The Mogollon Culture

The Mogollon culture appears to have developed from an earlier culture, the Cochise, an archaic culture of small nomadic hunting and gathering bands who lived in the mountainous parts of the Southwestern United States. The introduction of pottery, probably from the south, marked the beginnings of the culture we call Mogollon. The Mogollon lived in the mountainous region of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico from about 200 B.C. to 1450 A.D. The Mogollon culture was named by University of Arizona archaeologist Emil Haury after the Mogollon Mountain area of New Mexico. This group of people first lived in pithouses and made a plain brown pottery.

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Map of Prehistoric Southwestern Cultures

The type and density of Mogollon houses and villages changed over time, but they always appeared to value a shared community life. The earliest Mogollon villages were groups of several pithouses. Early Mogollon pithouses were quite deep and usually round or oval. Pithouses are houses dug into the ground surface with stick and thatch roofs supported by posts and beams and plastered on the outside with dirt and clay. Some early Mogollon sites had a pit house that was three times larger than the others in the village.

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Archaeologists believe this was the beginning of communal rooms sometimes called kivas, found in many later Mogollon villages and sites.

Pit homes gradually became more elaborate and rectangular in shape. Villages at first were on hilltops or mesas near the river valleys, possibly because they were easier to defend. Later, larger villages were located near rivers which put them closer to their gardens. Although the people grew corn, beans, and squash, they were also hunters and gatherers.

Hunting parties, armed with the traditional spears and atlatls (spear-throwers) in the earliest centuries and with bows and arrows in the later centuries, killed mule deer and wild turkeys in the mountains. They trapped muskrat and beaver along the streams and hunted jackrabbits in the desert basins.

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Drawing of an atlatl used to throw a spear.

Gathering parties, carrying their baskets, climbed the mountains to harvest wild fruits and seeds. Preserved pinyon pine nuts, walnuts, acorns, prickly pear, wolfberry, sunflower seeds, goosefoot, juniper berries, mariposa bulbs, and canyon grapes have been found at Mogollon sites.

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Mogollon pottery was made of iron-rich volcanic clays, which almost always fired to a dark brown color. Vessels were at first unpainted and decorated only with tooled grooves. Then the brown pottery was decorated with broad red lines. Later, pottery was made from white clay and painted with red geometric designs.

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Mogollon brown pottery

A typical family’s household possessions probably would have included plain brown or reddish ceramic bowls, pots, jars and other vessels; yucca - woven baskets; grinding and crushing stones; reed or straw mats; and fur blankets. Individual possessions could include clothing made from animal skins or plant fibers and jewelry made from shell, bone or semi-precious stones. The Mogollon used bone and stone tools such as awls, needles, projectile points, drills, knives, choppers, axes, and atlatls.

After the year 900 A.D., several changes occurred in the Mogollon culture. Archaeologists believe that the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) culture absorbed much of the Mogollon culture, perhaps as a result of migration. With influence from the north and an increase in population, the Mogollon began to give up their traditional

Arizona Department of Education 3 The Mogollon Culture pithouses and started to build communities of above-ground pueblos like the Ancestral Puelblo (Anasazi). They were usually one- or two- story clusters of rooms, often with common walls. They built small villages with four to six rooms in a straight line or in a square. In a few instances, they built large pueblos with 500 or more rooms which faced an open plaza. Some Mogollon groups resided in cliff dwellings during the 13th and 14th centuries. Another change was that their red- on-white pottery design changed into the style for which the Mogollon are most famous: the black-on-white Mimbres pottery.

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Mimbres black-on-white pottery

Ironically, for reasons which archaeologists do not know, the rise of Mogollon pueblo communities marked the beginning of the end of the culture. Archaeologists believe that the cause might have been drought, overuse of resources, warfare, disease, or some combination of those events. Whatever the reason, the western Mogollon peoples began abandoning their communities in several areas in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico early in the 12th century. Some were able to stay until the early 1400s. The

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exact reasons for the abandonment and the destinations of the Mogollon remain a mystery in southwestern archaeology.

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Mogollon Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico

Adapted from: Rose Houk. Mogollon. Southwest Parks and Monuments Association. 1992. Tucson, AZ. ISBN 1-877856-11-8 http://www.beloit.edu/~museum/logan/southwest/mogollon/introduction.htm http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/ind_new/ind6.html http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/northamerica/culture/s.w.uscultures/m ogollon.html

Standards Connections: Grade 6 Social Studies: Strand 1 Concept 2 PO 3 Reading: Strand 1 Concept 4, Strand 3 Concept 1

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