A CANYON VILLAGE

by Bruce F. Barber

Man in the Americas... Fossil evidence indicates man occupied parts of southwestern Arizona over large parts of the past 39,000 years. The area represented by Arizona, New Mexico, southern Colorado and southern Utah sheltered and nurtured man for the past 12,000 years. The history of man in Mexico dates some 8000 years before present while that of Baja California covers nearly three thousand.

The inhabitants of northeastern Baja California were a branch of the original Mogollon Indians who migrated south from the well watered mountains of the Pacific Southwest. It is interesting to note that the Mogollon's change from a nomadic to a sedentary village life was principally brought about by the introduction of corn from Mexico where it had been under cultivation for 7,000 years.

Owing chiefly to the diverse geography of their territory, the Mogollon were never a cohesive society. Rather, they consisted of scattered family groups sharing many basic cultural traits with regional differences. And so it was with the local Indians who seem to have lived about twenty to twenty-five miles apart in groups of twenty to forty.

Water, the desert's most elusive natural resource, has not only been the key to survival in the Southwest but lent itself to the quality of life for most regions' inhabitants. Consequently, because Baja's backbone mountain ranges (the Sierra San Pedro Martir and the Sierra de Juarez) contain water throughout most years, we find ample evidence of early dwellers therein.

In the San Pedro Martir, for example, there are an estimated four thousand petroglyphs adorning rocks in its nineteen canyons. Along the beach, there are shell mounds of such dramatic size they speak of the two thousand years prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. In Valle Chico, there is a place displaying evidence of women teaching children how to make arrow points, cutters and scrapers. In fact, it is a rare occasion that the knowledgeable man or woman returns from our local desert without having seen signs of the men and women who lived in what we must assume was a Canyon Village.