Abstract
AN expedition of the American Museum of Natural History of New York, under the leadership of Dr. Paul S. Martin, has been engaged in the examination and excavation of a number of Indian village sites in the mountainous region of western New Mexico. The villages are situated just off the route followed by the Spanish conquistador Coronado in his unsuccessful search for the legendary wealth of the “Seven Cities of Cibola”. According to a preliminary report from Dr. Martin, of which certain particulars have been issued through Science Service of Washington, D.C., there was little surface indication of the existence of any of the sites; and it was only the occurrence of scraps of Indian pottery, no larger than a thumb-nail, which directed the attention of the members of the expedition to one site which has been excavated. Even local pottery-hunters had failed to detect the existence of the villages. On this site the walls and floor of a large subterranean pithouse, presumably used by the inhabitants for ceremonial celebrations, has been uncovered. It measures 33 ft. in diameter, and is the largest of its kind hitherto excavated in this area. The objective of the expedition is the identification of sites bolonging to the little-known Mogollon culture, one of the three cultural divisions into which American archæologists now classify the prehistoric cultures of the south-west, preceding and leading up to the great development of the Pueblos. Dr. Martin reports that he has found important evidence relating to the age and development of the Mogollon culture. He estimates that the site excavated was abandoned seven hundred years before Coronado's expedition of about the middle of the sixteenth century.
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Prehistoric Indian Village, New Mexico. Nature 144, 542–543 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144542d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144542d0