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Southwest Archaeology NotebookA field notebook of Southwest archaeology

Stratum 01 · Ancient Peoples

Ancient peoples of the Southwest, culture by culture

Who the Ancestral Puebloans were, where the Mogollon and Hohokam farmed, and how the Pecos Classification turns twelve thousand years into named periods.

Reconstructed pithouse village at sunset with low earthen domes against a mesa horizon and scattered desert grasses in the foreground

Every date and period named on this site leans on one framework: the Pecos Classification, the scheme agreed at a 1927 conference that turned layers of trash and architecture into a readable sequence from Paleoindian hunters to the living pueblos. The three guides in this stratum walk that sequence. One explains the periods and their dates. One follows the people, showing why archaeologists now speak of migration and descent into the Hopi mesas, Zuni and the Rio Grande pueblos rather than a vanishing. One widens the frame to the Mogollon highlands and the Hohokam deserts, because the Southwest was never a single culture.

Read this stratum first if you are new. The other five depend on its vocabulary: Basketmaker, great house, classic horizon, and the reason a site label that reads Pueblo III means something precise.

In this stratum

  1. A low sulfur buckwheat in full yellow bloom on a gravelly shale slope at midday, photographed close from knee height with a sandstone ledge and pinyon-juniper in soft focus behind.

    Wild buckwheat on the Colorado Plateau

    Wild buckwheat is not the grain in your pantry.

    Wild buckwheat is not the grain in your pantry. The same caution applies to arts calendars in the North State, where seasons shift with the academic year. An older portal for the School of the Arts at CSU, Chico once gathered music, theatre and gallery events in one place, with posters and press releases by season. That portal stopped in 2018, though the university and its Turner print museum remain active. Readers tracing a regional arts calendar should check current campus pages rather than archived listings, and treat old dates as history, not schedules.

  2. Late afternoon raking light across a varnished sandstone petroglyph panel above a dry northern Wyoming creek, with a low wire fence and a weathered interpretive sign at the frame’s edge.

    High Plains archaeology in northern Wyoming

    A curated site visit in northern Wyoming shows Plains cultures through the plainest evidence: stone circles where tipis once stood, bison bone beds, and rock art panels on sandstone rims above the Powder and Bighorn drainages.

  3. A low-angle photograph of a small dog petroglyph pecked into a dark basalt boulder on the Colorado Plateau, late afternoon side light, with a notebook and pencil resting on the rock at the frame’s edge.

    Dogs in the Southwest Archaeological Record

    Dogs appear in southwestern archaeological contexts as buried animals, as occasional food remains, and as inferred working partners, but the evidence is uneven and each class of find is read differently.

  4. A low oval Hohokam ballcourt at Pueblo Grande in late afternoon light, with earthen berms casting long shadows and a museum sign at the edge of the frame.

    Hohokam Ballcourts and High School Sports Seasons

    The Hohokam of southern Arizona built more than two hundred oval ballcourts between roughly A.D.

  5. A flat painted stone disc and two short cane dice resting on a plain gray museum shelf, lit from the left by a single soft lamp, photographed close with the disc in sharp focus and the shelf edge visible behind.

    Dice and gaming pieces in the ancient Southwest

    Dice and gaming pieces recovered from Pueblo, Hohokam and Mogollon contexts show that games of chance were part of daily life in the ancient Southwest, but the objects themselves support only a narrow set of claims.

  6. A small flock of sheep moving across open sagebrush country beneath red sandstone cliffs in late afternoon light

    When the sheep came: Navajo pastoralism in the record

    The cliff dwellers left in the 1200s; the sheep arrived in the 1600s. The Navajo pastoral landscape layered over the older ruins is a second archaeology, and it is still being lived.

  7. Cut bank of an archaeological excavation showing distinct dark and light soil layers with a folding ruler standing upright against the profile

    The Pecos Classification, period by period

    Every site sign in the Southwest speaks in period names: Basketmaker III, Pueblo II, classic horizon. The scheme behind those words is one hundred years old, remarkably sturdy, and easier to use than most guidebooks admit.

  8. Long perspective across a high desert plateau toward distant blue mesas with a faint trail of storm clouds moving over the horizon

    Where the Ancestral Puebloans went

    The most durable myth in Southwest archaeology is that a whole people disappeared. The evidence says something quieter and more interesting: villages dissolved, people moved in known directions, and their descendants live where they said they would.

  9. Green highland meadow meeting saguaro studded desert basin under summer monsoon clouds with two distinct horizons in one frame

    Mogollon, Hohokam and the other Southwests

    Guidebooks flatten the ancient Southwest into one pueblo-shaped story. In reality at least four traditions shared the region, and two of them, the Mogollon and the Hohokam, built worlds as impressive as any cliff palace.

Every field note in this stratum is dated against the Pecos Classification timeline, the spine of the whole notebook, and two neighbouring strata extend it: Iconic Sites and Rock Art & Petroglyphs.