Kachina and the Cross Read Online Free PDF Page A

out of northeast Asia near the end of the Pleistocene , or Ice Age. At that time the climate of the Southwest was wetter than now with many lakes and large rivers. The first Paleo-Indians to become, indisputably, an element in the Southwestern landscape were people of the Clovis archaeological tradition who probably reached the region about 11,500 years ago. There is increasing evidence to suggest earlier settlements, but the Clovis Paleo-Indians with their fluted stone points used to hunt the great Pleistocene elephants are fully documented. Clovis sites are found over much of the Greater Southwest and extend beyond it in every direction. Clovis peoples had a technology probably based on the spear-thrower, sometimes called by its Aztec name, atlatl. The atlatl is a flattened two-foot billet of wood, bone, or ivory, tapered at one end to form a hand grip, with a notch at the other end into which is fitted the butt end of a short spear. The spear is then cast with a rounded motion of the arm, sending the missile farther and faster than could be done with the arm alone. Clovis spears were often tipped with a chipped stone point that was fluted; that is, a flake was removed on either side of the point along its long axis. Fluting is a characteristic American method of chipping and may have served to make the wound bleed more freely.
Clovis was replaced by a series of more topographically restricted cultures, the best known of which is Folsom , whose hallmark was another type of fluted point. By Folsom times, the various elephants (mammoth and mastodon) had largely disappeared from the Southwest, and Folsom hunters concentrated on the large Pleistocene bison. After Folsom came other hunting traditions, but the climate was growing warmer and drier. By about 6000 B.C. it was becoming very difficult to depend on big game hunting. Slowly, the Paleo-Indians adapted to this more difficult climate, concentrating on a strategy of gathering wild plants and hunting small and mid-sized game. This new era of human endeavor is called the Archaic

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in the Americas. It is roughly equivalent in technology and economic strategy and overlaps to a certain degree in time with the group of post-Pleistocene societies sometimes called the Mesolithic in Europe and the Mediterranean region. The Southwestern Archaic involved very small family groups who wandered over the desiccated landscape searching for fruits, berries, roots, or grass seeds in season and hunting rabbits and other animals.
Several Archaic traditions eventually established themselves in what later became the Pueblo Southwest. In the Rio Grande Valley they included the Oshara , a largely indigenous development in the upper valley, while to the west was the Cochise and to the south a tradition called the Chihuahuan , both of which extended into the Rio Grande Valley south of Oshara. People of these various Archaic traditions had a tool kit somewhat like that of the Paleo-Indians: they used the atlatl and a variety of chopping and grinding tools. They lived in caves and rock shelters or had huts of jacal (interlaced poles and branches daubed with mud) or, perhaps, skin tents of some sort. Life in general was hard, and populations rose very slowly over the millennia.
About 2000 B.C., at a time when the climate was slowly ameliorating from the "long drought" of the previous several thousand years, a new and revolutionary idea began to penetrate the Southwest from the more advanced societies of Mexico to the south. This was the concept of plant domestication, which had begun some two thousand to three thousand years before in southeastern Mexico. The plants that spread into the Southwest were descendants of these early domesticates, a rather primitive form of maize ( Zea mays ), squash ( Cucurbita pepo and C. moschata ), and the bottle gourd ( Lagenaria siceraria ), the latter plant dried and used as a container. Two other plants of very great importance spread out of Mexico later,