Near the end of the Underground Adventure exhibit at the Field Museum is a small display case with a few Native American artifacts collected in New Mexico in 1950–corncobs, squash seeds, a turkey foot, a muskrat-skin bag, a piece of shell on a cord, a black corrugated pot, a miniature bow and two arrows, a child’s sandal. They’re unassuming things. Yet they’re more than 1,000 years old, part of a larger collection in the museum’s storage rooms that’s one of the best and longest records of a prehistoric culture in North America.
In the 1930s archaeologists believed the area of west-central New Mexico around Tularosa Cave had been inhabited in prehistoric times by the Anasazi, the people who built the famous cliff dwellings of the Four Corners region. Their culture had been studied for years, though most of the excavated sites were well north of Tularosa. When Martin first came to the Field Museum he spent several summers digging Anasazi sites in southwestern Colorado, including Lowry Pueblo, a large group of masonry buildings dating from around AD 1090. Then he read a 1936 book by archaeologist Emil Haury, who argued that the sites he’d dug in west-central New Mexico were different enough from Anasazi ones that the people who’d lived there had to be from a different culture, which he called Mogollon after a local mountain range.
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With the exception of the four years during the war, when gas was rationed, Martin, his assistant John Rinaldo, and crews made up of students and local laborers spent the next decade in New Mexico, digging sites that had been occupied as early as 1500 BC and as late as AD 1100. Many of their finds provided additional evidence that Haury, who’d moved on to other things, had been right. Early Mogollon axes were different from Anasazi axes of the same period. Mogollon and Anasazi kivas were different, and the Mogollon had built theirs earlier. Their pottery was different too, and the Mogollon had begun making theirs long before the Anasazi. “That’s what ticked off the Anasazi specialists, quite honestly,” says Nash. “Everyone wants to have the earliest.” But Martin also saw that by AD 900 the Anasazi were influencing the Mogollon and that their influence only grew.
In June 1950 Martin, Rinaldo, and a small crew returned to the cave. At some point it had been used as a donkey corral, and the surface of the dirt fill inside was covered with dung, along with pieces of relatively recent trash: calico, a medicine bottle, a mule shoe. They laid out a grid of two-meter squares and dug through them 20 centimeters at a time until they hit bedrock, which in some places was nine feet down. The dirt was dry and fine, and dust quickly filled the cave each morning, forcing everyone to wear goggles and respirators despite the heat. “If one walked or crawled from front to rear, an impenetrable cloud of powder arose,” Martin later wrote. “It required about forty minutes for the pulverized, ashy particles to settle.”
Five feet apart at the back of the cave they found the 1,200-year-old mummified remains of a man and a woman. He’d been buried on a deer or antelope hide laid over a bed of grass, a bundle of feathers lying on his chest. She was buried on a rush mat over grass and, like him, was facing south, half-reclining, arms crossed and knees bent. She was wrapped in a blanket of rabbit fur and near her feet was a coil of fiber, which Martin guessed would have been used to make baskets.
He discovered that the Mogollon as a distinct culture had disappeared by around AD 1450, and in 1956 he wrote in the Field Museum’s member bulletin that when the Mogollon left the area they might have merged with the early Hopi and Zuni cultures–a bold conjecture for the time. “If it wasn’t his idea he was certainly putting it forth before anybody else,” says Nash. In the same article Martin went even further: “I am making the wild guess that the Zuni language–a language that cannot as yet surely be fitted into any linguistic grouping and thus appears to stand alone–may be the Mogollon language! This is certainly going out on a limb, and someone may saw it off from under me.” So far no one has.
As far as Nash knows, nearly everything Martin sent back is still there. With the exception of the foot in the Underground Adventure display case, the turkey mummies are gone. “They started to smell so bad the director of the museum made him get rid of them,” Nash says. And last fall the remains of the man and woman were repatriated to members of the Zuni, Hopi, and Acoma pueblos, along with the objects that had been buried with them.
