jornada mogollon culture

“Pottery associated with the Jornada-Mogollon culture, such as El Paso Polychrome and Chupadero black-on-white were found at the site.” This quote came from a State of New Mexcio document that outlined research problems that future archaeological research in Southeast New Mexico should examine.  It discussed an archaeological report of a site on the southern Llano Estacado on private land in Texas, and that the landowners did not allow the researchers to give the site’s location in the report.

 I was vaguely familiar with the Jornada-Mogollon culture – I knew that from 1000 A.D. to 1300 A.D they lived in pithouses and farmed corn, as well as hunted game and harvested wild plants. Archaeologists have decided that the artifacts of the people of that time that lived in the area from Chupadera Mesa in central Mexico, down to near Casa Grandes in Mexico, and from the Arizona border to the Texas-New Mexico border had enough similarities to be lumped together in what is named the Jornada-Mogollon culture.

A week or two later, while browsing in the Midland Archaeological Society’s (MAS) library, I picked up another journal with an essay by Polly Schaafsma, whose book “Indian Rock Art of the Southwest” is a comprehensive review of the artistic expressions of the prehistoric cultures of the region.

 In this essay, I found, “The site in the Hondo Valley near Roswell has two painted, horned, and feathered serpents painted on the walls of a rectangular room. Nearby were rounded pithouses. It was as if a mission of one culture was in a village of another culture.” This ignited my imagination – did one prehistorical Indian group proselytize another Indian group in the manner of the Spanish missions in historical times?   

I returned to the MAS library and found a special issue of the El Paso Archaeological Society authored by a Dr. Kay Sutherland. Within a few minutes I wondered if what I found might be “cuckoo science,” so I quickly googled her. I found that she and Schaafsma believed that the Jornada-Mogollon adopted elements of Mesoamerican (the cultures of the Toltec, Maya, Olmec) and began what is now known as the kachina religion of the Pueblo Indians in northern New Mexico. I also found that their theories were not widely accepted by academic archaeologists. They were not the first to propose the theory. Elsie Parsons first proposed the idea in the 1930’s.

Trade existed between the ancestral Pueblos and the city-states of Mexico without a doubt. Macaw feathers and copperbells from Mexico have been found in many Anasazi sites. Turquoise and obsidian from New Mexico have been found in Mesoamerican sites. 

Sutherland bases her theory on the multi-colored pictograph masks found at Hueco Tanks 30 miles east of El Paso. She believes them to be representative of Tlaloc, a Mesoamerican diety of rain. Twenty-four such masks are found there. Masks with similar design elements, but not the colors, are found throughout the Jornada-Mogollon region, and variations of the theme are found throughout the Pueblo region of  Northern New Mexico.

Both Sutherland and Schaafsma consider feathered and horned serpent images to be derived from Quetzalcoatl, another Mesoamerican diety associated with underground waters, springs, and irrigation. Rock art horned serpents are found near water throughout the region. Another image in common between the rock art of the Jornada-Mogollon and the Pueblo peoples is that of the “stepped cloud,”  which has two steps on both sides of the blocky image.

It is my understanding that both Sutherland and Schaafsma believe that as the Anasazi culture began to decline because of drought, war, and environmental degradation in the 1100’s the Chaco Canyon complex lost its role as the major trading center of the items mentioned above, and that Casa Grandes (Paquime) in northern Mexico began to flourish in that role. They believe that priest traders began traveling the region, not only bringing macaw feathers and copper bells but also better strains of corn. As they traded the items they talked of their gods and their associated rituals.

The western Jornada-Mogollon had learned irrigation techniques of the Hohokam of Arizona, who had already adopted some of the religious elements of the Mexican city-states. The Jornada-Mogollon retained their egalitarian social structure (whether this was in response to the decay of the elitist Anasazi societies or the continuation of lifestyles of the hunter-gather is unknown.) Over time the Jornada-Mogollon developed the kachina religion and when it was introduced to the Northern New Mexico Anasazi refugees  the new pueblos along the Rio Grande adopted it because they remembered the abuses of the priest-kings of the Anasazi. They also adopted the irrigation techniques of the western Jornada-Mogollon.

The pueblos there remained politically independent, and religion became part of every individual’s life. Every member of every pueblo participates in rituals throughout the year, portraying the kachinas as masked dancers, and in the dance trance enter the spirit world. The elitist priest kings were the only ones that entered the spirit world of the Anasazi (and the Mesoamerican cultures.) No pueblo became all powerful. 

It makes for a good story – it sounds logical. It probably can never be proven, and archaeologists will probably debate the theory for years. The eastern Jornada-Mogollon towns along the Pecos disappeared by 1300. The Jumanos of the 1500’s and 1600’s might be descendants of the eastern Jornada-Mogollon. Buffalo increased on the Llano Estacado during the 1300’s, and some of the farmers might have become hunters again, and traded buffalo meet to the Pueblo peoples, while others began living near Presidio del Norte, the Concho River Valley, and Gran Quivira where the Spanish found them. 

How has the landscape changed over time? Who were the people that lived and visited here? How did they comprehend the world? What were some of the issues they dealt with as interacted with other people?  Envisioning a trader from Casas Grandes wandering onto the Llano Estacado promoting a new religion makes a filled-in pithouse under a mesquite come alive!