(Note: After musing over his aerial photographs of trinchera
hill sites, Tom Baker takes the position here that they were fortified
farming villages. - L.B.)
Summary: The study of cerro de trinchera ("entrenched
mountain") sites in the lower American Southwest and northern
Mexico may shed light on the question of whether, as a number
of researchers have speculated, early farmers operated amid a
sea of hunter-gatherers, with the two lifestyles in occasional
(if not constant) conflict. The trinchera hill sites appear to
be fortified locations for growing food. Did early farmers have
to defend their crops and storage bins from raiding nomads who
had not adopted agriculture? Further investigation of these sites
may support the idea.
Apparently so. Foragers (variously called "hunter-gatherers,"
"nomads," or just "hunters") and farmers ("agriculturalists,"
or more accurately "horticulturalists" at this stage
of the game) seem to have shared the same territories, voluntarily
or not, as agriculture developed. It appears to have been a common
situation worldwide. It could have happened when a cultural group
that had already adopted agriculture migrated into the territory
of hunter-gatherers (or vice-versa), or it may have evolved when
some element of a single nomadic people took up agriculture among
the rest who did not.
Drawing strict distinctions between the foraging and farming lifestyles
is oversimplifying, of course, because as agriculture evolved
there would have been a mixture of the two, and perhaps never
a complete separation. Semi-sedentary groups could have foraged
while also maintaining small gardens, and in fact this must have
an intermediate step for those nomads who eventually became sedentary
through increasing dependence on agriculture. But there were nevertheless
groups who remained primarily nomadic foragers, while others became
largely sedentary farmers, existing in the same territory. In
historic times, we have only to look at the example of the U.S.
Southwest, where the farming Pueblo towns were surrounded by nomadic
Athabaskan tribes who migrated into their territory. And yet Puebloan
farmers never completely abandoned hunting, while nomadic Navajos
(for example) also tended gardens in watered canyons.
Some theorists visualize the two lifestyles as being economically
dependent on one another, especially early on when the distinctions
between them were more blurred, and trading their products (the
meat and skins of the hunters, the cereals of the farmers) back
and forth. Conflict would have become more common later on, when
farmers became more efficient, and self-sufficient.
Up until the appearance of agriculture, of course, hunting and
gathering was the natural lifestyle of all humans, the original
legacy of our hominid ancestors, pursued since time immemorial.
Small bands of humans had always roamed the landscape in seasonal
cycles of foraging that were finely tuned to the rhythms and resources
of the environment. Then, relatively recently and suddenly, the
agricultural way of life evolved, triggering rapid cultural evolution
leading to civilization. This happened independently and at different
times in the Old and New Worlds, but why it should have occurred
at all is still a question that gives anthropologists fits, and
probably always will.
There is a school of thought that believes that an agricultural
lifestyle, being an unusual development for humans, with definite
drawbacks to it as well, would have been resisted by all but those
unable to continue in the old hunter-gatherer way of life. Only
people who could not, for some reason, continue to be hunters
and gatherers would resort to gardening, this reasoning goes;
the rest would go on as humans always have. The eventual result
would be the two different lifestyles, foraging and farming, existing
side by side, with conflict developing between them. The fortified
hills we are interested in here may have been an outgrowth of
such conflict.
Why should the two lifestyles have been in conflict?
It would have been simply the farmers defending their villages,
crops and food stores from raiding nomads, the same way the Puebloans
resisted the raiding of the Athabaskan tribes in later times.
Besides the obvious temptations of a farmer's food gardens to
hunter-gatherers (that is, after all, what they gather), farmers
can amass food surpluses that they can store to tide them over
hard times. Foragers, on the other hand, would be without such
a safety net when the natural pickings grew slim, and at such
times the crops or storage bins of the farmers would have become
especially attractive to them. And when a group of humans wants
something, especially hungry ones wanting food, they will take
it by force if they can't get it by an easier means.
Thus, if a group of farmers in such a situation could keep their
valuable seeds and surplus produce in an easily defended place,
such as a walled hilltop, reason suggests that that is what they
would do. If they could also locate their gardens in such a place
(for at this time period we are talking more about truck gardens
than waving fields of grain), or even park their entire farming
village there, that would be even better. In our aerial photos
we usually see a river or stream at the foot of a trinchera hill,
which is where the farmers would have gotten water for their gardens
(and themselves), carrying it back in waterproof baskets while
waiting patiently for someone to invent pottery.
Is this, then, what the cerros de trincheras (fortified hills)
really are: the early farmers' response to the raiding of larcenous
hunter-gatherers? These hills appear, in our aerial photographs,
to have stone walls for defense, terraces for planting gardens,
and sometimes places where houses were located (see the especially
obvious small circles, suggesting structures, in the Cerro Vidal
photo). If these trinchera hills were actually fortified farming
settlements, then archaeologists should find evidences of gardens
on the terraces, and perhaps storage cists or bins as well. The
many grinding stones and other plant food processing tools scattered
about these sites which all observers, from Adolph Bandelier onward,
have commented on make it clear that some sort of agricultural
activity took place on these hills.
Note also, in John Roney's commentary on our photo of Cerro Juanaqueña,
that he has found a lot of projectile points on these trinchera
hills, and in fact that is one of his main methods of dating the
sites, as well as by the presence (or conspicuous absence) of
pottery. Are all these spearheads (this was too early for arrows)
evidence of fighting? Perhaps so. And if so, it is all the more
argument for these hills being prehistoric farm-forts.
It will be interesting to see if
future archaeological work, both in the air and on the ground,
supports this idea about what the cerros de trincheras were.
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