The Gila Cliff Dwellings are undoubtedly one of my top five New Mexico trips. The former dwelling place of the ancient Mogollon indigenous people is carved into a shelter cave in the side of a cliff about 45 miles from Silver City.
The way there on Hwy 35 took us through the verdant Mimbres Valley. All that green was a nice break from the yellow desert we had just passed through between Las Cruces and Silver City. I will warn you, the road up to the park is really hairy. I got carsick! It is 45 miles but it will easily take over an hour. However, the views are incredible.
Once inside the park, we visited the neat little museum there. We expected to have to pay for a day pass, as this is a national monument, but it was free!
Then we crossed a bridge over the Gila River and commenced the hike up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The hike is a loop trail and it is a bit steep and rocky but overall pretty easy to traverse. The park ranger at the museum told us it would take about 2 hours. I think it took much longer because we spent a lot of time in the Gila Cliff Dwellings.
We took the left side of the loop and soon reached the Gila Cliff Dwellings. There are five caves that were inhabited by ancient Mogollon, which you can view.
We were able to climb up inside and explore the cliff dwelling that once housed about 10-15 Mogollon families. There are an estimated 40 rooms, though many of the rooms have been lost to time and only a few are still clearly marked by walls.
The interior of the dwellings is an impressive labyrinth of rooms. The brick pueblo walls that separated these rooms and shielded the entire pueblo from the elements outside are still in remarkably good shape, considering they were built around 1270 AD. Most of the original mortar used to glue the stone slabs together is still there, solid as ever. The National park Service has done some reconstruction work and also constructed little ladders and stairs you can use to look over the walls into individual rooms.
Soot on the roof of the cave reminds you that this once a home for families. There are communal rooms with kivas, where families enjoyed worship and food together. There are storage rooms where they stored grains and squash they raised along the headwaters of the Gila River. Then there are rooms where they slept. They have left behind pottery and evidence of their agriculture, which contributed to about 40% of their diet. The rest of their food came from hunting and gathering.
There are pictographs and petroglyphs on the walls that you can view in the dwellings. I couldn’t see the ones inside the dwellings. I am pretty blind.
It is not known where the Mogollon came from. They are thought to be descended from a late Pleistocene human group that began occupying the desert Southwest around 9000 BC. Their history is divided into five periods, where they inhabited different areas for varying lengths of time. They inhabited New Mexico and Texas, including Three Rivers, Hueco Tanks, Mangas, and the Mimbres Valley, during their fifth period, between 1000–1450.
When they came to the Gila River area in the 1270s, they created this amazing pueblo but only lived in it for 20-30 years. They abandoned the area for unknown reasons. It is thought a drought or competition with other tribes may have contributed to their move.
The greatest mystery is where the Mogollon went after leaving New Mexico and Arizona. Up until 1450, they were a notable presence in New Mexico and Arizona. Their distinctive pottery, yucca cord shoes and clothes, and agriculture remain as evidence of their occupation. But all traces of them seem to disappear after 1450 AD. It is as if they just up and left. Even more oddly, their descendants have not yet been located.
The Anasazi also occupied many areas in the Southwest and left behind similar cliff dwellings, such as the ones at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Mesa Verde in Colorado. They abandoned these dwellings sometime in the 1300s after profound drought. There were signs that they shifted religious ideologies from astronomical to something else, as they made great effort to destroy old ceremonial buildings that were constructed in line with the stars and planets. This suggests that they may have joined with another group and adopted the new group’s religion, or they may have faced some kind of conquering and forced assimilation.
Their modern-day descendants are believed to be Pueblo people living throughout the Southwest. Linguists note similarities in language and also anthropologists discovered that the turkeys Pueblo people raise share DNA with turkey remains found in the Anasazi cliff dwellings.
Furthermore, there is a rich oral tradition among Pueblo people, particularly among the San Ildefonso Pueblo people of Santa Fe, that speak of their ancestors learning to control the weather, which led to unfortunate consequences. Their ancestors lived in the Mesa Verde and Bandelier areas, and migrated to blend with other pueblo people once drought drove them from their homes.
Oral histories also allude to similar changes happening to the Mogollon, who lived near the Anasazi and even traded with them and may have adopted cliff building from them. But the descendants of the Mogollon have not yet been located. They had to have gone somewhere, we just don’t know where. Their DNA has not been detected in any of the indigenous people currently living in the Southwest. The most popular theory among archaeologists is that they migrated to Mexico.
Evidence shows that Apache people moved into the Mimbres area around 1500. There is also some evidence that a few Mogollon people did remain there as well, though in much smaller numbers. Archaeologists stopped finding their pottery around 1150 AD, so they assumed that meant the Mogollon had totally disappeared from the area, but now it is thought that some Mogollon remained and simply assimilated into other indigenous cultures, causing them to change their pottery style. That doesn’t explain why their DNA has not been found in indigenous people from the area, though.
I love a good mystery and the mystery of the Mogollon fascinates me. I hope that they were able to survive whatever catastrophic event made them abandoned the Southwest.