Mogollon culture

The Mogollon culture is an archaeological tradition of the south-western United States and northern Mexico, spread across southern New Mexico and Arizona, western Texas, and northern Sonora and Chihuahua. Its people built pit-house villages, later stone pueblos and cliff dwellings, and from about 200 CE to around 1450 developed one of the region's most distinctive traditions, famous above all for the painted pottery of its Mimbres branch. Pueblo nations including the Hopi, Zuni and Acoma connect themselves to it through oral history and ceramic traditions.

The culture borrows its name from New Mexico's Mogollon Mountains, which honour Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón, who governed the Spanish province there between 1712 and 1715. Emil Haury chose and defined the term in 1936, drawing on his digs of 1931, 1933 and 1934 at two New Mexico sites, Harris Village near the Mimbres River and a settlement on the upper San Francisco River. He showed that it differed from its neighbours, the Hohokam and the Ancestral Puebloans, in its brown coiled-and-scraped pottery, deep pit-houses and ceremonial buildings. Later research has broadly confirmed his view, and archaeologists also recognise distinct Mogollon styles of stone tools, settlement and burial.

How the Mogollon began is uncertain. One view links them to Desert Archaic peoples who had lived in the region since the late Pleistocene; another sees farming migrants from central Mexico arriving around 3500 BCE; a third traces them to the late Archaic Cochise culture, which adopted farming from the south. Archaeologists divide the sequence in different ways. A widely used scheme, put forward in 1955 by the archaeologist Joe Ben Wheat, sets out five periods from 200 CE to 1450, while a simpler one follows housing types: early pit-houses from 200 to 550, late pit-houses from 550 to 1000 and pueblos from 1000 to 1450. Some scholars carry the end date to the Spanish arrival around 1540.

The first Mogollon were foragers who also farmed, but during the first millennium CE they came to depend more on crops, especially maize. Early villages were small clusters of deep round or oval pit-houses, later shallower and rectangular, with larger semi-subterranean rooms for ceremonies. By the eleventh century, houses of rock and earth built at ground level had become common, and water-control works appear at Mimbres sites from the tenth to twelfth centuries. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries many communities moved into cliff dwellings, such as those preserved at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, set up in 1907.

The best-known regional variant is the Mimbres branch of south-western New Mexico, alongside others such as the Jornada, Reserve and Forestdale. During its Classic phase, around 1000 to 1130 or 1150, large pueblos of up to 150 rooms grew up around open plazas near well-watered floodplains. Potters painted bowls in black on white with bold geometric patterns and lively scenes of birds, fish, animals and people; some fish are species from the Gulf of California, hinting at long-distance contacts. Bowls placed over the faces of the dead were often pierced with a "kill hole", though wear marks show most were used in daily life. Their fame has driven looting of graves since the 1960s.

Mimbres pottery production ended around 1130 to 1150, and this was once read as the people vanishing. Recent research instead shows that the Mimbres valley lost much of its population while some communities stayed, adopted neighbouring pottery styles and moved into new kinds of settlement. Elsewhere, Mogollon pueblos continued to be occupied until about 1450 on most reckonings. The Apache later moved into much of the area from the north, while archaeologists see possible links between the Mogollon and the western pueblos of the Hopi and Zuni.

Our 800 and 900 maps draw the Mogollon as an approximate area in the Southwest; it marks a zone of shared archaeological traits, not a territory with fixed borders, and the culture both began earlier and continued later than these map years. Later peoples of the region, such as the Apache, appear on our maps from 1492.