by Paul Weideman
The variety of New Mexico's landscapes is simply marvelous, although much of the beauty in the desert Southwest tends to be on the austere side. For the earliest Native Americans, that was a problem.
When paleoindian hunters brought down a mammoth 10,000 years ago, it provided a substantial quantity of meat for a family or small community. But mammoths were soon extinct and survival became ever more a matter of feast or famine, especially with drought a factor.
During the Archaic Period (from about 5500 B.C.E. to 600 C.E.), people still hunted but they also increased their skills at foraging edible plants. The challenge was getting enough calories to be healthy.
Subsistence options changed substantially with what archaeologists call the Columbian Exchange. At the time of Christopher Columbus' late-1400s voyages from Spain to the Caribbean and Central America, and with subsequent European colonization, there were "huge interchanges of agricultural crops and livestock," says Mollie Toll. "Most of what came into New Mexico was from the Mediterranean and North Africa by way of Mexico.
"We had already received the important Mexican crops — corn, beans, and squash — for a couple thousand years before the Spanish came in. What we didn't have were tomatoes or avocados, or chickens, sheep, goats, and pigs."
Nevertheless, corn changed subsistence economics. Toll, who is a paleoethnobotanist with the Museum of New Mexico's Office of Archaeological Studies, says, "When people finally got a handle on growing corn, it made larger pueblos possible."
Water for crops was often a challenge. But people dug ditches, operating them with water gates just like the later Spanish acequias. And the Hopi people developed a type of deep-rooted corn to tap water at the sand-clay horizon below stable dunes. "
A lot of corn I looked at at Chaco sites was small, just five inches or so," Toll recalls. "And the rows were irregular and there are signs that some rows were not filled and those are signs of moisture stress at tasseling time. "Most of the corn that was local to Chaco was pretty runty. Then there are these ears from Pueblo Bonito, from Chetro Ketl, from Pueblo del Arroyo that were enormous. Researchers determined chemically that those big ears were grown outside, like in the Chuska Mountains 50 miles west, where you would be assured of more water."
Chaco was a dispersed community, and many of the people may have lived most of the year at such farming "outliers," then gathered at Pueblo Bonito for seasonal trading or ceremonial events.
Over the centuries, Native peoples amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of useful plants growing on mesatops, in canyons, along streams, and in the mountains. Toll is quoted in Canyon Gardens: The Ancient Pueblo Landscapes of the American Southwest (UNM Press, 2006) talking about the value of "crumbs" such as the seeds and small plant parts that fall into the corners of floors or between a metate (stone grain-grinding platform) and a wall, similar to what gathers between appliances in the modern kitchen. When archaeologists examined a large, 1,500-year-old pit structure near Nakaibito (150 miles west of Santa Fe), storage bins were found empty, but such "crumbs" provided evidence that the residents had used more than 30 plants, including amaranth, beeweed, goosefoot, jimsonweed, yucca, and piñon.
"Piñon nut is a great one, offering higher caloric density than corn," Toll says. "Piñon was worth trekking for and people definitely did that."
Of course, piñon is delicious, but the bulk of dietary materials wouldn't have tasted anything like what we're used to. "Everything was bland," Toll says, "although many desert species produce all kinds of alkaloids to deter predators, and that also helped people with parasites. A lot of things that are very aromatic when you're out walking in the desert, like sagebrush and juniper, have some weird flavors. And people ended up eating a lot of dirt. Your food would have been bland, gritty, and strange."
Tart purslane and the fruits of prickly pear and currant offered some variety, but meat was always a welcome menu item. "If you find a deer, elk, or pronghorn, it provides a lot of meat as well as raw materials, hide and sinew and bone for making tools," says Caitlin Ainsworth, an osteologist with the Office of Archaeological Studies who works with Toll. "But once people started living in big settlements like at Chaco Canyon it would be tough to find enough of those big animals to support the community, so we see a lot of consumption of rabbits and larger rodents like prairie dogs."
As Jason Shapiro writes in his Before Santa Fe: Archaeology of the City Different (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2008), nature's bounty is simply unreliable when foragers' lives depends on it: "There are times when piñon groves do not always produce nuts, the wild grasses do not always grow or ripen, and animal populations rapidly decrease in what is called a 'population crash.'" Thus the logic of growing your own food.
Once the people focused more on agriculture, the animals that we call "pests" noticed the change. With a new strategy that Ainsworth calls "garden hunting," residents would protect their valuable plant resources and also acquire much-needed meat.
Including birds? "Bird feathers were incredibly important for making ritual items, but the birds also provided a source of meat for the diet," she responded. People kept turkeys at Chaco and at the pueblos of Pindi and Arroyo Hondo in the Santa Fe area. "This is one of the things that archaeologists sometimes argue about, but it appears that early on turkeys were most valuable for feathers, for blankets, and for bone for tools, but over time they became a part of the diet as well.
"It's interesting to read early Spanish accounts of how stunned they were at how hot and how dry the landscape was, wondering how anyone could possibly survive there," Ainsworth says. "But people are very resilient, and they're really good at making the best of what they have and finding creative solutions."
— Article by Paul Weideman written for The Santa Fean magazine, which in the summer of 2021 went belly-up before publication.
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