Ancient history comes into focus

Across southern New Mexico, pieces of pottery or chipped stone scattered across the desert can hint at something much larger hidden beneath the surface. 

“Buried there, there may be an adobe pueblo,” said William Walker, a professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University. “There’s stuff everywhere.” 

That history is at the center of the 23rd Biennial Mogollon Archaeology Conference at NMSU, which brings researchers together for more than 30 papers and presentations on the Mimbres, Jornada Mogollon, northern Chihuahua, White Sands Missile Range, Fort Bliss and the Mogollon Rim. 

The gathering traces its beginnings back roughly 46 years to archaeologist Pat Beckett, the former owner of Coas Books. Walker said Beckett recognized that the Mogollon region occupied an important place in the history of the Southwest but lacked a conference of its own. 

Stretching through parts of Arizona, New Mexico and northern Chihuahua, the Mogollon region sits between other major cultural areas of the Southwest. Its location made it a crossroads for people, goods and ideas moving between Mexico, the Plains and communities farther north. 

Yet Walker said southern New Mexico has sometimes been treated as lying on the margins of Southwestern archaeology, in part because more visible sites such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde drew greater public attention. 

“Being the edge actually means that it’s kind of central to a lot of different places,” Walker said. “When things come up from Mexico, they come through the Jornada.” 

Researchers continue to examine those connections through ceramics, trade, migration, agriculture, and religious practices. Walker said advances in methods such as geochemical analysis have also allowed archaeologists to trace where ceramics originated and better understand how communities interacted. 

Among the researchers participating is Myles Miller of Versar Inc., who has spent decades studying Indigenous cultures across southern New Mexico and the Jornada region. Miller said material left behind in rock art, ceramics and carvings can offer a window into how communities understand their surroundings and their place within them. 

“The symbols that are in rock art, and on ceramics, and in different forms of material culture, carvings of shell and bone and stone, they reflect those engagements with the spiritual and natural world around them,” Miller said. 

Miller’s conference research addresses a longstanding archaeological problem: determining the age of painted rock art. He said a method developed by the late researcher Marvin Rowe allows tiny amounts of carbon to be extracted from pictograph paint and dated. 

The results, Miller said, are pushing the chronology of some Jornada-style imagery centuries earlier than researchers once assumed. Dates from the work, place examples at roughly A.D. 680 to 900, rather than around A.D. 1200 or 1300. 

“The rock imagery and the Jornada style of imagery is one of the oldest sophisticated rock art traditions in the Southwest,” Miller said. 

For Miller, the findings also add to a broader picture of communities that successfully adapted to the Chihuahuan Desert over long periods. He pointed to more than a millennium of consistency in the region’s ceramic traditions and said Jornada communities developed sophisticated ways of living with drought and an arid environment. 

“Sometimes we get myopic, looking at our own region, and all of these things are interconnected,” Miller said. 

That exchange of research is part of the purpose of the biennial gathering. Walker said this year’s presentations range from the movement of goods and animals such as parrots and turkeys to village organizations, religious institutions and the ways communities farmed in an unpredictable climate. 

The conference also includes work from neighboring archaeological traditions, including the Mimbres region, known for its distinctive black-and-white pottery, and sites along the Mogollon Rim. 

For Walker, bringing that work to Las Cruces offers residents a chance to reconsider a landscape whose archaeological record is not always easy to see. Greater awareness, he said, can also encourage preservation and involvement with local archaeological organizations and museum programs.