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John Speth is studying the economic ties that developed in the 14th and 15th century between Plains buffalo hunters and Southwestern Pueblo farmers. With the help of many undergraduate students—some participating in a summer field school program, others writing senior Honors theses, and yet others participating in Michigan’s UROP program—Speth has been excavating two villages in southeastern New Mexico.
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At the Henderson Site, a community of at least 75 rooms, two phases of occupation have been recognized: an Early Phase, which began about A.D. 1275; and a Late Phase, which lasted from the early 1300s until the mid- to late 1300s, when Henderson was abandoned. The occupation of Bloom Mound, a smaller community less than a mile from Henderson, picked up more or less where Henderson left off, somewhere in the mid- to late 1300s; its occupation continued into the early or mid-1400s.
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 Aerial view of Bloom.
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 Capitan Mountains at Bloom.
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The Roswell villages document a dramatic increase in exchange with the Puebloan world to the west. The Henderson villagers may have contributed meat and other products of the bison hunt to the exchange system, products that they themselves procured by undertaking long-distance hunting forays into the Southern Plains. In return, the Roswell communities received pottery, turquoise, blankets, and perhaps maize (corn) produced by Puebloan farmers.
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Information gathered by local amateurs who dug at Bloom Mound in the 1930s, augmented by the University of Michigan’s recent excavations, underscore Bloom’s role as a small trading center of some affluence, with much greater quantities of exotic ceramics and other imported items, including Mexican copper bells, than were found at Henderson. However, a dramatic falloff in bison remains at Bloom, despite abundant evidence that the community remained thoroughly engaged in long-distance exchange with the Puebloan world, seems to suggest that Bloom’s inhabitants had shifted their role in the exchange system from hunters to middlemen.
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Competition over access to the bison herds and to trading partners gradually led to tensions between hunters and farmers that finally erupted around A.D. 1450 into deadly conflict. Amateurs digging at Bloom in the 1930s found more than a dozen unburied skeletons, many burned. Michigan’s excavations revealed several deliberately buried skeletons, none of which were burned, although one bore club impacts, two had projectile points in their abdominal areas, and all were “non-combatants,” that is, infants, children, young adult women, and elderly men. Soon thereafter Bloom and perhaps other “middleman” villages in southeastern New Mexico were abandoned.
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 Excavating at Bloom.
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The Roswell research not only tells us about the turbulent centuries that preceded Spanish entry into the Southwest, it also helps us understand why hunting peoples in other parts of North America may have entered into close ties of exchange and interdependence with farmers.
 Henderson Site pottery.
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Recent and Ongoing Research Projects
Over the years, numerous undergraduate and graduate students have had the opportunity to work with John Speth on his research in Roswell. Many of these student projects have led to course papers, theses, professional talks, and publications. A few examples of recent and continuing projects include:
In 2006, John Speth and Matt LeDuc, at the time an undergraduate Honors student in anthropology at Michigan, began a project for Matt’s Honors thesis to investigate the rims of El Paso Polychrome jars recovered from four late prehistoric village sites in the Roswell area of southeastern New Mexico. It has long been known that the ratio of maximum rim thickness to minimum vessel wall thickness (a ratio known as the “rim sherd index” or RSI) increased steadily over time, but no one had ever determined whether the change reflected increasing rim thickness, or declining vessel wall thickness, or some combination of the two. The assumption has always been that the RSI primarily monitors stylistic characteristics of the rims, although changes in average jar size, a functional property of the vessels, could conceivably also lead to shifts in the RSI. Surprisingly, nothing was known about the relationship between the properties of the rim and the size of the vessel. To investigate these relationships, Speth and LeDuc undertook a study of El Paso jars curated by museums and research institutions in New Mexico and West Texas. In a sample of over 40 complete or nearly complete jars, we measured orifice diameter, maximum vessel diameter, vessel height, maximum rim thickness, and vessel wall thickness. We then explored the relationship between attributes of the rim and vessel size. We found that El Paso jars subdivided neatly into just two distinct size classes—small and large—with virtually no overlap between them. And, as we had suspected, the average RSI values of the small and large vessels were significantly different. We used these insights to develop a chronological ordering of the four late prehistoric (post-A.D. 1250) Roswell-area villages. The results of the seriation revealed that these villages underwent a rapid “pithouse-to-pueblo transition” during the 14th and early 15th century, a shift that may have been driven more by socioeconomic changes than by subsistence intensification, the traditional explanation for shifts of this nature elsewhere in the Southwest. Our results were published in 2007.
Speth, J. D., and M. LeDuc, 2007. El Paso Polychrome Jars: New Insights from Complete Vessels. In Viva la Jornada: Papers from the 14th Biennial Jornada Mogollon Conference, edited by J. Jurgena, L. Jackson, and M. Thompson, pp. 33-52. El Paso Museum of Archaeology, El Paso, TX.
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Erin Gager, Khori Newlander, and John Speth have used ultraviolet (black light) fluorescence (UVF) to determine the abundance of stone tools made on nonlocal materials at Henderson and Bloom Mound. UVF has proven quite useful as an expedient means for distinguishing some of the major Southern Plains chert sources. For example, Alibates and Tecovas cherts, both Texas Panhandle sources, produce a green response to UV light, while Edwards Plateau chert, derived from central Texas, produces an orange response. Thus, the UVF response of projectile points can identify the areas within the Southern Plains where the Roswell villagers did most of their bison hunting, and whether the geographical focus of their hunting activities changed in any significant way over time.
The UVF study showed three interesting patterns: (1) green responses (indicative of the Texas Panhandle) are consistently more frequent than orange responses (indicative of central Texas), (2) both green and orange responses fall off sharply by the time of Bloom’s occupation, and (3) the frequency of points displaying an orange response falls off sooner, and declines further, than points with a green response. These results suggest that the Roswell villagers were interacting with, and probably hunting in, both the Texas Panhandle and central Texas, though seemingly more frequently, or for more extended periods, in the Panhandle. In addition, access by the villagers to both the Panhandle and central Texas appears to have declined between Henderson’s Late Phase and the occupation at Bloom, with access to central Texas beginning to decline sooner. The warfare that ended the occupation at Bloom may well have erupted in response to competition between the Roswell villagers and other hunting peoples in Texas over access to Southern Plains bison herds, a source of conflict remarked upon by early Spanish expeditions when they first entered the region in the 16th century. The results of this study are currently in press:
Speth, John D., and Khori Newlander, 2009. Plains-Pueblo Interaction: A View from the “Middle.” In Revisiting the Late Prehistoric in Central Texas: The Toyah Phase, edited by Nancy Kenmotsu and Douglas Boyd. Plains Anthropologist (submitted).
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Jamie Clark has conducted a detailed examination of the skeletal remains recovered, under a State of New Mexico permit, from Bloom Mound as well as those recovered during the 1995 and 1997 excavation seasons at the nearby Henderson Site. Important finds at Henderson include the commingled remains of at least two individuals (adult and child) that were recovered in a burial pit in the West Plaza (Feature 66). This find is interesting because, unlike the other burials at the site, Feature 66 was not interred beneath the floor of a structure. Feature 66 represents a secondary burial, as evidenced by the fact that the skeletons are not complete, the bones were not in articulation, and the adult remains preserve evidence of carnivore damage. This may indicate violence at Henderson; perhaps the victims of conflict were left unburied (and exposed to carnivores) for a period of time before the villagers were able to collect the remains and bury them in a collective pit. However, this is not the only possible explanation; for example, carnivores may have visited the site during a period of non-occupation and disturbed existing burials, with the bones being reburied upon later discovery.
As indicated above, analysis of the individuals buried at Bloom provided more direct evidence for conflict. An older male who was buried beneath the floor of room N-7 preserves evidence of traumatic injury in the form of impact damage on the skull. Three of the four adults from the site are missing large portions of the face; because there is currently no direct evidence that this damage is the result of human activity, we cannot attribute it to violence with any degree of certainty. Given that facial bones are delicate and thus more likely to suffer from damage after burial, the damage to the facial region may be a factor of differential preservation. However, although the sample is currently small, the fact that there are no young adult males in the sample may also point to conflict; perhaps the village was attacked when the men of the village were away on a hunting/trading expedition or were involved in conflict away from home. Future work at Bloom will hopefully provide more insight into the nature, extent, and cause of the apparent conflict at the site.
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