Prehistory, Personality, and Place: Emil W. Haury and the Mogollon Controversy

Preface

Preface This book is about the history of the Mogollon controversy in Southwest archaeology—whether or not the ancient Mogollon culture was a distinctive cultural entity—and its resolution. It is a story that began in the mountains of New Mexico and ended in the mountains of Arizona,surely some of the most compelling places on earth. It also is about the remarkable individuals who discovered the Mogollon culture, fought to validate it, and eventually resolved the controversy. As such, our book is about places and personalities—the role of place in shaping the intellect and personalities of archaeologists, and the unusual intersections of personalities and places that produced resolutions of some intractable problems in Southwest history. Our book also is about discovery. There was no flash of insight to mark the moment when we, as archaeologists ,“discovered” the Mogollon in the form we now label Mogollon Pueblo (Reid and Whittlesey 1997,1999,2005).We had been working at the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper Pueblo on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation since the early 1970s.At that time, William A. Longacre, professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, was director of the field school, and the “New Archaeology” influenced us to the extent that we were far more interested in adaptive responses to environmental stress (Reid 1973, 1978) and developing middle-range theory for identifying material correlates of human behavior (Whittlesey 1978) than in cultural or ethnic identifications. This was shortly to change. Reid had always been deeply interested in the history of Southwest archaeology, and in the spring of 1975, he began interviewing Emil W. Haury, professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and the discoverer and defender of the Mogollon, to compile an oral history . About the same time, Whittlesey began researching the Mogollon controversy. Sometime between the spring of 1975 and the fall of 1979, when the first draft of the Mogollon controversy was being cobbled together from Whittlesey’s notes, we discovered that Grasshopper Pueblo fit Erik K. Reed’s (1948, 1950) model for the Western Pueblo, or Mogollon Pueblo. Furthermore, those aspects of Grasshopper lifeways and material culture that did not fit his model allowed us to develop the concept of ethnic coresidence—people of different cultural traditions living together in the same pueblo community. Reed’s model permitted us to identify the coresidence of Mogollon and Anasazi, or Ancestral Pueblo (Reid and Whittlesey 1982,1999),long before sophisticated chemical techniques were developed to support these conclusions (Ezzo and Price 2002). The genesis of this book lies, therefore, not only in oral history and literature reviews but in real-life archaeological techniques for answering questions about ancient life. We discovered a model that fit the facts of Grasshopper Pueblo as we knew them.In our book Grasshopper Pueblo: A Story of Archaeology and Ancient Life (Reid and Whittlesey 1999), we present our interpretation of Mogollon Pueblo ecology, sociology, and ideology as revealed by thirty years of archaeological research in the Grasshopper region. Although this was not our ultimate intent, the book resembles in format and content a sequel to another archaeological recollection . This was Paul Sidney Martin’s Digging into History: A Brief Account of FifteenYears of ArchaeologicalWork in New Mexico (1959),written for a general audience as a summary of Mogollon culture history in the Pine Lawn Valley. Regrettably,Haury did not live to comment on our ethnography of the Grasshopper Mogollon, but we know that he was never comfortable with this association of Grasshopper with an unqualified Mogollon label. Haury did, however, accept the label we use here: “A useful descriptive compromise label for the communities in the eleventh century and later that contain features of both cultures is Mogollon-Pueblo, first suggested by Joe Ben Wheat in 1955. It is less acceptable to call them Mogollon, glossing over the highly indicative and readily identifiable attributes that spell an Anasazi heritage”(Haury 1985a:404). We concur wholeheartedly, even though we, like many others, have employed Mogollon as a shorthand label on maps and in narrative sketches for cultural variability spread out over twelve centuries in the central mountains of Arizona and New Mexico. Strictly speaking, as we will discuss, Mogollon should apply to the mountain people living in pit houses until around ad 1000, and Mogollon Pueblo to those descendants living in masonry pueblos. Perhaps the most compelling reason for writing this book derived from our simple wonder, as mature archaeologists with...