PREFACE

Most frontier studies deal with agrarian or state societies, and southeastern New Mexico is unusual in thathunting and gathering appears to have been the predominant cultural adaptation for all but a few centuriesduring the Ceramic period. Even during that period, hunter-gatherers may have been present andsedentary groups appear to have had a mixed farming/foraging economy. Consequently, environment anddemography are expected to have been the major factors conditioning cultural adaptations to the region,and I have suggested that the processes of intensification and extensification may be useful in explainingthe interplay of those two factors.Because we are dealing primarily with mobile groups, the settlement-subsistence strategies employed bythose groups must be understood in order to define the social boundaries between ethnic groups. Basicresearch to reconstruct those strategies and to identify how they changed through time must therefore becompleted before any detailed examination of the interaction between groups can be initiated.A series of basic questions, applicable to all temporal periods, were formulated for the chronology,subsistence strategies, and settlement system/mobility strategy problem domains (Table 4.1) to ensurethat the data needed for these reconstructions are obtained. More specific questions relating to eachtemporal period and broader culture history questions posed by previous researchers (Table 4.2) were alsoincorporated into the research design. The questions posed under the environment problem domain(Table 4.3) are integrally linked to the investigation of settlement-subsistence strategies, but much of thedata needed to address those questions will be collected in conjunction with model development orspecial studies rather than through excavation.The first consideration in prioritizing those research questions is that they constitute a nested hierarchy.That hierarchy is explicit in the general questions summarized in Table 4.1. Three scales of inquiry aredefined, the most specific of which is the site/component. The intermediate area/generalization scale isintended to represent investigations within a single regional sampling unit (RSU). At this scale, researchis concerned with generalizing from the specific data obtained from excavated sites in the RSU. At theregional/integrative scale, data from all of the RSUs are used to address broader questions, including mostof the questions summarized in Table 4.2. Research at this scale is also intended to move beyondgeneralization to explanation.The implication of this hierarchy is that the lower scale questions must be answered before the higherlevel questions can be addressed. In the short term (ca. five years), it is unlikely that an adequate orrepresentative sample of sites for the entire region can be intensively examined to answer many of thehigher level research questions. Priority should be given to addressing the basic questions in Table 4.1under the site/component and area/generalization scales of inquiry. Question blocks in Table 4.2 markedby a superscript “g” may also be addressable in part with data obtained at the site or area scale of inquiry.The second consideration in prioritizing the research questions is the likelihood that the relevant data canbe obtained from the sites being investigated. This consideration cannot be addressed definitively sincethe samples of sites selected for excavation are chosen independently for each RSU. The site distributiondata presented in Chapter 3, however, indicates that relatively few sites dating to the Paleoindian andProtohistoric periods have been documented in the region. Because of their rarity, those sites, along withsites dating to the early and middle Archaic, should be given a priority for excavation. Nevertheless, theresulting sample is likely to be too small to address questions above the site/component scale of inquiry.As the greatest number of excavated sites will be those dating to the late Archaic and Ceramic periods,priority at the area/generalization scale of inquiry should be given to the general and specific questionsrelating to those periods.4-57