Leaving Mesa Verde: Peril and Change in the Thirteenth-Century Southwest

12. Remodeling Immigration: A Northern Rio Grande Perspective on Depopulation, Migration, and Donation-Side Models

Remodeling Immigration A Northern Rio Grande Perspective on Depopulation, Migration, and Donation-Side Models Jeffrey L. Boyer, James L. Moore, Steven A. Lakatos, Nancy J. Akins, C. Dean Wilson, and Eric Blinman 12 The depopulation of large parts of the northern Southwest by Pueblo people is an iconic event in the intellectual development of southwestern archaeology. The Pecos Classification (Kidder [1924] 1962) codified a complementary relationship between the central “Anasazi” area (the northern San Juan/Mesa Verde and southern San Juan/Chaco regions) and the eastern Pueblo area (the northern Rio Grande region). In the Pecos framework, the Pueblo III period ended with depopulation of the San Juan regions, while the Pueblo IV period began as large villages formed in other areas of the northern Southwest, including the northern Rio Grande. This sequential framework still contributes to archaeological interpretations that couple temporal and cultural continuity between the San Juan regions and the post–AD 1300 northern Rio Grande.Those interpretations usually invoke migrations of people from the former to the latter and imply that historical northern Rio Grande Pueblos are descendant from San Juan populations. Depopulation of the San Juan regions by AD 1300 is beyond dispute, and chapters in this volume provide detailed descriptions of the circumstances , with emphasis on the northern San Juan. As archaeologists working in the northern Rio Grande, however, we are not confident about assumptions and models that present those circumstances as formative events for the cultures of the northern Rio Grande. Numerous attempts have been made to reconcile the timing, visibility, and impacts of proposed movement(s) of people from the San Juan regions into the northern Rio Grande (e.g., Ahlstrom, Van West, and Dean 1995; Cordell 1995; Cordell et al. 2007; Dean, Doelle, and Orcutt 1994; Dutton 1964; Ford, Schroeder, and Peckham 1972; McNutt 1969; Mera 1935, 1939; Moore 2008; Peckham 1984; Reed 1949; Wendorf 1954; Wendorf and 286 Boyer et al. Reed 1955; Wilson 2008). Most, however, are largely based on viewpoints from the donating sides rather than from the presumptive receiving side of such movements. Like Cordell (1995), we recognize a variety of problems with reconstructions of twelfth- and thirteenth-century population movements into the northern Rio Grande. We also see several areas of research that must be addressed to understand population movement into the northern Rio Grande. For example, if population movement as a significant event or process is a matter of scale (Cordell 1995), then data relevant to identifying and describing immigration into the northern Rio Grande must be collected at regional and interregional scales. There must be comparable evidence, chronological and material, from the donating and receiving regions (Haury 1958). Further, interregional aspects of population movement cannot be addressed synchronically, since the dynamics at AD 1250–1300 in the San Juan and northern Rio Grande regions are only relevant within their respective social-cultural-economic trajectories. Consequently, migration from one region to another must be addressed through comparisons of diachronic trajectories. In other words, if a single site or assemblage is inadequate to identify significant population movement (Cordell 1995:206–207), then it follows that a specific point in time is equally inadequate because the significance of the archaeological record at that point is predicated on the specific trajectories that led to it. In this chapter, we assert a perspective of indigenous, long-term cultural development in the northern Rio Grande. This perspective demands that northern Rio Grande people be viewed as active participants in their own culture-historical trajectories and in their interactions with peoples in other regions. Northern Rio Grande Pueblo people were neither so few in number nor so intraregionally disengaged that the dynamics of their cultural developments were determined by events and processes occurring in other regions. The northern Rio Grande was not a nearly empty landscape available for use or colonization by people from other regions. From about the middle of the first millennium AD, the region was home to a growing , expanding indigenous population that developed its own suite of traditions comprising a cultural trajectory superficially similar to but actually quite distinct from those of the San Juan regions. Remodeling Immigration 287 This perspective is certainly not new—witness Peckham (1984); Peckham’s position in Ford, Schroeder, and Peckham (1972); Stubbs (1954); Wendorf (1954); and Wendorf and Reed (1955), for instance—but its substance and implications have been ignored in models of interregional Pueblo interaction and movement that emphasize donation-side perspectives, particularly from the northern San Juan. Nonetheless, the northern...