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, spring • 2009

The Mesa Verde Anasazi migrated to Cañada Alamosa and built a village on these cliffs, known as Pinnacle Ruin, that they could easily defend. (opposite) Archaeologist Karl Laumbach stands by the remains of one of the village’s structures.

Dennis and Trudy O’Toole purchased the Monticello Box Ranch in 1998.

Kelly Canyon, Victorio, and Pinnacle Ruin. Dennis, who oversaw archaeological programs during his career as a history museum director, walked Victorio before they bought the property, and “saw collapsed buildings and pottery just littering the ground.” Shortly thereafter, the O’Tooles founded the Cañada Alamosa Institute, and they established a partnership with Human Systems to study the entire Alamosa drainage—more than 728 square miles of Chihuahuan desert, grasslands, and forested uplands.

By the spring of 1999, Laumbach had devised a general research plan. Its central question was inspired by the mix of Anasazi and Mogollon ceramics on the surface of the sites: Did the Cañada Alamosa have a relatively stable and longlived formative population that borrowed from and adapted to the material culture and economics of adjacent areas, or was there a series of occupations and abandonments by various groups of people?

In June of that year, O’Toole and Laumbach held their first field school, excavating a room at Victorio with the help of six graduate students from Eastern New Mexico University. In addition to Laumbach and O’Toole, the project’s other principal investigators are University of Colorado archaeologist Steve Lekson, who has been excavating Pinnacle Ruin; Laumbach’s wife, Toni, curator at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, who directs the project’s ceramic analysis; and New Mexico Tech geologist Virginia T. McLemore, who identifies where the raw materials used to make the ceramics came from.

Cañada Alamosa was a frontier between the Anasazi and Mogollon regions. Archaeologists have found ceramics from surrounding areas at Cañada Alamosa’s four sites, indicating that its occupants interacted with people from those areas.

“here we have a TighT

little sequence, well-preserved,”

Laumbach says of Cañada Alamosa. The sequence spans four major Puebloan occupations—

Mimbres, Socorro, Tularosa, and Magdalena—that are represented at the four sites. (The

Mimbres culture was a subgroup of the Mogollon, while Socorro and Magdalena were subgroups of the Anasazi. Tularosa was related to both.) The archaeologists investigated the Montoya site in 2001, the year Earthwatch

Institute became the project’s chief sponsor, a relationship that continues to this day. In eight seasons, nearly 200 Earthwatch volunteers have participated in the investigation, and several of them have worked more than one season. The researchers discovered that Montoya was a periodically utilized Mimbres village made up of flimsy jacal structures. The age of the Mimbres ceramics (a.d. 1000-1130) indicates that Montoya is the oldest of the four sites. While working at Kelly Canyon in 2002 and 2003, the researchers discovered Socorro Black-onwhite ceramics, which provided the spring • 2009

first clue that a 12th-century Anasazi community, originating from the Rio Salado west of Socorro, migrated to the area. The ceramics suggest that Kelly Canyon was occupied from about 1100 to 1175. The researchers also found linear roomblocks with a kiva in front, an architectural style employed by the Anasazi in the Chaco Canyon region.

The evidence of the migrant community at Kelly Canyon led Laumbach to return to the Montoya site to investigate a masonry structure found among the jacales in 2001. The structure contained what Laumbach calls a “wonderful stratigraphic sequence” of three 12th-century occupations— Mimbres, Socorro, and Tularosa. The archaeologists found Mimbres Black-on-white sherds on the bottom floor, a mixture of Mimbres and Socorro Black-on-white on the second floor, and Socorro and Tularosa Black-on-white on the upper floor. This stratigraphic sequence supports the concept of a continuous, but changing, occupation of the canyon during the 12th century.

It’s thought that Victorio’s occupation starts when Kelly Canyon’s ends, because most of the former’s ceramics are Tularosa Phase (1175-1300). Victorio, which has over 450 rooms and is the largest of the four sites, has also offered evidence of pre-pueblo pithouse occupations. A pithouse at the site has been dated to approximately a.d. 740. Most of the ceramics associated with this early occupation are Mogollon, but there are also numerous sherds of Anasazi whitewares, indicating that the two cultures were interacting on the Cañada Alamosa frontier at this time.

The youngest site, Pinnacle Ruin, has carbon painted ceramics dating from 1240 to 1300 that strongly resemble those found in the Mesa Verde area. The archaeologists have also uncovered glaze-painted ceramics dating from 1300 to 1400 that may represent a later occupation.

The researchers reTurned To VicTorio

in 2005 to conduct a surface collection of artifacts, and they’ve been working there for the last three years. Archaeologist Delton Estes carefully extracts pieces of a pot from the site that, he says, “was their sink.” The bowl-shaped vessel has no bottom and was set into the floor of the structure so it could be used as a container. After collecting all the pieces, Estes examines the rock-hard impression left by the bowl, which he refers to as a “collar.” He then collects samples of this collar for pollen analysis, which can reveal what the environment was like at that time. Joshua Pfarr, an Eastern New Mexico University graduate student, recently found corn and squash pollen near the flood plain of the Rio Alamosa.

Researchers carefully break up hard soil with a metal pry bar and then sift it through a screen in search of tiny artifacts. They’ve found a few lithic tools, a piece of a small bone, and corrugated and painted ceramics, including a sherd with painted spots on the rim. “It’s been very hard-

fired,” Laumbach says as he turns it over. “It’s not anything I recognize off hand.” The artifacts are sorted, cleaned, and catalogued in a laboratory at the ranch in preparation for their analysis by volunteers at the Human Systems Research laboratory in Las Cruces.

The archaeologists initially assumed that Victorio’s size reflected a long, continuous occupation. But the evidence has shown that, while there are a few rooms from the early pueblo period, most of them were in use during the 13thcentury Tularosa Phase occupation. Finding the older rooms has been challenging, and Laumbach surmises that many were covered by later construction. He and his colleagues did find an early pithouse during the 2008 season when they discovered a floor and a fire pit more than six feet underground. Describing it as “the most important discovery we made this season,” Laumbach notes that the ceramics associated with the pithouse are predominantly Mogollon, but the style of the pithouse, which features what archaeologists refer to as a “ventilator shaft” that was remodeled from a Mogollon ramp entrance, is Anasazi. This appears to be another example of early interaction between the two cultures.

laumbach says The years of research

indicate that Cañada Alamosa was occupied on and off by different puebloan groups from a.d. 600 to 1400. The pithouse occupations appear to have ended around 900, and the area remained unoccupied for about 100 years. “There could have been some really severe flooding” during that time, says Laumbach. He also adds that the Anasazi may have been drawn to Chaco Canyon, which was taking shape then, just as the Mogollon could have migrated to emerging settlements in the nearby Mimbres Valley.

During the 11th century Mimbres settlers sporadically

Prehistory Revealed Through Pottery

The archaeologists’ conclusions about the various occupations at Cañada Alamosa are based, to a large extent, on their interpretation of the ceramic evidence. For example, they believe that a number of Anasazi migrated from the Mesa Verde region to Pinnacle Ruin because of the distinctive carbon-paint ceramics they’ve found there. Plants like Rocky Mountain bee weed and tansy mustard were boiled to a goo and then added to water to make carbon paint, a method that started around a.d. 1200 or earlier. Carbon paint makes blurred lines on clay, which is one of the signatures of Mesa Verde ceramics.

Most of the ceramics they’ve recovered are decorated with mineral paint, which is made by grinding iron oxide or manganese for pigment. When applied to pottery, mineral paint produces the sharp lines characteristic of Mimbres Black-on-white pottery. Though they’ve identified many of the ceramic styles, the archaeologists also want to know where they were made. This information would reveal the region’s production centers and suggest the extent of the trade networks through which goods traveled. To obtain that information, the researchers are identifying local and regional clay sources and comparing them with the clays used to fashion the pottery. The pottery clays are identified by instrumental neutron activation analysis, a process that entails bombarding the samples with neutrons to reveal their elements. The researchers have submitted 420 ceramic samples and 30 local clay samples to the University of Missouri for testing. The analysis is in the early stages, but so far the results show that many of the ceramics were produced outside of Cañada Alamosa in the Zuni and Socorro areas. —Denise Tessier

Soccoro Black-on-white Magdalena Black-on-white

Tularosa Black-on-white

Mimbres Black-on-white St. Johns Polychrome

These sherds represent the various ceramic styles found at Cañada Alamosa.

Archaeologist Delton Estes holds pieces of a bowl-like vessel that was discovered at the Victorio site. The vessel was intentionally embedded in the ground.

Earthwatch volunteers gather to review maps before beginning a day of excavating.

inhabited Cañada Alamosa. They traded with, and probably intermarried, the Anasazi living west of Socorro on the Rio Salado. Due to a drought in the early 12th century, the Anasazi came to Cañada Alamosa in search of water and, establishing the Kelly Canyon site, joined their Mimbres neighbors. By the time they moved to Victorio in the early 1200s, the two people became virtually indistinguishable.

By then, the production centers of their respective ceramic types, Mimbres and Socorro, were no longer making pottery, according to Laumbach. The preponderance of Tularosa Black-on-white as well as St. Johns Polychrome pottery indicates that Victorio’s occupants turned to a different production center, the Zuni area, to acquire their paintdecorated ceramics.

In the mid-1200s, another group, the Mesa Verde Anasazi, migrated to Pinnacle Ruin and built a terraced village on a defensible, rocky promontory one-half mile upstream from Victorio. Many people were abandoning the Mesa Verde region at that time due to factors such as climate change and conflict, and the location of the migrants’ village could have been an expression of fear. In any case, the archaeologists suspect that the occupants of the two sites were never friendly, and both ultimately abandoned the valley.

Laumbach, O’Toole and their colleagues have found that new socioeconomic systems were created as old ones were maintained at Cañada Alamosa. They continue to examine the unpredictable details of life on the prehistoric frontier.

DENISE TESSIER is a New Mexico-based journalist and historian who has written for the New Mexico Independent, the Albuquerque Journal, and the New York Times.

For more information about the Cañada Alamosa Project, visit the Web sites www.humansystemsresearch.org and www.earthwatch.org