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8 Alkali Ridge, Awat’ovi, and the Anasazi Frontier The question is, do we wish to find out what happened in the past and why it happened, or do we, like the Dictators of the present day, wish to jam our beliefs down other peoples’ throats. —John Otis Brew (1946:75) J. O. Brew was arguably the most provocative and vehement antagonist to the Mogollon concept. Like Haury, he was the product of a Harvard University education,and he would go on to a distinguished career at that institution. Brew’s opening attack in the controversy was his review of McGregor’s textbook Southwestern Archaeology in American Antiquity (Brew 1942), and it is one of the strongest reviews that we have ever read. With its harsh criticisms of the Mogollon culture, this review established Brew as the major opponent to the Mogollon concept,a position he would retain for decades (Wendorf 2008:64). Much of the antagonism voiced in this review was bound up with the other disagreements Brew had with McGregor’s work, making it difficult to tease out the Mogollon-specific threads of the argument. A few statements from the long and thorough review should make this point clear: Students have long looked forward to Dr. McGregor’s book. The testimony here presented, on the basis of the most careful reading I have ever given a text book, is the opinion that this book does not fill our need. It is a great disappointment. (Brew 1942:191) Dr.McGregor’s book is presented as a textbook for beginners.Actually, it can be read without serious danger only by those who are thoroughly familiar with all aspects of Southwestern archaeology. (Brew 1942:192) McGregor’s book is not only unscientific,in the terms described above, but it is expressed in a dogmatic style, startling and anachronistic in the year 1942. (Brew 1942:192) Unfortunately there are many other points to which exception can and will be taken. I shall list no more of them. For, after all, the main difficulty with this book does not lie in these specific items. Its glaring fault is the continuous bald statement of one hypothesis only [emphasis in original]in highly controversial matters. These statements are usually clothed in such positive terms that unwary students are given no indication that they are not dealing with established and demonstrable fact. “Theirs not to reason why. . . .” (Brew 1942:196) Brew’s criticisms more specifically directed to the Mogollon include McGregor’s attempts to establish Mogollon as a “basic culture” in the absence of what Brew would consider sufficient evidence. He noted the lack of distinctive traits and that in the list of Mogollon traits, “there is not one which does not occur also in either Pueblo or Hohokam or both” (Brew 1942:193). Moreover, he emphasized McGregor’s own statement that all Mogollon sites excavated at that time were outside its geographical center and therefore could well be atypical. He found unacceptable the assertion that Mogollon influenced other cultures and was critical of the dating, especially its extension back to ad 1. To Brew, the distinctiveness and antiquity of Mogollon as well as its affinity with the preceramic Cochise culture were still unproven. The only statement McGregor made concerning Mogollon that Brew was willing to accept was that the Mogollon culture was poorly known. For reasons not apparent in the published literature, Brew seems inadvertently to have backed himself into a corner on the Mogollon issue while criticizing justifiably the looseness of McGregor’s reconstructions. On the one hand, Brew called for more rigor in archaeological thought, especially taxonomy, while on the other hand, he dismissed as insubstantial the evidence in support of the Mogollon as a“basic culture,”although the evidential requirements of a “basic culture” were left vague. Nonetheless , Brew’s comments added a critical, new dimension to the controversy —concern with a rigorous definition and use of terms—that we think is a direct reflection of the atmosphere of archaeological thought then prevailing at Harvard. Perhaps in response to these issues, Reed’s papers that appeared throughout the 1940s took evidence, tradition, and Alkali Ridge, Awat’ovi, and the Anasazi Frontier 77 definition as their central themes, and by the end of the decade, this work resulted in an expanded concept of the Mogollon culture. It is annoying that we have been unable to locate a published response by...

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