PREFACE

Acquisition of the horse would have allowed these groups to cover a much wider range and provided thetransportation capacity needed to support the highly mobile settlement strategy employed byethnographically-documented Plains groups. The residential mobility of these groups was probablydictated as much by the need to provide grazing areas for the horse herds as by subsistence concerns,however.The few documented Protohistoric components west of the Pecos River are almost all attributed to thenineteenth-century Apachean occupation. The initial date for this occupation is unclear, but givenhistorical accounts of the Apaches being pushed off the Plains by the Comanches, it may be as late as themid-eighteenth century. This leaves open the issue of whether local populations of hunter-gatherers orhorticulturalists turned bison hunters continued to occupy parts of southeastern New Mexico into theProtohistoric period. In order to address this or any other problem relating to the Protohistoric occupationof the region, the fundamental question that first must be addressed is• what criteria can be used to identify Protohistoric occupations during survey?ENVIRONMENTThis problem domain was added at the request of the Southeastern New Mexico Overview (SENMO)group. I had not included it in the original draft largely because environmental studies are integrallylinked to the development of diet breath models in the subsistence strategies problem domain and tosettlement patterns analyses proposed in the settlement systems/mobility strategies problem domain.Also, I had included environment as a separate problem domain in the research design for the FruitlandCoal Gas Development Area, and little of the proposed research was completed. In retrospect, theproblem seems to have been that excavations at archaeological sites generally have a limited potential tocontribute information about past environmental conditions, and no alternative means of pursing thatresearch were formulated. The various modeling efforts proposed for southeastern New Mexico areintended in part to correct that problem. Although these studies will probably have to be funded as aseparate component of the research, the collection and analysis of environmental data will necessarily becompleted if this part of the research design is implemented because they are essential steps in the modeldevelopment.Given this approach, the basic research questions to be addressed under this problem domain are:• how are key plant resources distributed in the region?• what is their relative abundance and seasonal availability?• how are key faunal resources distributed in the region?• how are arable soils distributed in the region?• what variability is there in the climatic conditions affecting crop growth?• how are perennial and seasonal sources of water distributed in the region?• what sources of lithic raw materials are there in the region?• how have climatic conditions varied over time?• how would those changing climatic conditions have affected the distribution and abundance ofkey wild resources and agricultural productivity?4-54