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eight Plains-Pueblo Interaction a vieW From the “middle” John D. Speth and Khori Newlander Bloom Mound, gutted by vocational archaeologists and pothunters more than sixty years ago, is a tantalizing enigma on the prehistoric landscape of southeastern New Mexico. Despite its apparent diminutive size (only ten rooms were known to local amateurs) and its remote location far out in the grasslands of southeastern New Mexico, Bloom was tightly enmeshed in developments in the broader Pueblo world, producing the easternmost record of copper bells as well as quantities of turquoise, obsidian, marine shells, and ceramics from as farafield as northern Chihuahua, western and southwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Arizona. The University of Michigan’s excavations at this intriguing little trading entrepot have shown not only that Bloom is larger than all of us had once thought but that its florescence in the 1300s and 1400s provides us with a priceless record of the early stages of intensive interaction between peoples of the Southern Plains and the Pueblos to the west. Bloom is also revealing the heavy price the villagers may have paid for engaging in this interaction, as they came into intense, sometimes deadly competition over access to bison herds, and perhaps access to trading partners, with other Southern Plains groups, some from as far away as central Texas and the Texas Panhandle. To most, whether tourist or long-term Southwest resident, the Roswell area epitomizes the “middle of nowhere.” Most archaeologists, it would appear, share much the same view. And in New Mexico, when archaeologists talk about “the Southwest,” you can be pretty sure they are thinking about “the Pueblos,” spelled with a capital “P.” Were you to ask them where they would place the eastern edge of the Pueblo world prior to contact with Euroamericans, most would agree that it stopped at the last major range of mountains fronting the Plains—the Sangre de Cristos in the north, followed to the south by the Sandias and Manzanos, and plaiNS-pueblo iNteractioN 153 finally by the Sacramentos (the Guadalupes, which lie still farther to the south, are generally excluded). Whatever might be found to the east of the mountains is something else, but almost certainly not Pueblo. Even the culture historical framework used by Southwestern archaeologists reflects eastern New Mexico’s perceived marginality in the prehistoric scheme of things.Thus, we have the Mogollon culture area, a fully respectable division within the cultural geography of the ancient Southwest, and one that has been with us for decades. Occupying much of southwestern New Mexico, the Mogollon stands front and center with its equals, the Anasazi and Hohokam, and features prominently in any serious discussion of Southwestern prehistory (e.g., Cordell 1997). Moving eastward across southern New Mexico, we come to the Jornada branch of the Mogollon (or Jornada Mogollon for short), an entitycentered on the El Paso area, and one that is not so mainstream even though it too has been with us for a long time (Lehmer 1948; Miller and Kenmotsu 2004). The Jornada Mogollon does get discussed by archaeologists who work outside the Jornada area, but most often as a kind of backwater occupied by “less-developed” cultures that somehow missed the boat while important things were happening elsewhere.Cordell’s (1997) most recent edition of the Archaeology of the Southwest clearly shows just how little impact Jornada archaeology has had on mainstream thinking in the profession ; using the index as a guide, in the book’s 522 pages only two paragraphs are devoted to the Jornada Mogollon. Moving still farther to the east, we come to the eastern extension of the Jornada branch of the Mogollon.This mouthful, which encompasses most of southeastern New Mexico and a bit of adjacent Texas, is largely the creation of local amateurs who for years unsuccessfully sought help from mainstream Southwesternists but were pretty much ignored (Corley 1965; Leslie 1979; Miller and Kenmotsu 2004). Then, from the early 1980s onward, the area was given over to contract archaeologists who have been buried up to their proverbial ears pounding out an endless stream of “boilerplate” surveys of well pads, pipeline right-of-ways, power lines, and potash mining leases. Although thousands of “sites” (read “pickedover , deflated, surface manifestations”) have been recorded in State files, to the consternation of both State and federal officials, there still is no real “prehistory” for this vast area, no archaeological record that provides palpable grist for the mills of mainstream theorizing about cultural developments in the Southwest...

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