Book Description:
The beautiful and enigmatic black on white decorated pottery of the Classic Mimbres culture of southern New Mexico is well known to archaeologists and artists alike. But prior to the florescence of the Classic Mimbres around A.D. 1000, the inhabitants of the Mimbres Valley played a generative role in the cultural and historical sequence of the region as a whole. These Early Pithouse period villagers have received comparatively little attention from archaeologists in recent decades. Now, in Early Pithouse Villages of the Mimbres Valley and Beyond, Michael W. Diehl, Steven A. LeBlanc, and colleagues publish for the first time a complete account of the excavations and artifacts of two important Early Pithouse village sites and a synthetic analysis of the environmental context and culture historical framework of the Upland Mogollon region of the North American Southwest. The McAnally and Thompson sites, two villages located along the Rio Mimbres in the heart of the Upland Mogollon, contain architecture, artifacts, and other remains of the earliest relatively sedentary horticulturists to occupy the region. The lifeways of these people their subsistence practices, their knowledge of construction and of the manufacture of stone tools and pots, and their rules for social interaction provided the foundation for nine centuries of continuous occupation and use of the Mimbres Mogollon area. Dating from A.D. 200 through 1000, the sites yielded information that suggests that, over time, Mogollon pithouse villagers invested ever greater effort in constructing and maintaining their dwellings, intensified their reliance on maize agriculture, and increased the efficiency of their maize grinding tools all indicators of longer periods of occupation at these sites. Based on their surveys and excavations, the authors of Early Pithouse Villages of the Mimbres Valley and Beyond develop a new chronology for the occupation of the region. They also discuss competing models of Upland Mogollon Pithouse period life styles, architecture and residential mobility, paleobotanical data, ground stone and chipped stone artifacts, ceramics, osteofaunal remains, and miscellaneous artifacts uncovered at the two sites. Diehl and LeBlanc s insightful summary chapter analyzes the relationship between the McAnally and Thompson sites in the context of the Mimbres Valley, emphasizing temporal changes in subsistence, demography, and social organization. An appendix provides a comprehensive summary of tree ring dates from Upland Mogollon pithouse villages.
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