In the fall of 1930 and the summer of 1931, two young archaeologists set out to survey the archaeological sites of the southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona mountains. Traveling in an old woody station wagon, Emil Haury and Russell Hastings traveled the back roads of the rugged country, camping along the way as they documented the prehistoric ruins of the region. In the following years, Haury excavated at two major sites.
In 1936, Haury published The Mogollon Culture of Southwestern New Mexico, in which he defined the ancient Mogollons as a culture distinct from their Anasazi and Hohokam neighbors, triggering a major intellectual debate that involved most all of the big names of the era, including Alfred V. Kidder, J.O. Brew, and Paul Martin. Tree ring dating was just beginning, so Haury had to use ceramics and stratigraphy to put the Mogollon into temporal context. He found that the Mogollon architecture, ceramics, mortuary practices, and other aspects of material culture were markedly different from the Hohokam and the Anasazi.
University of Arizona archaeologists Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey ably chronicle this controversy and the personalities who drove it. It is also a book about the places that shaped the New Archaeology of the Southwest.
