GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Cosgroves And The Further Evolution Of Historical Particularism

In 1929, two years after Watson's article in El Palacio, C. Burton and Harriet Cosgrove, the local husband-and-wife team of archeologists sponsored by the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were on the headwaters of the Gila River, surveying cave and rock shelters and occasionally salvaging the associated prehistoric artifacts. Concerned about the prevalence of vandalism and looting at these kind of sites, their fieldwork eventually included caves in the Hueco Mountains in Texas, caves in far southwestern New Mexico, and Chavez cave on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico.

Despite extended fieldwork around the forks of the Gila and for reasons not explained in their published analysis, the Cosgroves examined only one site that lies in the national monument—a cave adjoining "on the north the group containing the cliff houses of the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument," [28] which by description is now known as Cave 6 of the linked caves at the monument. [29] At any rate, behind a large boulder, a disturbed burial was found, the remains of a prehistoric male adult whose skull showed artificial occipital flattening. Using the classification system developed at the 1927 Pecos conference—which they had attended—the Cosgroves were the first to record for Gila Cliff Dwellings two components, or distinct occupations, one of which was very early. This observation was only recognized in the adjoining caves years later and independently of their work. In addition to the skeleton, they recovered artifacts that they identified as of Pueblo or Basketmaker origin, including (Pueblo origin) broken reed arrows, a miniature ceremonial bow, feather cloth, "gaming sticks," sherds of Tularosa fillet-rim and Tularosa Black-on-white and (Basketmaker origin) a wood dart foreshaft. A shell gorget, reed cigarettes, and vegetal remains were of ambiguous origin. Collotypes of some of these objects were included in the analysis, which was finally published in 1947.

Better known for their excavation of Swarts Ruin in the Mimbres Valley, [30] the Cosgroves subsumed the cave surveys into their 1932 report on the Swarts site by drawing the boundaries of the Mimbres culture, at that time still viewed as a variant of the general pueblo culture, to include in the north all of the West Fork and Middle Fork of the Gila River. These boundaries notably excluded the upper San Francisco River and the Tularosa River—the area explored by Hough during the Gates-Museum expedition. In the final report of the cave survey, they did record the presence of Tularosa ceramics at Cave 2 on the West Fork (Cave 6) and at five other cave sites between the confluence of Sapillo Creek with the Gila and the cliff dwellings along the Middle Fork, artifacts "indicating more northerly contacts."

Although neither Caves of the Upper Gila nor Swarts Ruin contains a description of the TJ pueblo site, the Cosgroves had apparently seen the ruin: they recommended in 1934 that it be studied by the National Resources Board, [31] a new organization that had been created by executive order to study resources, including needs for state and national parks.

The same year that the Cosgroves were climbing into caves on the upper Gila, the goal of a general cultural history of the Southwest was complicated at the third Pecos conference when the relevance of Pecos classification to locales below the Mogollon rim was challenged. Two years later, at a conference held at the Gila Pueblo archeological foundation in Globe, Arizona, a second classification framework was developed for a southern prehistoric culture (Hohokam). In 1934, yet a third culture (Mogollon) was recognized for southwestern New Mexico by H. S. Gladwin, founder of the Gila Pueblo, and formally described in 1936 by Emil Haury, whose archeological excavations at Mogollon Village and the Harris site had been sponsored by Gila Pueblo.

Already dissatisfied with the Pecos classification sequence, Gladwin suggested in 1934 a new and universal system of classification, using a genealogical tree as the organizing metaphor. [32] The roots of this tree were the principal recognized Southwestern cultures, at that time Hohokam, Caddoan (subsequently labelled Mogollon), Basketmaker (subsequently labelled Anasazi), and Yuman (subsequently labelled Patayan and later Hakataya). The stems were regional variants of the roots (San Juan stem of the Basketmaker root, for example). The branches were still smaller geographical variants within stems (Chaco branch of the San Juan stem of the Basketmaker root). Each branch could further be divided into phases that represented distinct developmental stages. Regarding the Anasazi, the Pecos classification sequence could still be used for that level of division, but for branches of other roots a plethora of new names was required to identify specific phases that were ultimately recognized by finely grouped traits of material culture. The four roots are still used as a conceptual framework to classify the prehistory of the Southwest.

The Gladwinian "genetic-chronologic" system of classification and the conceptual fragmentation of the previously "general" pueblo culture had three long-term effects on the archeology of the upper Gila. First, no one knew how far the culture root might extend geographically. As a result, research in southwestern New Mexico shifted from relatively well-excavated sites on the Mimbres drainage to the headwaters of the San Francisco River and to sites farther west in Arizona, new country suggested by Gila Pueblo. Although Hough had noted many sites 30 years earlier around Reserve, with one brief exception they were still unexcavated in the late 1930s. Chief among Hough's successors in the area were Paul Martin and his colleagues, whose work was sponsored by Chicago Natural History Museum, and later Edward Danson, whose survey of west-central New Mexico and eastern Arizona was sponsored by the Peabody Museum. After Haury published in 1936 a phase sequence for the Mogollon, [33] no additional research formally occurred in the Mimbres area, including the forks of the Gila, until salvage operations at Gila Cliff Dwellings in 1963.

Second, as cultural boundaries were researched, the Mogollon root began to be parsed into more and more branches based on increasingly fine artifactual distinctions. For example, in 1947, Haury reported three branches (Mimbres, Forestdale, and San Simon); by 1955 Joe Ben Wheat noted six branches and possibly two additional ones (Mimbres, Pine Lawn—possibly a northern Mimbres subset—Forestdale, San Simon, Black River, Cibola, Jornada, and possibly another as yet un-named branch in Chihuahua, Mexico). As a result, discussion of the "Mogollon problem" became increasingly burdened with taxonomies and the lists of material traits needed to distinguish the various branches, all of which had largely separate sequences of phases that required more lists as well.

The third effect was more subtle. With attention focused on new areas, there was a tendency to overlook or not to perceive complexities, variations, or anomalies within already described branches, some of which had been described on the basis of excavation at a single site. Given the very limited amount of archeological work on the Gila River and the initial concentration of research in the Mimbres Valley, the effects of this normative tendency were pronounced during the first years of Park Service management at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.