November 19, 2023 Part 1 Exploring Amerind and Texas Canyon.

The Amerind (combination of America and Indian) Museum has been on my bucket list for over 10 years.  Why..well..  I am very interested in the indigenous peoples in North America – how they got here, what was their culture, and what have we uncovered about them..

The museum/grounds are off Dragoon Road and up a dirt road:

First thing we saw was a small cemetery:

The Amerind Foundation Buildings:

   

 

As we went into the museum, there were signs – No Photography!   What a bummer..

So here is a little history:

“The Amerind Foundation was founded in 1937 by William Shirley Fulton (1880-1964) as a private, nonprofit archaeological research institution. A native of Connecticut, Fulton became interested in archaeology as a young man. Several trips to Arizona between 1906 and 1917 captured his attention in the Southwest’s past and present Native cultures. Throughout the 1920s Fulton regularly traveled west from his New England home, heading into the southwestern mountains, canyons, and plateau country to explore for archaeological ruins and expand his Native American collections.

On one of his visits he heard of Texas Canyon with its rugged vistas and rumors of prehistoric agricultural villages. Fulton purchased the property for his FF Ranch (later the Amerind Foundation) in 1930. After building a home amid the boulder formations of Texas Canyon in 1931, Fulton soon found his annual trips to the Southwest began lasting months instead of weeks, and he soon started excavating sites on his ranch property. What began as an avocation grew rapidly into a full-time passion. As his techniques improved, he began publishing accounts of his excavations in a series of Archaeological Notes published by the Museum of the American Indian in New York. With the incorporation of the Amerind Foundation in 1937, Fulton hired a professional archaeologist and began supporting archaeological research on a major scale.

Fulton believed that one of the few means of interpreting ancient cultures was through the collection and preservation of their surviving material remains. He also believed that contemporary Indian cultures could help to interpret the past, but that many native traditions were rapidly disappearing under the influences of the modern world.

These beliefs were central to Fulton’s own studies, to his active support of other archaeologists, and why he created one of the finest private museum collections of ethnographic and archaeological materials in North America. The years from 1937 witnessed the expansion of the Amerind facility as the Museum, Library, Art Gallery (primarily Mrs. Fulton’s contribution), laboratories, storage, workshops, and staff housing were constructed.

In 1948, Fulton hired Amerind’s first professional director, a newly minted PhD from the University of Arizona named Charles C. Di Peso, who would become one of the Southwest’s premier archaeologists. Di Peso’s tenure at the Amerind spanned 30 years and included pioneering excavations at nearly a dozen sites in the Southwestern borderlands of southern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and northern Mexico. He is best remembered for his ground breaking work at Paquimé in northern Chihuahua. Between 1959 and 1962, the Amerind Foundation collaborated with the Mexican Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) to conduct intensive excavations at Paquimé, one of the largest ancient sites in the greater Southwest, and in 1974 Di Peso published a massive eight volume report on the excavations—still one of the most comprehensive archaeological site reports in the history of southwest research.

By any measure, Di Peso’s most important contribution to historical research was to help erase the arbitrary line formed by the international border between Mexico and the United States. Southwestern archaeologists always knew that the cultural region they studied extended well south of the US-Mexico border, but apart from some extensive surveys, very little work was accomplished in northern Mexico. Mexican archaeologists focused most of their attention on the great Mesoamerican sites of central and southern Mexico, and American archaeologists were busy excavating sites north of the border. Few paid more than passing attention to Mexico’s northern frontier. Di Peso and a handful of like-minded colleagues argued that to understand the prehistory of the southwestern US, we needed to fill the blank space on the map of northern Mexico. For Di Peso, the term Southwest was a parochialism. Arizona and New Mexico were really the northwestern frontier of Mesoamerica, and much of Di Peso’s research in the Southwest borderlands was designed to demonstrate a point that most archaeologists now take for granted.

Throughout its history, Amerind has continued to pursue archaeological research that contributes significantly to our knowledge of the Southwest Borderlands. Although Amerind, at this point, is no longer engaged in archaeological excavations, we contribute to the field by hosting two to five advanced seminars each year, bringing together archaeologists, anthropologists, and other scholars to discuss, debate, and synthesize work on various anthropological topics. Proceedings from the seminars are published each year by the University of Arizona Press in a series entitled, Amerind Studies in Anthropology.”

More info can be found here:

https://www.amerind.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerind_Foundation

 

The first floor was about the coming of the indigenous peoples into the southwest.   What I found so interesting is the correlation between this one and Lubbock Lake – over 300 miles away.   This one is about the peoples, Lubbock Lake was about the animals.

It contained the history of the Athabaskans/Athapaskans thru to the the 20th century - their beginnings (from the Beringia Land Mass), their travel thru North America,  their lives, their language, their culture, their arts…

The Athabaskans/Athapaskans folks disappeared and are believed to be the beginnings of the Apaches.

Did you know that the Apaches were not just one big group but many little factions that had their own language? The Apache “group” spoke over 14 different languages.. WOW!

The history of the peoples took us up thru the last stronghold of free indigenous peoples.   The one section then went to Natives in the current America and where they are located.

One of the groups the organization had researched is the Paquimé:

“Paquime emerged from shadowy origins early in the thirteenth century. It became the largest and most culturally complex settlement in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. It bore the imprints of both the Puebloan cultures of the Southwest and the great Mesoamerican cultures of southern Mexico and central America. It served as a cultural beacon for prehistoric people within a thirty thousand square mile area, which encompassed far west Texas, southern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, northeastern Sonora and northern Chihuahua. It collapsed in the mid-fifteenth century, perhaps a century before the arrival of the Spanish, who first spoke of the ruin in 1560.”

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/560/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casas_Grandes

https://tpqfoods.com/paquime-story

https://www.desertusa.com/desert-people/paquime.html

Fascinating to me.. their homes had 30 inch walls.  Their city had multi-floor apartments.  They were very advanced in agriculture and canals and supporting well over 1000 people.   Amazing…   But they disappeared..   And the archeologists are not exactly sure why or where they went or were they assimilated into other groups…

(Can you tell I LOVE learning about this stuff?! – Sadly I hated history in high school..)

Another tidbit is that our view of native Americas living in Teepees is not quite true.   The nomads did live in Teepees as they followed the food.  Others used the Teepees as a means to travel to get the food and bring back to the village.  (Sort of like what hunters/ranchers do today!  Only they use tents..).   Amazing, what is truth and what is Hollywood!

All I can say is what an incredible place!

Another treat here is to walk about the boulders of Texas Canyon.. (Another item on my bucket list!)

There were a few trails and we only did the one.

Going to the trails:

 

OH MY!  Here they are!

 

 

“What makes this canyon unique are the rocks. The rock formations in Texas Canyon are made up primarily of granite and metamorphic rock, which were formed deep underground and later brought to the surface through the process of tectonic uplift. The area has a long and complex geologic history, with rocks that range in age from approximately 1.4 billion years old to just a few million years old.

One of the most striking features of Texas Canyon is the dramatic cliffs and towering spires that rise up from the desert floor. These features are the result of millions of years of erosion, which has carved away at the softer layers of rock to reveal the harder, more resistant layers beneath. The area is also home to a variety of interesting geological features, including hoodoos (tall, thin spires of rock), arches, and natural bridges.

The boulders also balance on top of each other. This happened due to a type of erosion called spherical weathering. This process is a combination of physical and chemical weathering. The result is these large, circular/ovular rocks balancing on top of each other.”

 

 

 

   

 

One flower on the vine in the path:

 

Andy coming up the trail:

Me deciding which trail to take:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A little squirrel watching us:

 

Love the grasses:

 

Heading out  - what a view!:

 

What an incredible place!  Another recommendation from me!

We decided to do a little road trip to Dragoon and found another treasure – covered in Part 2!