Mogollon culture

[9] Today, the distinctiveness of the Mogollon pottery manufacture, architectural construction, ground-stone tool design, habits and customs of residence location, and mortuary treatment is generally recognized.

One theory is that the Mogollon emerged from a Desert Archaic tradition linked to the first (late Pleistocene) prehistoric human occupations of the area (around 9000 BC).

A third theory is that Mogollon descended from the Cochise culture[12] (the early pithouse, late Desert Archaic) who had arrived around 5000 BC, and were not linked to the earlier inhabitants, but adopted farming from Central Mexico.

The earliest villages consist of several pithouses—houses dug into the ground, with stick and thatch roofs supported by a network of posts and beams, and faced on the exterior with earth.

Others include the Jornada, Forestdale, Reserve, Point of Pines (or "Black River"), San Simon, and Upper Gila branches.

Mogollon culture is often divided into five periods proposed by Joe Ben Wheat in 1955: Another way to divide Mogollon history is in three periods of housing types: Archaeological sites attributed to the Mogollon culture are found in the Gila Wilderness, Mimbres River Valley, along the Upper Gila river, Paquime and Hueco Tanks, an area of low mountains between the Franklin Mountains to the west and the Hueco Mountains to the east, and Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, 17 miles north of Tularosa, New Mexico.

The Hueco Tanks State Historic Site is approximately 32 mi (51 km) northeast of El Paso, Texas.

The Mimbres branch is a subset of the larger Mogollon culture area, centered in the Mimbres Valley and encompassing the upper Gila River and parts of the upper San Francisco River in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona as well as the Rio Grande Valley and its western tributaries in southwest New Mexico.

Local pottery styles include early forms of Mimbres black and white ("boldface"), red-on-cream, and textured plainware.

Large ceremonial structures (often called "kivas", a Hopi language term with specific meaning, has generally been applied to Northern Pueblo populations and may be a poor term in discussing the Mogollon in their broadest contexts) are dug deeply into the ground and often include distinctive ceremonial features such as foot drums and log grooves.

[17] Classic Mimbres phase (AD 1000–1130) pueblos can be quite large, with some composed of clusters of communities, each containing up to 150 rooms and all grouped around an open plaza.

The distinctive style, which includes "diamond-shaped eyes and receding chins for human figures", created demand on the black market beginning in the 1960s.

[20] Mimbres pottery is so distinctive that until fairly recently, the end of its production around 1130 to 1150 was equated with the "disappearance" of the people who made it.

The area originally settled by the Mogollon culture was eventually filled by the unrelated Apache people, who moved in from the north.