Pueblo on the Plains, Lea County site is rewriting accepted history
Levi Hill/News-Sun
Fifty years before Columbus, the last rays of a Zia sun hammered the stark, ruddy cliffs of a mesa in what will eventually become western Lea County.
Robed in deerskins, their skin baked red in the furnace of the Llano Estacado, a string of women trudge laboriously up the face of the mesa.
Each woman bears two ceramic jugs of silted water, the last, precious, muddy mouthfuls the land will provide.
As they reach the top, one woman stops to catch her breath and turns to look out over the withering stain that was once a thriving lake in a golden sea of bone-dry buffalo grass waving across a wind-seared landscape.
Behind her, a scrawny jackrabbit, so driven by hunger as to ignore the danger she presents, digs for a morsel among the barren plots of what were once thriving gardens filled with corn, squash and native melons.
The woman wipes the sweat and sand from her furrowed brow, worry creasing her face as she gathers her jars of water and marches on to her people’s kiva, nestled among the 35 or so interconnected jacal-roofed rooms that make up her pueblo.
Tonight, for the last time, her people will gather to feast on buffalo, mezcal and acorn nuts — the last of their stores that cannot be packed for the journey ahead. They will dance and sing praises to the gods, beseeching them for mercy, plentifulness and safety.
Tomorrow, with the rising of the sun, the 50 or so members of her tribe will gather what scant possessions and food they can carry and abandon the pueblo they have called home for more than three generations.
They will walk off the face of their mesa into obscurity — where they came from as much as an enigma as where they went.
Whether the gods were kind and they found new homes or met an untimely end on the lonely plains either from thirst or as victims of a warring tribe is unknown.
What is known is that 100 years later the first Spanish explorers to breach the desolate Llano found no settlements and only whispers of nomadic tribes crossing the plains in pursuit of buffalo.
The fact these agrarian people even existed was lost for 500 years until white men, driven by the greed for Native American artifacts, discovered the remains of their homes — their spades and picks piercing centuries of blowsand to carry away precious clues to the past.
If not for the work of a group of amateur archeologists in 1957 even less would be known today of a what is already terrifyingly little of a people whose very existence is rewriting the accepted history of the Llano, southeast New Mexico and the peoples of the Southwest.
History discovered
“This is the first discovery of its kind in this area,” said archeologist Martin Stein, who oversees the data collected from Lea County’s pueblo for the Permian Basin Programmatic Agreement. “There is a pattern where people live by hunting and gathering, but they do come to a time period where they start trying to grow crops and take on a more sedentary lifestyle. That was always one of the things everyone was on the lookout for. The Merchant Site was the first that came along where you could say that is what was going on.”
The Merchant site, as the pueblo is identified to science, has met with resistance from the archeological world, but Stein said it is gradually taking a foothold in history as the first pueblo discovered east of the Pecos River and the first site with a kiva (pit ceremonial room) east of the Pecos.
Only three other pueblos in New Mexico have been found south of Interstate 40 and those are still within 100 miles of that line.
Furthermore the site in western Lea County is the first to show evidence those native peoples not only took up long-term habitation of a single location on the Llano Estacado, but also farmed the high desert.
“In the Southwest in particular, what is unique about southeast New Mexico, primarily because of the climate and the natural resources, is that the best way to live there was to have a mobile society — small groups of people who would camp in an area for perhaps several weeks and harvest what was available locally,” Stein said. “That’s the pattern you see at thousands of small sites where people lived temporarily.”
According to radiocarbon dating, the site was inhabited from around 1300-1450 A.D. and then abandoned. It was then inhabited again for a time before being abandoned permanently. At least that’s the story archeologists read in the artifacts left behind.
A pueblo by any other name
Where exactly these people came from is unclear, their tools and style of building incorporate several aspects of contemporary tribes residing in the Southwest, most notably the pueblo peoples of Northern New Mexico.
In the strictest sense the site is not a pueblo.
It isn’t built into a cliff face and the rooms are made of stacked caliche rock, interwoven sticks and mud — not adobe like northern pueblos.
However, Stein said that simply means these peoples used the resources at their disposal to construct homes similar perhaps to those they once lived in before something or someone drove them out into the desolate plains of the Llano Estacado.
“There is a kind of a blend of southwestern pueblo traits and traits from the high plains,” he said. “One of those is the surface rooms were built interconnected like rooms at pueblos. They used adobe blocks in most pueblos. The construction method at the Merchant site was caliche blocks or sandstone used to make a short wall to act as a sort of foundation, then lightweight jacal construction.”
Jacal, a term used to describe the interwoven sticks plastered over with mud and grass, was ideal for the arid climate of the Llano and was first discovered in the El Paso area.
So whoever these peoples were, they knew about pueblo living and Stein said the location chosen in Lea County was done so likely because of it’s defensible position on the edge of the mesa and because of the small lake that geology indicates once existed at the foot of the mesa.
In the most recent documents written on the Merchant site, archeologist Myles Miller firmly asserts the site’s providence, dubbing it the “Pueblo on the plains.”
Tools and pottery abound
Not only the building style, but the tools these peoples made also point to an amalgamation of cultures.
Archeologist Calvin Smith — who first visited the site in 1957 as an amateur archeologist working with the Lea County Archeological Society, a group of volunteers — said arrowheads were scarce at the site because of looting but flakes and scrapers abounded and told a tale themselves.
The LCAS team was the first group to document the site, and their work preserved information that was rapidly being lost to looters who continued to invade the site in search of arrowheads and pottery.
“I have never seen a site with that many scrapers on it,” he said. “The bottom line is the accumulation of scrapers of all kinds — snub nose, edge, flake —they were hide dressing on a very regular basis.
He said the pottery and tools also point to two different cultural influences, but he said the unique pottery collected at the site is not found in other locations, suggesting these peoples possibly did not trade it, which was unusual.
“If you look at the Merchant site and the material that came from there, what you see is an amalgamation of High Plains with entry by the Jornada people from the west. That has become really important to professional archeologists, whom we couldn’t get down here in the early days,” he said.
But tools found at the site suggest the people did trade.
Some of the shards the tools are made of — often misidentified as flint — comes from Central Texas, about 1,000 miles from the pueblo. He said either the pueblo peoples in Lea traded for it or traveled hundreds of miles to get it.
“They were obviously in contact with the pueblos in these other areas,” Stein said. “They were trading but we don’t know what they were trading. They were getting obsidian in these campsites and most comes from northern New Mexico.”
Established farmers
Perhaps just as jarring for archeologists to discover aside from the location being a wayward pueblo, was the discovery of a kind of dike system and plotted gardens at the Merchant side.
It is a sophisticated system for the time and one that surprised Smith, who says he was the first to discover the dike system during the 1957 excavation.
“I found what I felt like were remnants of enclosures around crops,” he said. “I found some straight lines of caliche that occurred north of the site itself, I won’t say it was irrigating, but they may have been carrying water there.”
Stein said the accepted theory now is the dike system probably collected rainwater and funnel it to the caliche-walled plots where the crops were grown — archaic dry-land farming.
“They were laid out to take advantage of whatever rainfall there was,” he said. “The water would run down and they made check dams to slow down the water and cells of rock that would help trap the water and sediment.”
Stein added that the amount of corn pollen found in the floor of the ceremonial pit at the site indicates corn was grown somewhere fairly close to the pueblo.
A ceremonial pit
Perhaps the most hotly debated and yet fully accepted find at the Merchant site was a large, round pit room that Smith and Stein both say was likely used for ceremonial purposes. By any other name it is a kiva, Smith said.
“It was 25-30 feet across and I think it could have gone 12 feet deep,” he said. “You would have had to have had a ladder to get in and out. They had to cut and pick their way through lots of caliche to make it. They would not have gone to that much trouble unless it was for a special ceremonial purpose and that’s what a kiva is — a ceremonial room.”
“(It is) a kiva in the sense it is a place where the people gathered for important events, but in terms of the form, it didn’t have some of the features kivas do in the Four Corners area,” he added.
Stein said evidence gathered at subsequent digs at the site show the floor of the pit structure was plastered, another indication it had special meaning and uses.
He said when the site was finally abandoned, a nearly 12-inch thick layer of animal bones lined the bottom of the pit — an indication the inhabitants abandoned it in a ceremonial way.
“You don’t find the animal bones like that in pueblos, not in huge numbers like present there,” he said. “That was a plains trait. These people were actively hunting bison and bringing back pretty large numbers of them.”
Probably because of a cycle of dryer weather that was sweeping the Southwest at the time, the Merchant site pueblo was probably on the tail end of the settled existence of the plains, Stein said.
It was a short-lived period anyway, likely brought on but a sequence of wet years that created the small lake and other across the Llano such as a similar site found in Andrews County, Texas, that has only had a cursory study done of it because of even more severe looting by arrowhead hunters.
Many thanks to the first team
Stein said the insight that continues to come from the Merchant site is due very much to the early work done by Smith and the LCAS team in 1957.
“Bus Leslie (who lead the 1957 volunteer team excavation), he was a self-taught, but he understood the importance of context in trying to interpret archeological sites,” Stein said. “A lot of people think arrowheads is what you need, but it’s more about where it is found and how it relates to other thing. All-in-all he really did a wonderful job recording the information about the site that allows us to make the interpretations we are making today.”
No future excavations of the site are currently planned, although Stein said aerial surveys of the area are planned in the near future to try to map the site better.
He said he believes there is still much that can be learned through future explorations but the key is to protect it from looters until more research can be done.
He added he hopes more research can be done at the Andrews site and other locations that might mirror the Merchant site to see if they tell a similar story.
“The merchant site has been a real fountain of knowledge,” he said.
