Hinterlands to Cities: The Archaeology of Northwest Mexico and Its Vecinos

By Matthew C. Pailes and Michael T. Searcy

This approachable book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series is a comprehensive synthesis of Northwest Mexico from the US border to the Mesoamerican frontier. Filling a vital gap in the regional literature, it serves as an essential reference not only for those interested in the specific history of this area of Mexico but western North America writ large. A period-by-period review of approximately 14,000 years reveals the dynamic connections that knitted together societies inhabiting the Sea of Cortez coast, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, and the Sierra Madre Occidental. Networks of interaction spanned these diverse ecological, topographical, and cultural terrains in the millennia following the demise of the megafauna. The authors provide a fresh perspective that refutes depictions of the Northwest as a simple filter or conduit of happenings to the north or south, and they highlight the role local motivations and dynamics played in facilitating continental-scale processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9780932839664

Book preview

cover.jpg

Hinterlands to Cities

The Archaeology of Northwest Mexico and Its Vecinos

Matthew C. Pailes and Michael T. Searcy

The SAA Press

Washington, DC

The Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC

Copyright © 2022 by the Society for American Archaeology

All rights reserved. Published 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pailes, Matthew, author. | Searcy, Michael T. (Michael Taylor),

1976– author.

Title: Hinterlands to cities : the archaeology of northwest Mexico and its

vecinos / Matthew C. Pailes and Michael T. Searcy.

Description: Washington, DC : The SAA Press, 2022. | Includes

bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "This approachable book

is a comprehensive synthesis of Northwest Mexico from the US border to

the Mesoamerican frontier. Filling a vital gap in the regional

literature, it serves as an essential reference not only for those

interested in the specific history of this area of Mexico but western

North America writ large. A period-by-period review of approximately

14,000 years reveals the dynamic connections that knitted together

societies inhabiting the Sea of Cortez coast, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan

Deserts, and the Sierra Madre Occidental. Networks of interaction

spanned these diverse ecological, topographical, and cultural terrains

in the millennia following the demise of the megafauna. The authors

provide a fresh perspective that refutes depictions of the Northwest as

a simple filter or conduit of happenings to the north or south, and they

highlight the role local motivations and dynamics played in facilitating

continental-scale processes"—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021047708 (print) | LCCN 2021047709 (ebook) | ISBN

9780932839657 (paperback) | ISBN 9780932839664 (kindle edition)

Subjects: LCSH: Mexico, North—Antiquities. | Mexico, North—History.

Classification: LCC F1314 .P53 2022 (print) | LCC F1314 (ebook) | DDC

972/.01—dc23/eng/20211103

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047708

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047709

Cover photo credits: (Top) Mattew C. Pailes; (Bottom) Scott Ure

Contents

1. Introduction to the Northwest

2. Paleoindian Period

3. Archaic Period

4. Regional Traditions

5. Exchange and Warfare: Regional Interaction in the Late Precolonial Period

6. Religious Ideology in the Northwest

7. Colonial Period Archaeology

Acknowledgments

References Cited

Index

1

Introduction to the Northwest

The context of this book, in broader academic circles, is very much intended to flip the common script of treating the Mexican Northwest as peripheral and tangential to the real action in the US Southwest. The singular focus on Paquimé and the perfunctory page or paragraph devoted to the rest of Sonora and Chihuahua, to say nothing of Durango and Sinaloa, is a highly consistent theme of summary treatments of the Greater Southwest. These same summaries often take pains to delineate the boundaries of the region in introductory chapters that extend from Durango to Durango.

As many others have before us, we recognize the absurdity of treating the modern artificial political border as though it had any relevance to what actually happened in precolonial eras (and much of the colonial period). At the same time, we acknowledge the very real conditions that maintain an imbalance of data in an archaeologically rich region. For non-Mexican archaeologists, the international border creates an intellectual divide, partly due to language differences but also because of the added difficulty of working in a foreign country. Archaeologists on both sides of the border are also hyperaware of the periodic violence symptomatic of the warring drug cartels and their clashes with government forces. During the more dangerous episodes, some US universities have banned faculty and students from traveling to these areas, and our Mexican colleagues routinely delay field seasons or otherwise alter plans. Despite these challenges, remarkable discoveries have been made in Northwest Mexico over the past century thanks to the dedicated research of both Mexican and foreign archaeologists. Our goal is to provide a synthesis that highlights their work and this region’s importance in the cultural history of North America. Additionally, we identify larger trends and processes of theoretical relevance as opposed to focusing on the trajectories of individual subregions or limited slices of time. This includes taking into consideration the larger sphere of interaction, both within the Mexican Northwest and beyond.

With these goals in mind, we wish to explain several points of style. More often than not, we cite summary pieces when referencing activities outside of Northwest Mexico while making every effort to cite original literature within the region. It is unfortunately difficult to gain access to many of the original reports that detail fieldwork in Mexico. Central offices of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) in Mexico often retain copies of reports, but it was not practical to travel to Hermosillo or Ciudad Chihuahua every time a reference was required. We should stress that this observation is not intended to critique our Mexican colleagues; United States–based scholarship faces its own daunting gray literature issues. We also note the inequity of locking up most foreign research on Northwest Mexico behind various forms of paywalls, thus precluding easy access to our Mexican colleagues, most of whom are at INAH centers rather than at universities with negotiated access to such content. All of us must do a better job of making our research more accessible, even the projects that do not turn out as planned. Thus, while we try our best to cite original informes (reports), we often have to settle for summary articles or secondary sources where the data are presented in partial form simply because these were the only resources available to us

The scope and organization of this volume is intended to counter trends we perceive in previous summaries, including our own (Pailes 2017a), that present very uneven regional and temporal coverage. Our discussion will geographically wander north on numerous occasions and occasionally south, but to be blunt, there is enough literature on these areas; it will not be our focus except to the extent necessary. Ultimately, our story is one of connectivity that has deep roots in antiquity. Distinct cultural groups did not emerge suddenly in AD 1000 and only discover that they had neighbors in AD 1200. However, there are realities to the amount and style of research conducted on various periods and places. In our interest to provide balance, we admittedly vacillate between detailed, site-level descriptions and general regional overviews. We feel that our summaries accurately capture the knowledge base employed in current discussions, but obviously, those interpretations based on only a few sites will be prone to greater revision in future years.

A minor but important detail regarding the scope of this volume concerns the language we use to name it. Scholars often employ Greater Southwest or just Southwest to indicate the larger culture area that encompasses the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. While not intentional, the inherent bias in this convention often manifests in the peculiar omission of information regarding northern Mexican people and their role among the diverse societies that occupied/occupy west-central North America (see, for example, Cordell and McBrinn 2012; Fowles and Mills 2017). Kelley (2017a:11) even suggested that beyond being inaccurate, using Southwest dismisses Mexican sovereignty. We could propose Greater Northwest to shift the focus for the content of this book, but this would only create confusion. To rectify this inaccuracy, some scholars working in northern Mexico have used Southwest/Northwest or Northwest/Southwest (NW/SW; noroeste/suroeste) to actively reincorporate northwestern Mexico into titles referencing this region (Kelley 2017a; Kelley and Searcy 2015; King et al. 2017; Minnis and Whalen 2015; Nelson et al. 2016; Plog et al. 2016; Villalpando and McGuire 2017). Throughout this volume, we use modern political and geological conventions when referring to specific regions (e.g., Sierra Madre Occidental [SMO], Central Coast, bootheel of New Mexico, etc.). We employ these commonly used phrases to quickly orient the reader spatially. But when discussing phenomena that stretched across these subregions within Mexico, we use the term "Northwest," and when referring to patterns that also crossed the international border, we use the abbreviation NW/SW as a concise way to reference the larger region.

Frontiers related to precolonial cultural traditions were not fixed in space or time. Rather, borderlands were always shifting as people moved or increased and decreased in population. These shifting borders are difficult to track and illustrate without detailed spatial or chronological information, which is often lacking. For the southern cultural border, groups practicing Mesoamerican traditions were equally expanding and contracting; thus, we assume that the frontiers were in a constant, diachronic flux. To this end, we also disapprove of the term "Borderlands" when applied to the entirety of the Northwest. Though intended to suggest dynamism, it has the effect of portraying the region as relevant only through its relationship to exterior regions. The term also raises an important question: A border between what? The particular history of the Northwest indicates that the insinuation is obviously Mesoamerica-US Southwest. This pan-regional focus has been a boon to research in the Northwest, but there are limits to any particular scalar perspective. There were 900 km between the ever-shifting Mesoamerican frontier and the US Southwest. This entire territory was the location of nuanced histories that should not be reduced to the status of a transitionary zone or diffusion filter, or even worse, a blank space devoid of unique history.

Finally, the patterns discussed in the following chapters are based on the material evidence of cultural traditions. An enduring exercise of inference in archaeology is to develop culture areas based on material evidence manifest across the landscape (see Figure 4.1). To some, a continued interest among Northwest archaeologists in developing cultural area schemas within an overall cultural historical perspective will seem antiquated, but we challenge our colleagues to show us a single application that does not in some way rely on the data and assumptions generated under this paradigm anywhere in North America. We further maintain that as long as the material remains are considered reflections of agents engaged in active practices, the recognized material patterns effectively represent the collective practices of groups of individual actors. We consider these acts and their material effects to be reflective of traditions of practice that allow archaeologists to develop conventions into which are integrated the variables of time (Figure 1.1) and space. For example, to identify a site as belonging to the Casas Grandes tradition assumes that it included a group of people who primarily lived in northwestern Chihuahua from circa AD 700 to 1450. People subsumed by this archaeological group are expected to have engaged in fluctuating traditions within this period over time and space with corresponding changes in practice and the material evidence of such. For any given cultural tradition discussed in this volume, it should be assumed that our grasp on the details related to time and space are variable; thus we recognize that future investigations into these traditions will aid in better defining them and the people who practiced them.

As a technical note on date conventions, we employ the BP format through Chapter 4; these are always calibrated unless specifically noted. This required us to calibrate many dates reported in radiocarbon years for the Paleoindian and Archaic periods. For this calibration, we use the IntCal13 curve (Reimer et al. 2013) accessible in OxCal (Bronk Ramsey 2009). Generally, we round dates to an even century or mid-century mark in the approximate middle of the calibrated distribution, excluding minor intercepts (>15% of total distribution). Those familiar with the vagaries of the ¹⁴C calibration curve will recognize the pitfalls in this approach, but we find it preferable to the non-equal interval and overall compressed time scale of uncalibrated years.

History and Current State of Research

The exploration of the Northwest’s archaeological past has been closely intertwined with that of the US Southwest since its inception. The two regions share many of the same luminaries, including Adolph Bandelier, Carl Lumholtz, Aleš Hrdlička, A. V. Kidder, Robert H. Lister, and Monroe Amsden, among others. Mexican archaeologists such as the renowned Eduardo Noguera also played an important role in the formative years of research in the region but were a decided minority. By some metrics, this dynamic remains the case into the recent era. Figures cited by Kelley and Villalpando (1996:69) estimated that 80% of all publications on the Northwest were by non-Mexican scholars; they also cite figures compiled by Rafael Cruz that non-Mexican scholars penned 86% of publications on Chihuahua between 1890 and 1989. César Villalobos-Acosta (2008:Tabla 2) calculated that US scholars ran 56% of all projects conducted in Sonora. In recent years, binational projects became more the norm than the exception, but research dollars expended in the Northwest, particularly those that result in peer-reviewed publications, continue to flow predominantly from or through US institutions.

This situation is maintained by several entrenched forces. Our Mexican colleagues experience a disparity in funding and support relative to their Mesoamerican counterparts. Most research funds in Mexico flow to investigations at sites and regions with tourist potential in central and southern Mexico such as Teotihuacan, Palenque, and Chichen Itza. Chihuahua and Sonora are the two largest states in Mexico, yet they each have only one archaeological site developed as a tourist attraction (Paquimé and Cerro de Trincheras). There is also substantial momentum in Mexican educational institutions to emphasize training at Mesoamerican sites. McGuire (2002:181) notes that such pedagogical traditions affect all levels of epistemology, from what counts as data to appropriate excavation techniques; recording the dispersed ranchería settlements characteristic of much of the Northwest is far removed from skills relevant to the investigation of even tertiary-scale Mesoamerican sites. Not surprisingly, graduates of these Central Mexican institutions (namely, Escuela Nacional de Antropología and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) gravitate toward applying their skills in familiar territory. In recent years, undergraduate licenciatura opportunities have become more common outside of the core Mesoamerican region, including a new school at Chihuahua’s Escuela de Antropología e Historia Norte de México.

Of course, the principal reason why there is more work conducted on the US side of the border are the legal mandates that require protection or at least documentation of cultural resources, especially on public lands. Antiquities laws in Mexico are in some ways more extensive, with protection centralized at the federal level and designed to protect sites even on private land. However, preservation in remote areas is a gargantuan task for Mexican authorities and is often enforced only for large-scale infrastructure projects or extractive industries. Preservation and mitigation are overseen by Centro INAH offices in the respective states. The first of these in the Northwest was set up in 1973 in Hermosillo as El Centro Noroeste and was intended to cover not only Sonora but also the Baja states and Sinaloa. Other Northwest offices have since come online in Chihuahua in 1984 and Sinaloa in 1998. Staffing remains minimal compared to the United States. The state of Durango at the time of this writing has no archaeologists assigned to the state, which covers an area of over 123,000 km². Sonora is relatively well off in researchers, with six full-time investigators for 179,350 km². Arizona, by contrast, has over 1,500 resident permitted archaeologists.

Given this history, it is not surprising that theoretical perspectives in the Northwest mostly followed trends in US academic circles, a situation that may be changing to the benefit of all. The standard tripartite division of intellectual history presented in most graduate-level intro-theory seminars is perceptible in the archaeological history of the Northwest, but this division is a thin veneer on a more permanent intellectual tradition firmly rooted in the goal of generating a cultural history of time, space, and form variation. An early cultural historical period focused on delineating interaction spheres in which diffusion and migration events were traced. A second processual period became very interested in explaining the local evolutionary sequences of complex societies. Finally, a third period reflects a humanistic turn and an emphasis on interpretative approaches with greater attention paid to issues of ideology, agency, and the emergence of social identities. Summarizing more pointed critiques made in extensive reviews of this intellectual history (Kelley and MacWilliams 2005; Kelley and Villalpando 1996; Villalobos-Acosta 2008), these predominantly American perspectives were always in tension with approaches emanating from Latin America and by extension European continental perspectives that maintained a more historicist perspective. As others point out (Kelley and MacWilliams 2005:83), the historicist perspective meshes well with the development of publicly consumable narratives that situate charismatic sites as tourist destinations. These relationships are a natural outgrowth in contexts, unlike the United States, where there is a widely shared sense of connectivity between modern and ancient populations. Even if highly fictionalized, the public face of archaeology in this context is drawn on to foment a sense of nationalism by materializing shared origin stories.

The distance between American and Mexican perspectives was greatest in the era of processualism, which was most fully implemented in studies of the Casas Grandes region. Far from dispassionate scientists pursuing nomothetic laws of culture, many Mexican archaeologists saw archaeology as a distinctly political field in which to support or contest dominant narratives both of the internal state and the place of Mexico in the international community. Many American archaeologists found this to be an inauspicious time to pursue research in places such as Mesoamerica, where certain flavors of Marxist critique were turned on the imperialist undertones of foreign archaeological expeditions. Such disputes had little direct impact on the Northwest, but it is worth noting that several of the prominent American researchers of this era in the Northwest, such as Charles Di Peso and J. C. Kelley, were considered to be either iconoclasts or antiquated holdovers for their interest in a more historicized version of archaeology. A predilection for world-systems perspectives in this era, with its Marxist roots but positivist leanings, could also be seen as reflecting a compromise perspective between these divergent national intellectual traditions.

A last layer to this brief sketch of intellectual traditions concerns the topics various scholars have found worthy of study. This is most fully manifested in the relative emphasis placed on reconstructing local developmental sequences contrasted to focuses on pan-regional or at least extra-regional trajectories. This relationship is occasionally depicted as a Mexican versus American perspective, but this is not particularly accurate. As just discussed, Mexican perspectives often place greater emphasis on local histories, but the Mesoamerican focus of Mexican archaeology casts the Northwest as peripheral to the main channels of history. Until the founding of the Centro Noroeste, most Mexican projects in the Northwest were as equally expeditionary in nature as their American counterparts and also sought to interpret the Northwest in relation to its relevance to external regions. The interest in extra-regional forces also runs through cultural historical, processual, and post-processual perspectives. The earliest cultural historical research in the Northwest posed this question in familiar diffusionist-migration models that, depending on perspective, sought to demonstrate gaps or delineate corridors in the distribution of Mesoamerican affiliations (Phillips 2002). Outside influence on local populations dominated the narrative, suggesting coercive adoption of foreign ideologies and practices. The processual period focused on economic evidence for interaction or, lacking the relevant material evidence of exchange, signs of Mesoamerican stimulus in political systems. Ironically, it was the era of processualism, with its avoidance of historical contingency, that instigated much-needed work on fleshing out local sequences of development that now permit more nuanced perceptions of unique histories. Recent research emphasizes the mechanisms, motives, and patterns of ideological diffusion and maintains a strong interest in the role of foreign connections and knowledge as a means of elite legitimization within local contexts. Equally, Northwest archaeologists realize the basic need to understand local historical trajectories foundational to developing logical theories related to diachronic and nuanced changes in interregional interaction, both local and distant.

There are continuing points of divergence between Mexican and American traditions. We believe most established American scholars currently working in the Northwest appropriately adopt many of the perspectives of our Mexican colleagues, so the difference is really between researchers who work on either side of the border. One of us, Pailes, has argued that the alternative training backgrounds of Mexican and American scholars (i.e., Mesoamerica versus Southwest) leads us to work from different baselines that result in interpretations that may seem incommensurate but are actually similar in overall intent. Investigators in the American tradition often assume a lack of hierarchy or other dimensions of complexity until demonstrated as present, whereas many of us in Northwest Mexico are more comfortable assuming the presence of such social patterns until proven otherwise (Pailes 2017b:xvi). A self-critical appraisal of this tendency would note that the latent Marxism often ascribed to Mexican archaeology necessitates the perception of elites as a component of explanations rooted in internal societal negotiation. Relatedly, Mexican and American researchers often make very different assumptions about the feasibility of interaction and information sharing. Stephen Lekson (2009, 2018) has faced unceasing headwinds among the US Southwest community for assuming that everyone knew everything despite geographical distance. This principle would likely induce little more than a shoulder shrug among most current Northwest scholars. These differences in perspective may also be linked to the amount of insularity manifest in the opposing sides of the border. As Minnis and Whalen (2015:13) suggest, the US Southwest is particularly parochial, whereas they describe the community of Chihuahuan archaeologists as more cosmopolitan, with archaeologists from all over Mexico, the United States, and Canada contributing to diverse perspectives. Current and recent scholars in other Northwest states would add participants from continental Europe and South America.

A last point of demarcation between the Mexican Northwest and the US Southwest is the effort expended to include Indigenous voices in archaeology. Though still nascent, movements to Indigenize archaeology have come to define the future of much US Southwest archaeology in the hopes of at least partially redressing a century of cultural insensitivity. There are structural impediments to similar changes occurring in Northwest Mexico that raise questions without simple answers (McGuire 2016). Almost all work in the Northwest takes place by means of coordination with local municipios and ejidos, and local workers are often employed on projects. But the relationship between these individuals and institutions and ancestral inhabitants is not always simple. Modern Mexican identity is forged on a communal belief in a shared mestizo ancestry that positions the modern state as the rightful spokesperson for ancestral Indigenous communities. And in many parts of the Northwest, the particular histories of colonialism in fact created local mestizo populations that represent the obvious genetic if not the superficially evident cultural descendants of ancestral Indigenous communities. In these instances, the state-level INAH offices are arguably structurally equivalent in many ways to US-based tribal historic preservation offices. More to the point, as phrased by one helpful volume reviewer, the political economy of research in the United States and Canada, which was an outgrowth of a predominantly Anglo legacy of settler colonialism, is not necessarily a good candidate for exportation to all of the New World. In many ways, the assumption that Mexican archaeology should adopt a US-based perspective on indigeneity is a novel but nonetheless pernicious form of imperialism.

However, it is also true that while Indigenous group sovereignty is not legally sanctioned by the Mexican federal government, several distinct Native communities persist in Northwest Mexico. It is telling that the portions of the Northwest that maintain the clearest continuity in Indigenous governance, such as the Yoeme and Yoreme regions, are also the least investigated archaeologically. We are aware of only one example in the Northwest—Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña’s (2015) research with the Comca’ac—of what US researchers would consider a truly collaborative, community-based effort. These patterns suggest the passive assumption that a federal permit always equates to descendant community approval is overly simplistic. In such scenarios, coordination with local ejido and municipio officials remains the best, if still imperfect, means of performing due diligence. Consulting related and descendant tribes in the United States is another option we should pursue in certain circumstances, but this presents complicated issues of eroding Mexican sovereignty, a position most US researchers hope to avoid. In short, it is obvious that more should be done, but researchers will likely have to plot individualized courses specific to their projects.

In summary, there are several prevalent crosscurrents in the intellectual tradition of the Northwest. Our review is obviously a gross oversimplification, and the positions of many researchers defy easy categorization into national, theoretical, or generational pigeonholes. The overall takeaway from this discussion is that while the perceived borderlands status of the Northwest created a significant lack of research, what has been accomplished reflects an intellectual dynamism lacking in many parts of North America. It is tempting to view ourselves in a moment of enlightenment in which we have struck an appropriate balance between particularization and generalization, history and ecology, the local and the distant as engines of change, and many other false dichotomies. Almost certainly, future generations will not agree. But one of our primary goals is to get to the next step, which for parts of the Northwest is still the first step of establishing basic cultural histories, which we consider the foundations of precolonial research in North America.

Regional Background

To avoid redundantly providing contextual information throughout this volume, we review here some basics of ecological, topographical, and cultural geography. Regardless of the variables considered, there is a high degree of diversity in the region, so much so that it is worth asking if the Northwest was ever defined by internally consistent criteria or is simply an amalgamation of the space leftover after defining clearer patterns elsewhere (Pailes 2017a:374). This heterogeneity is