The next day started off gloriously sunny, and I grabbed my new walking stick and my hat and took the trail that went across the road to the site of the Three Rivers village. The path lead through low desert plants, such as mesquite and grasses. It was a perfect day to go exploring!
Although the streams are dry now, the climate wasn’t quite as dry when the Jornada Mogollon lived there. There is still a line of cottonwoods growing where I imagine a stream once flowed.
The village started around 1000 years ago. By 1200 AD, it was an important village and it reached its greatest size and influence around 1300 AD. By 1400 AD, it was abandoned.
Archeologists had excavated three sites that exemplified types of dwellings in use during the history of the village. The first was a pit house, which was roofed over with branches and had an animal skin for a door.
The next dwelling I came to was a partially reconstructed house made of stone. The archeologists say that the small size of the door was due at least in part to the height of the people at the time. Men were about 5’4″ and women were about 5 feet tall.
They say that they think this was a dwelling for one family.
At one end, there was a rounded room, that they think was for storing food.
There were signs encouraging us to look for remains of buildings that hadn’t been excavated. I saw this line of stones, and I think it was the site of another dwelling.
I love exploring and after I found the remnants of this wall, I got really excited! I started finding pottery shards! Check another item off the bucket list!
I found one and then another.
I was absolutely thrilled with my finds. Within minutes, my hands were overflowing with my treasures.
I had to pick out my favorites. It was so hard to choose!
I saw a sign that said people used to dig up the ruins looking for arrowheads and pottery, and they ended up destroying the sites. They said take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprint. I should have read to the end of the sign. I didn’t read it until I was on my way out. It said not to disturb the sites. Uh-oh…
Well, I did return the shards to more or less the same place I found them, and I didn’t take any.
As a “recovering potter” I have always wanted to find the remains of my “ancestors'” work. I was amazed at how finely made and consistently thin the shards were.
In the interest of full disclosure, however, two shards fell into my backpack, and I only discovered them then next day. I did give them to the Lyn, the camp host, to add to their collection in the office.
What an exciting day for me!
Nice pottery. I imagine that a lot of work has been done on the ceramics of this culture. Pottery is one of the (many) things that has been invented independently by humans at different times and in different places. The fine quality of some very ancient ceramics is breathtaking.
Height of ancient, and not-so-ancient, peoples: of course there are genetic differences in average height, but the oft-repeated statement that ‘people used to be smaller’ is a bit of a factoid. Height is determined both by genetic inheritance and by environmental factors, and sometimes the small average adult size of some past populations was due almost entirely to relatively poor nutrition in childhood, which prevented individuals reaching their full, genetically-determined potential height. This can be seen in many historic populations up to the 19th and even early 20th centuries, in which members of the wealthy and privileged classes were on average visibly taller than the peasants/working classes of the same culture, chiefly because they had been better fed when young. My guess would be that the Jornada Mogollon people had a fairly restricted and spartan diet, and that it was this, rather than a racial characteristic, that kept them small.
According to the literature at the site, the Jornada Mogollon people did have corn, beans and squash, but I imagine that it must have been a hard life, even if the climate was more conducive to agriculture than it is now.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom, Catherine!
Nice!! Our oldest son would be in 7th heaven looking at those sites. He worked on many a dig here in Canada.
God bless.