Archaeological Excavations in the Northern Sierra Madre Occidental, Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico

Abstract

The focus of Lister's research is establishing early contacts between Mexico and the Southwest. He wanted to look in caves in the Sierra, believing that this chain of mountains may have served as a corridor between regions. Lister focused on caves thought to contain Casas Grandes material. Instead Lister found only one cave helpful on this problem and the others to be full of material that he considered Mogollon. The area they dug in is the Rio Piedras Verdes southwest of Nuevo Casas Grandes. There is a 2 mile stretch known as Cave Valley. They tested five caves here. The following pages are descriptions of excavations and materials found. Lister also dug four caves in Arroyo el Concho, in Sonora, west of Nuevo Casas Grandes. This is a narrow, steep-sided canyon. In the 1955 season they returned to do some testing in the Rio Garabato at Las Ventanas Cave (* now known as Cuareta Casas). They investigated eight cliff-dwellings and "several" rock shelters in the Rio Garabato. In the adjacent Arroyo en Medio five small cliff dwellings were "investigated". Plastered grass granaries were common in the caves. The artifacts excavated are summarized in the following sections. P. Mangelsdorf provides a chapter describing the excavated plant remains. Brand, and until this work, Lister, thought that the cave sites were the final stage of Casas Grandes culture. They thought Casas Grandes had developed to the east in the basins and valleys. Casas Grandes people moved into the mountains after being pressured by nomads. Sayles thought that the caves represented the earliest well-developed stage of Casas Grandes. Sayles and Gladwin saw relationships to Mogollon in this. Now Lister prefers to see the cave sites as Mogollon as are ceramic sites below the caves. Casas Grandes culture developed from a Mogollon base, and under Pueblo influence, spread out. The Alma wares are the clearest signal of Mogollon influence. One missing Mogollon trait is San Francisco redware. A bit of Casas Grandes pottery was found in surface collecting the caves. It is taken to be redware. Lister and colleagues had trouble assigning their material to phases because so much of it makes for poor time markers. So they set out culture periods as defined by Wheat (1955). Their oldest horizon is considered to be the lower levels of Swallow Cave which cannot be too old since they have corn. But there is a hiatus before the overlying Mogollon 3 material. The earliest Mogollon material is late Mogollon 3, which they date around A.D. 900. Finding maize below Mogollon 3 "strengthens" their belief that the Sierras were a corridor. All the other caves contain Mogollon remains right down to rock floors. More recent materials in the caves are associated with the cliff dwellings. They consider this material to be Mogollon 4 and 5, from around A.D. 1000. Lister goes on about how the few Casas polychromes are tradeware. At the time they thought early Casas Grandes culture dated from A.D. 1000 to 1100. Lister thinks that the Mogollon caves sites were abandoned when Paquimé came to the forefront, thus, the former is ancestral to the latter, after an infusion of Pueblo culture. * Without dates Lister could not easily know that cave sites often have components that are almost certainly contemporary with Paquimé. The idea of a Sierra corridor between regions may have its roots in Haury's suggestion of the Sierra being the route by which cultigens got into the Southwest.