GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Watson And The Advent Of Historical Particularism

In 1927, El Palacio, a magazine founded by Edgar L. Hewett and the New Mexico Archaeological Society to promote archeology and Southwestern culture in general, published a survey by Editha L. Watson of 104 archeological sites along the upper Gila River, some of its tributaries, the Mimbres River, and around the general vicinity of Pinos Altos, an old mining town just north of Silver City. [27] The most detailed site description (#20) was of Gila Cliff Dwellings, the first published description of the place since Hough's reprint of Bandelier's report, and a photograph of the ruins illustrated the title page of the August 27 issue. Corncobs were still plentiful, and Watson also noted the presence of red pictographs, about which she wrote "they are supposed to be the work of later tribes." The source of this supposition is unknown, although she may have discussed the pictographs with Wesley Bradfield, an archeologist with the School of American Archaeology who had begun several years earlier to excavate at a Mimbres ruin near Silver City—work that was also reported in El Palacio—or with C. Burton and Harriet Cosgrove, amateurs from Silver City who were digging at the Swarts Ruin and who would write a report that stood for years as the best description of a Mimbres cultural site.

Like the Cosgroves, Watson was not a university-trained archeologist, but she had a significant collection of Mimbres mortuary pottery that brought her to the attention of Jesse Walter Fewkes, drawing her at least peripherally into professional archeological circles. Fewkes himself had been drawn to the Mimbres area by E. D. Osborne, another local and amateur collector of prehistoric pottery, who had begun a correspondence with the Smithsonian Institution just as Lieutenant Metcalf had more than 30 years earlier.

In her survey, Watson included the TJ Ruin (#23), which was "across the river from the [Heart Bar Ranch] house, on what is called the 'Polo Grounds,'" and noted that the pottery sherds were different from those elsewhere in the Heart Bar range (the West and Middle forks of the Gila) which appeared to have been thickly settled at one time. This observation contrasted with the previously noted assessments of the Forest Service and the Park Service. She also reported without comment that Mr. T. L. Perrine, the manager of the Heart Bar, had excavated another site on the ranch "range" that yielded burials but not the valuable mortuary pottery. Pothunting was common, Watson had written in her introduction, and she recommended that all the sites she identified be excavated or preserved.

Seven years after the 1907 publication of Antiquities of the Upper Gila and Salt River Valleys in Arizona and New Mexico, Jesse Walter Fewkes had commented that "we know practically nothing about the prehistoric cultures of the Upper Gila," and Alfred Vincent Kidder had reiterated the observation, practically word for word, in his Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, published another ten years later. In this near void, Watson's survey, which identified many sites that Hough and his informants had not recorded, had little impact and few echoes—not until the 1980s did it even appear in a scientific bibliography. The popular bias of the magazine in which the survey was reported may have contributed to the professional silence, but a larger reason was probably a change that was happening in the theoretical framework of archeology: historical particularism.

The ascendancy of Franz Boas and the influence of his empirical approach to anthropology, actual excavations at Pecos, Pueblo Bonito, and ruins in the Four Corners area, and the new procedures of stratigraphic records and ceramic seriation developed around the time of the First World War shifted professional attention in the Southwest to the creation of relative chronologies for prehistoric sites. This trend was formalized in 1927 as the Pecos Classification System: Basketmaker I, II, III, and Pueblo I, II, III, IV, V. In brief, typologies of architecture and artifacts that had previously been developed for descriptive purposes and the presence or absence of particular traits or phenomena at excavated sites—evidence of agriculture or cranial deformation, for example—were used to sequence chronologically the evolution of pueblo culture.

Published the same month and year of the first Pecos conference, Watson's survey echoed the intent of Hough's 1907 work—the legal protection of antiquities. Twenty years after the passage of the Antiquities Act, her approach was dated. The cursory information was only of anecdotal interest, nearly irrelevant to the new issue of cultural history, and ultimately overshadowed by excavations in 1927 at the Cameron Creek Ruin and along the Mimbres River at the Swarts and Galaz sites.