1

Disappearance of the Mimbres People."

But when a team of archaeologists led

. bi Michelle-Hegmon and me took a closer look at this moment in time

and the following decades, we found

that people had not disappeared from

the Mimbres region. Some people left,

but many did not; they simply moved out of their villages into small ham-

lets situated near some of their fields. This move away from village life

helped them preserve their farming

traditions and allowed them to remain

in their Mimbres homeland. The mys-

tery is not one of disappearance, but

of metamorphosis . Here 1 trace two

pieces of the story of change. The

first is the way archaeologists revised

their view of the past, and the second

is the way the people of the Mimbres

region transformed their lifeways.

Figure 12.3. Footprints pecked into stone above Palomas Creek in th e ~:_c .. Mimbres area-another image expressing the theme of movement.

Changing the Questions You may have heard your teachers say, in elemen-

tary school, "There's no such thing as a stupid ques-

tion." Perhaps there isn't, but there is definitely

such a thing as an outdated or inappropriate ques-

tion. Science is the investigation of a series of ques-

tions that become progreSSively more refined as we

learn more about the subject of study. When we

look back in time, earlier research questions often

no longer make sense; they no longer direct our

attention in the right ways. That is not bad . Science

is the process of improving our understanding, and

as we do so, we ask different, and presumably bet-

ter, questions.

Early researchers, local residents, and archaeol-

ogy enthusiasts in the Mimbres region documented

many dozens of ruined villages and hundreds of

smaller, stone masonry field houses scattered across

the landscape. On the surfaces of these sites were

strewn thousands of fragments of broken clay bowls

and jars, painted with intriguing naturalistic and

geometric designs. No contemporary Native people

make this pottery, and no Native communities then

lived in the area . It seemed that the people who had lived in these villages and made this pottery had

disappeared. The question that emerged was.

What caused the mysterious disappearance :'

the Mimbres people? Later twentieth-century archaeologists. k ::

often labeled a people by their pottery, as \ \T 0 :'"

tend to do in the twenty-first century. If we c~: pottery "Mimbres" and the people who made. '.

correspondingly, "the Mimbres people," the . . - - -

we see that the pottery was no longer made .. ; _

conclude that the people must have disappe".~, .:.

This conOation of pottery and people has ca-.:o - -

to ask the wrong question. What disappeare ~ fact not people, but a pottery tradition. Wh :-. -=- .

pIe moved away from the villages, they sto :: ~ = making Mimbres-style pottery. To understar. C: .- changes, we need better questions: Why did: - _

people leave their villages? Where did they ~ :' ­

How did their lives change 7 And why did t i". C' -

making Mimbres-style pottery?

Why Did People Leave Their Villages? We do know that thousands of people left ~ _ .

of villages in the Mimbres region within th . 0-

some 20 to 30 years-a dramatic event. ,-\ . .; ~ - -

association of this movement with the end :' : -

pottery-painting tradition Signals impona n : 0 :

changes. The decades of the early twelfth c:>-

100 Margaret C. Nelson