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6 The Gathering Storm of Controversy It always seemed paradoxical to me that there should have been so much resistance to recognizing multiple cultural groups in antiquity, when historically we can tally a dozen or more Indian tribes in the Southwest with almost as many life styles and half as many distinct language groupings. —Emil Haury (1985a:xvi) By the time The Mogollon Culture of Southwestern New Mexico appeared in 1936, Haury already had moved into new directions. In the winter of 1934–35, he had directed excavations at the monumental Hohokam site of Snaketown along the middle Gila River in the Phoenix area. Preparing the report of this work would occupy the next two years of his life. In 1936, Haury and E. B. “Ted” Sayles excavated at White Mound, a late Basketmaker III village on the Puerco River near Gallup. It was to be Haury’s final project for Gila Pueblo. In 1937, when the Snaketown monograph was published and just one year after reporting his identification and definition of the Mogollon culture,Haury left Gila Pueblo to become head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Arizona, replacing his mentor, Cummings. In the following year, he would take over as director of the Arizona State Museum. These events no doubt overshadowed the effects Haury’s monograph created in the archaeological community. It is clear, however, that Haury may have not anticipated the mixed reviews of and negative reception to the proposed Mogollon culture, and that his response to the critique was visceral and heartfelt, to the extent that he devoted much of his professional life to vindicating the concept. The Scholars Weigh In The initial reviews of The Mogollon Culture of Southwestern New Mexico were positive. In the year following the publication, Paul Sidney Martin (1937:233) reviewed it as“so astonishing, so far-reaching, and so unorthodox that the worth of this report and of the new data contained herein probably will not be understood or esteemed for some years.” Prophetically , Martin anticipated that “the hypothesis set forth in this excellent report will doubtless be scoffed at by many competent people.” Events would soon prove Martin correct, and his own research would place him beside Haury firmly in the midst of the ensuing controversy. Frank H. H. Roberts’s (1937) summary of southwestern archaeology was less enthusiastic than Martin’s review, although he did give the Mogollon treatment equivalent to that of the Anasazi and Hohokam. It took little time, however , for a critical tone to enter the literature. In 1938, Paul Nesbitt reported his work on the Starkweather Ruin. This multiple-component site located near Reserve, New Mexico, had pit structures dating to the Georgetown, San Francisco, and Three Circle phases, as well as a Reserve phase pueblo. To Nesbitt (1938), the Mogollon did not represent a new culture; its elements were similar and in many cases identical to Anasazi, with some ideas borrowed from the Hohokam . He also saw Mogollon as no older that Pueblo I (ad 700–900) in the Pecos classification. Importantly, Nesbitt discredited the antiquity of Mogollon pottery. Because Nesbitt did not believe in the legitimacy of Mogollon, the presence of San Francisco Red at Snaketown could only mean that Hohokam and Mogollon received pottery technology from an outside, undisclosed source. Nesbitt appears to have been influenced by Kidder, who viewed the material remains that Haury labeled Mogollon as the result of mixing of Anasazi and Hohokam traits. The following year, Kidder, who was widely considered the patriarch of southwestern archaeology, reviewed Nesbitt’s report. Kidder (1939:315– 16) wrote that the Mogollon mountain folk were “receptive rather than radiating”; he believed they lacked individuality and had all the earmarks of a peripheral, borrowing culture. Only the early pottery was distinctive , but Kidder echoed Nesbitt’s belief that the ceramics derived from an outside source, presumably in Mexico.“If this be true,”Kidder (1939:316) concluded, then “Mogollon loses its sole significant claim to individuality .” Nesbitt had dismissed the pottery issue with the assertion that “culture cannot be solely defined in terms of pottery and the true perspective The Gathering Storm of Controversy 59 and picture of the situation is likely to become lost in making ceramics alone the archaeological objective” (Nesbitt 1938:83). Much later, Haury would write concerning this issue: I am well aware that pottery cannot always be used as a certain identi fier of a people,but...

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