Petroglyphs From Mogollon People, New Mexico
1/6/16 • Written by Julianne
Now in New Mexico in the Chihuahua Desert, we find ourselves near a protected petroglyph site dated to 500+ years ago when the area was inhabited by Mogollon people. Our good luck is that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has built visitor center and trail so that we can easily find the glyphs and reach them safely. They even provide walking sticks.
We managed a short, rocky trail among sagebrush and the basalt stones which are used for the pictures. Basalt is very hard, not easily carved but has the advantage that a hole pecked in the rock exposes a lighter colored underlayer. The carvings were all created using this pecking method.
There are hundreds and hundreds of the petroglyphs in the area and anyone can wander around at leisure to visit them. We found, to our delight that almost anywhere our eye landed, we found carvings.
The Mogollon people inhabited this basin and a wider area in southern New Mexico until about 500 years ago. Although some of the types of art they used is repeated in the work of some native people now inhabiting New Mexico, it is not thought that the current native groups are descended from the Mogollon populations. Or maybe the descent is not yet determined-I am not a scholar of this area and am sure research is on-going.
Of the 21,000 petroglyphs identified, about 10% use the circle design shown in the top photo. Others use images of big horn sheep, ravens or other animal life. Many include faces or human figures. Others are geometric designs.
This site includes the remains of a village which has been excavated. While the land looks flat and very desert-y as shown in the below photo, the village was sited along a water course. The white area in the center is the current visitor center, the village was located about 1/4 mile beyond that. Life looks sparse to me but these were people adapted to getting food and other resources from a harsh environment. The climate was a bit more moist than now and some speculate that the Mogollon people dispersed as the climate dried.
Among other things to like about this site are the volunteers who staff the visitor center. BLM has a program in which volunteers can live at the site in their own motor homes and staff the visitor center. A retired couple from New Hampshire live there now and have just signed up for another year. They were welcoming on a foggy day, had lots of knowledge to share which made our visit even better. What a nice thing for the government to enable and what a nice thing for the volunteers who help us out. Lovely.
Below, photos of petroglyphs and vegetation.
Photos by Nancy. Text by Julianne.
It started out in the late 1980's and continued into the 1990's as a project to demonstrate how humans could migrate to alien worlds and create their own livable environment.