Living and Dying on the Periphery

The archaeology and bioarcheology of the Roswell, New Mexico, area remains one of the most understudied in the American Southwest. Two prehistoric sites, Henderson and Bloom Mound, were excavated in an area some consider marginal." These were communities that responded to cultural system stresses in ways that are detectable in the archaeological record. The inhabitants of these communities were farmers, but had less reliance on maize than contemporary Puebloan communities to the west. They had a mixed and diverse subsistence economy which included bison hunting and consumption by the early 1200s"--