Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
Maljamar sand dune archaeology
November 16, 2005
“Pottery shards included Chupadero Black and White, Three Rivers Red Wash, and La Junta Focus (from near Presidio.) The presence of a small amount of El Paso Polychrome and the absence of Lincoln Black and Red indicate the site was abandoned about 1300 A.D.” In 1957 and 1958 members of the Lea County Archeological Society carried on excavations six miles northwest of Maljamar, New Mexico, one mile west of the Mescalero Escarpment, the western edge of the Llano Estacado.
The Midland Archaeological Society maintains its non-lending library at the Sibley Nature Center. One recent lunch break I randomly grabbed a report containing the above words. I sat eating my asadero and green chili burritos from the Burrito Place, sipping a bottle of water and skimming the report. The words “La Junta Focus (from near Presidio)” jumped out at me and grabbed my imagination – it felt like someone grabbing my beard and yanking!
As I read a new source on history of the Llano Estacado I include notations in a timeline on the computer. Over the years I have added information from over 100 books, and in its bare-bones form it is a 70-page document. It begins with notations from the earliest Spanish explorers, and much of the first 100 years of information focuses on Jumano Indians. Jumanos were one of a number of Indian peoples that lived in adobe structures throughout northern Mexico and the American southwest. Much of the Jumano population lived in the region of the La Junta Focus around Presidio when the Spanish arrived.
The words that caught my eye hinted that people from the Presidio region traded with people on or near the Llano Estacado more than two hundred years before the beginnings of Spanish documents. Could the traders that brought the La Junta pottery have been “proto-Jumanos”? I am so thankful that the Archaeological Society library is at Sibley. I get excited learning new things about my home bioregion!
No one knows how many languages were spoken before the advent of Spanish colonization, nor how difficult communication was as they traded among themselves. With pottery at the Maljamar site coming from several different regions, it can be assumed that at least some hardy folks walked great distances as traders. The Athabaskan invasion (Navajo and Apache) had not occurred yet, and as far as I can determine, northern Mexico and the American southwest was populated by pueblo dwelling folks that farmed, hunted, traded, and developed a rich and complex religious life with a detailed ritual cycle. Humans being humans, I am sure some strife brought by warfare must have occurred, but the only evidence of that has only been found hundreds of miles from the Llano Estacado.
The site is on top of a small hill along a large draw. A number of springs were still seeping when the region was settled by Anglo ranchers in the 1880’s before water wells were drilled on the Llano Estacado. The sand dunes are just to the west. The soil on top of the hill is unusually black and large amounts of burned rock of various sizes are present at all levels in the soil. Three burial sites were noted – all of young children.
Another burial site had been vandalized, and in between visits by the group someone vandalized what might have been the belowground part of a pit-house. (Pit houses were dug two or three feet down, and then walls and ceiling of rock or wood or both were constructed. It is an early form of what became the classic pueblo style dwelling.)
As I am prone to do, I let my imagination try to reconstruct life at the Maljamar site.
Sandsage brushed the hair from her face as she put another hot rock into the cooking basket. She was boiling the shin-oak acorns to remove the tannin. When she finished processing what she had collected that morning she would grind the acorns into meal, and then store the meal in her favorite pots.
Her husband Kit Fox and his father and brother were hunting deer. Her husband had recently received in trade a bow made of an orange wood (Osage orange or bois d’ arc, and its closest native range was in Oklahoma.) Traders from the east of the pronghorn antelope plains (the western Llano Estacado) had brought several earlier in the year. To get the bow her husband had given up the beautiful abalone shells he had gotten from traders that came from far to the west.
Her husband’s family had visited this land of dunes with pools of water, and cliffs with small springs for generations. As summer’s heat withered the grasses, game concentrated near the water. The acorns ripened at the same time. She had met her husband last year when he came to trade in her village on the other side of the mountain of walnuts (present day Nogal Peak in the Sacramentos.) Her husband’s family liked to wander in the fall.
Her sister-in-law, Tobosa, began screaming. “My child has been bitten by a snake!” Their mother-in-law woke up from where she was snoozing against the dwelling. The two younger women had convinced her to rest because of her coughing and wheezing during the night. The mother-in-law, Pretty Blanket, darted into the dwelling and grabbed the sharpest arrow blade out of her husband’s belongings – a blade made of a shiny black rock from far to the north.
Pretty Blanket met Tobosa as she ran crying to the house, carrying her small child. “Sandsage, get some of the cotton cloth and moisten it.” Sandsage ran to do her bidding. Pretty Blanket examined the child. The rattlesnake’s bite was on the inside of the thigh, and blood was dripping steadily from the wound. “You need to pray, Tobosa. The bite reached a blood vessel. Little Nighthawk is in grave danger. I don’t know if I can save her.”
Pretty Blanket made a small cut across the bite. Little Nighthawk screamed. Pretty Blanket squeezed her leg and then began sucking and spitting blood.