Man on the Rio Grande: Introduction and Overview

Ware, John

A record of over 10,000 years of human occupation is preserved in the Rio Grande rift. The duration and character of that occupation was and remains intimately related to geological processes. The Rio Grande rift preceded the river of the same name. Rifting concentrated runoff, imposed a drainage corridor, and helped to create one of the most important resources in an arid environment: a perennial water source. The rift almost certainly influenced the seasonal movements of early hunters and gatherers in northern New Mexico. The region's first Paleoindian inhabitants were undoubtedly drawn to the water source, as were the herds of Pleistocene animals they hunted. As water became increasingly scarce during the millennia-long droughts that followed the close of the Pleistocene, the river exerted an important influence on settlement patterns and seasonal population movements. The rift concentrated important resources other than water. Volcanism associated with rifting produced obsidian for stone tools, altered land forms, and created, elevations, ecological diversity, and a greater variety of wild plant and animal resources. The floodplain of the Rio Grande eventually attracted farming settlements. When large areas of the Colorado Plateau were abandoned by prehistoric farmers during the first centuries of the present millennium, many of those who were displaced migrated to the rich bottomlands of the Rio Grande and its tributaries, where the certainty of a perennial stream flow and the advantages of a longer growing season encouraged population growth and agricultural intensification. When Europeans colonized New Mexico in the sixteenth century, they encountered over a hundred farming communities along the Rio Grande and its tributaries (Fig. l). In the next century the valley of the Rio Grande became a migration corridor for Spanish settlers probing deep into New Mexico from the mining towns of Chihuahua, and in 1680 it became an escape route for the descendants of immigrants fleeing the onslaught of the Pueblo Revolt. Two hundred years later the Rio Grande corridor of trade, migration, and communication helped to usher in a new era of trade with, and eventually political domination by, the United States. The four papers that follow focus on the late prehistoric and early historic periods on the northern Rio Grande, from the twelfth-century Pueblo Coalition (Wendorf and Reed, 1955) to the seventeenth-century Pueblo Revolt, a span of five centuries that witnessed profound changes in human adaptations and cultural lifeways on the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. Some of the more important changes are outlined and discussed in the first two articles by Peckham and Schroeder, which present concise overviews of the late prehistoric and early historic periods. The final two articles, by Cordell and by Bower and Snow, address specific research issues of the period. Cordell raises questions regarding some old assumptions about cultural continuity in the Rio Grande valley, assumptions that have influenced historical and archaelogical research strategies in the northern Southwest since the tum of the century. Bower and Snow use x-ray fluorescence analysis of early historic Tewa pottery to investigate historic cultural interactions among Spanish and Pueblo populations in the Rio Grande valley. The following papers make no attempt to cover the entire ca 10,000 years of documented human occupation of the northern Rio Grande valley. In introducing the papers, I will focus on some of the more obvious gaps, to provide some historical background for the more detailed archaeological and historical discussions that follow, and to provide a critical overview of some of the more important research values that are raised. The sketch that follows relies primarily on secondary sources, recent syntheses, and discussions with colleagues. It touches on some, but by no means all, of the important issues. For more detailed introductions to Rio Grande p