 Gina Powell (red shirt) at the Henderson Site, 1997 | Gina Sue Powell: Mobility and Hunting in Late Southwestern Prehistory |
 Field school students backfilling a roasting pit excavation at the Henderson Site. | The Henderson site, near Roswell, New Mexico, has been excavated for five seasons by University of Michigan students and others, providing paleoethnobotanical data I will use to explore issues about mobility and subsistence in the late prehistoric Southwest. Southeastern New Mexico is an area of the Southwest characterized by highly mobile populations that occasionally settled into pueblos, possibly when conditions were good for farming. Henderson Pueblo offers an opportunity to study the changes in farming and gathering strategies brought about by an increase in bison hunting around A.D. 1300. |
| Preliminary results suggest that maize agriculture did not significantly change when bison hunting increased, although gathering of wild perennial resources seems to have decreased in the later phase. After 50-75 years of occupation, the site was abandoned. Presumably, the inhabitants began to occupy more ephemeral, less archaeologically visible sites. | |