Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1990 - 93

By Stephen H. Lekson

network of mountain brooks threads through
the vast Gila National Forest in southwestern
New Mexico. These streams feed the region's
A
major rivers, the Gila, Mimbres, and Rio
in turn have created narrow zones of ferwhich
Grande,
tile land on the plains. Today little of this arable land is
farmed, and much of the mountain water is diverted to
the copper mines and smelters that are the industrial
base of the local economy. The parched grasslands that
survive on a scant ten inches of rain per year are now
used as pastures for ranching.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century
farming towns that once existed along the riverbanks
were built over the ruins of still earlier farming communities. Sherds of striking black-on-white pottery litter
the surface of these early ruins, identifying the ancient
farmers as belonging to a culture we call the Mimbres,
the Spanish name for the willows that line the life-sustaining rivers.
The Mimbres are famous for the designs on their pottery that combine intricate geometric motifs with pictures of people, animals, mythical creatures, and scenes
of Mimbres life. Mimbres art mixes familiar subjects hunting scenes, warriors, bugs - with those that are
unfamiliar - fish with antelopes' heads and men with
bears' feet. These mixtures of the commonplace and the
supernatural appeal to modern tastes. Motifs and
scenes from Mimbres pots today appear on calendars,
T-shirts, note cards, and trivets; the pots themselves are
displayed in museums throughout the world and fetch
lofty prices from private collectors.
But there is much more to Mimbres archaeology than
pots. Recent work in the Mimbres Valley by Steven A.
LeBlanc's Mimbres Foundation and Harry J. Shafer's
NAN Ranch Project (see page 48) provides our best information about the people who made Mimbres pottery. We know that they lived in compact villages at the
height of their culture, from about a.d. 1000 to 1150.
Each village was composed of a number of masonry
room blocks - clusters of contiguous rooms - scattered
around a central plaza. The villages each housed perhaps 200 people. At least ten villages of this size are
known along the 30-mile Mimbres Valley, with smaller
settlements between the larger ones. LeBlanc and his
colleagues estimate that at their peak in about 1100,
the Mimbres Valley settlements held about 5,000
inhabitants.
Five thousand people in a dozen farming villages may
seem a fairly modest development compared, for example, to the Toltec state that ruled Mexico at about the
same time. But in the context of the American Southwest, Mimbres society was a phenomenon. For their
time, Mimbres towns were among the largest settle46 Archaeology

ments in the region, second only to the Great Houses of
Chaco Canyon, 200 miles due north.
Chaco Canyon structures like Pueblo Bonito contained as many as 500 rooms, while the very largest
Mimbres dwelling contained well under 300. But this
comparison may not be entirely fair. We do not know
the actual function of Pueblo Bonito and the other
Chaco Great Houses. There is little evidence that they
were occupied year-round by large populations; they
have very few fire hearths, relatively few trash deposits,
and a paucity of burials. Archaeologists suspect that the
Chaco structures were ceremonial, not residential, and
used by people who lived in much smaller settlements
elsewhere. Not so in Mimbres villages, where there is
abundant evidence of residential use. Perhaps the most
telling evidence is the remains of the occupants themselves. In the Mimbres Valley, the dead were buried
beneath the floors of occupied rooms; up to 1,000 burials
have been discovered at a single site.
The tight clustering of masonry rooms in Mimbres
villages resembles the plan of modern Pueblo villages of
the Taos, Acoma, and Hopi tribes of northern New
Mexico and Arizona. There is little question that the
Mimbres were the progenitors of these people. Many
aspects of modern Pueblo ritual life are clearly
represented in Mimbres ceramic art. Depictions of the
kachina figures, so important to modern Pueblo myth
and ritual appear first in Mimbres art. Like Catholic
saints, some kachinas have characteristic attributes, and
these have been identified with some certainty in
Mimbres art. While we cannot determine what a
Mimbres artist had in mind, the evidence points to continuity between Mimbres and Pueblo ritual.
The Mimbres were remarkable in other ways. The
people of the Chacoan regional system and the people of
the cliff-dwellings of Mesa Verde relied on rainfall for
farming. In the Mimbres region, rainfall was too sparse;
crops had to be irrigated. LaVerne Herrington, a retired
archaeologist in Silver City, New Mexico, has located
and mapped extensive Mimbres irrigation systems in
several small valleys that, for various reasons, escaped
later settlement. The planning, construction, and maintenance of the irrigation systems may have required a
degree of centralized planning. But archaeologists disagree on the extent to which the Mimbres adopted an
authoritarian political structure necessary for such
undertakings.
The sophistication and extent of the Mimbres culture
are clear. My own work has focused not only on the
heavily studied Mimbres Valley, but also on the much
less well-known Qila and Rio Grande Valleys. For many
years, the Mimbres were believed to have settled exclusively in the Mimbres Valley, but survey and excavation
of sites in the Gila Valley, 50 miles west, have demonstrated that the Mimbres were very much in evidence
there. In fact, the largest Mimbres villages are found in
the Gila Valley. We have also found large Mimbres
towns during surveys of the Rio Grande Valley, 50 miles
east of the Mimbres Valley.

Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1990

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