research and education for Human Systems, which is located in Las Cruces. On frontiers, cultures sometimes came together to “create something new.” At other times they remained at arm’s-length. Both scenarios seem to have played out at Cañada Alamosa. While doing research in the Cañada Alamosa in the 1980s and early 1990s, Laumbach and his colleagues discovered large ruins on private land that were in danger of being looted. In 1998, Dennis and Trudy O’Toole bought the Monticello Box Ranch, a 5,000-acre spread in the canyon that contains the four sites, known as Montoya,
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spring • 2009
