Gila Cliff Dwellings: Mogollon People in the Heart of the Wilderness

About forty-five miles north of Silver City, up a canyon road that climbs through pinon and juniper into the ponderosa pine of the Gila highlands, the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument preserves a set of rooms built into natural caves in a canyon wall by people archaeologists call the Mogollon. The dwellings were built and occupied, the evidence suggests, between roughly twelve seventy-five and thirteen twenty of the Common Era. Then they were abandoned.

The Mogollon were not a unified political group; the name is a cultural-archaeological category applied by twentieth-century scientists to people who shared certain material traditions across a broad region of the Gila country. Their relationship to the contemporary Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona, including the Zuni and some of the Hopi clans, is a matter of ongoing archaeological and oral-historical research. The people did not vanish. They moved.

The cliff dwellings sit at the end of a moderately strenuous trail that crosses a creek and then climbs into the caves through a series of ladders and hand-cut steps. The rooms are small, the ceilings low, the doorways sized for people who were not large. What is preserved in the sheltered caves, the plaster, the wooden beams, the corn cobs and turkey bones in the lower layers of debris, gives archaeologists more material to work with than most open-air sites in the Southwest.

Gila National Forest surrounds the monument on all sides. The monument itself is a federal enclave within the wilderness. The fact that the most accessible set of ruins in the Gila country sits about forty-five miles from the nearest city, at the end of a canyon road that the Forest Service maintains but does not improve, is why it is still in one piece.