Early Agriculture in the Mogollon Highlands of New Mexico.

Abstract

The prehistoric dispersal of domesticated plants among hunter-gatherer societies is a poorly understood process. Explanatory models for the diffusion of agriculture have, until recently, been characterized by an emphasis on migrations of farming groups, rather than the adoption of domesticates by hunter-gatherers. Consequently, the dynamic for agricultural expansion is frequently seen as an economic feature of horticulturalists, and much less often as a characteristic of recipient hunter-gatherer systems. An exception to the migration model is the American Southwest, where the earliest agriculture is usually attributed to diffusion between hunter-gatherer groups. Efforts to explain this process in the Southwest--or to confirm that inter-group diffusion was indeed the means of transmission--have been severely hampered by ambiguities in the archaeological record involving the dating and geographical distribution of the earliest domesticates. This study presents an economic construct for the acceptance of domesticated plants by hunter-gatherers in temperate regions, and evaluates it against the archaeological record of early agricultural adaptations in the Mogollon Highlands of west-central New Mexico. The construct focuses on the conditions favoring a decision by hunter-gatherers to adopt food production, while the data base is drawn from recent excavations and collections of materials from earlier research projects. The results suggest that the conditions favoring the adoption of agriculture are the product of density-dependent change in regional hunter-gatherer socio-economic systems, as well as long-term changes in the environmental structure of the study area. It also seems apparent that the current culture historical models for the timing and location of agricultural introduction which posit a gradual, long-term process confined to montane regions about 5000 years ago, should be reconsidered, since the appearance of domesticated plants in the Southwest seems to have been a rapid and widespread phenomenon occurring sometime between 3500 and 3000 yr B.P.