At an archaeological site in New Mexico’s Bootheel, New Mexico State anthropology professor William Walker and his students are helping to clarify the region’s place in Southwestern prehistory.

Since 1999, Walker, his graduate students, volunteers and students in an annual New Mexico State archaeology field school have been excavating the 700- year-old pueblo on the Gray Ranch. Walker believes the pueblo was connected to the Casas Grandes culture that once covered parts of northern Mexico, southern New Mexico and a sliver of West Texas.

Among other things, the excavators have found a Mesoamerican ball field, a room with a single column in the middle of its floor, which mirrors Casas Grandes architecture, and pottery pieces characteristic of the Casas Grandes culture, Walker said.

During this year’s dig, Walker invited Eric Blinman, assistant director of the Office of Archaeological Studies of the Museum of New Mexico, to visit the site and use a process called “archeomagnetics” to help date some artifacts and the site’s period of occupancy. Using the way burned objects’ magnetic fields line up with the Earth’s magnetic north, researchers can tell approximately when the objects burned and cooled, Blinman said.

The site, called Joyce Well for a ranching family that once owned the land, was a small farming village composed of approximately 200 adobe rooms

grouped around three plazas. About half of the rooms have been burned, a condition Walker said plays into an ongoing debate in archaeology circles about the role of violence in pre-Columbian pueblo culture.

“People have been looking at all the sites again, trying to figure out if the burning is due to violence and, if so, what kind of violence. So far, the data at this site suggests that the burning wasn’t due to an attack and it wasn’t accidental and, therefore, we’re left with the idea of a ritual abandonment,” he said.

Sometime around 1370, the pueblo’s occupants abandoned it, perhaps because the Casas Grandes culture, with its religious practices and beliefs, had somehow fallen out of favor, Walker said. But that hypothesis — or any other — is still open to question, in part because it’s unclear who the occupants were or where they went. It’s possible that the people who built Joyce Well simply disappeared in Spanish colonial times, he said.

Two fragments of pottery show the
range of styles found at the site.
These two pieces are of Playas red
incised pottery and Gila polychrome
pottery.

“When the Spanish came, this site was already abandoned. It then becomes a piece of archaeological detective work. In this area, the people with the most similar culture were called Sumas by the Spanish. But shortly after the Spanish arrived they disappeared as a tribe. They either became huntergatherers and joined bands of Apaches or Jacome, died of diseases brought by the Spanish or became Hispanicized,” he said.

Jack King