A growing interest: How ‘Ancient Women Gardeners’ shaped New Mexico’s prehistoric food systems

No doubt some people are already thinking about the vegetable seeds they’ll be planting this spring in their backyard plots.

David Stuart, an Albuquerque ethno-anthropologist, has completed about six years thinking about and researching planting — in prehistoric New Mexico.

Stuart’s easy-to-read research is packed inside his new book “Ancient Women Gardeners: Prelude to the Chacoan World.”

The book explores the key role women played in small family gardening in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin in the centuries before and during the Chacoan Great House society.

There have been snippets written about these ancient women gardeners, Stuart said, but not until his book has there been a full explanation of the importance of women as early gardeners and of the high-protein foods they cultivated.

Initially, the pocket gardens were in the uplands and mountains west and southwest of the San Juan Basin.

The book’s introduction gives readers a sense of the long historical sweep of the text. It goes far back in time, about 16,000 years ago, which is believed to be the time people from Siberia and eastern Asia arrived in the Americas.

The book places the San Juan Basin in the geographical context of the greater Southwest, meaning parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua.

Family-sized bands of hunters/foragers roamed these lands around 10,000 years ago. Some drifted to western New Mexico, Stuart writes, seeking cooler climates, more grasslands with “protein-rich plants like Indian rice grass, wild amaranth and spinach-like chenopodia species. These provided essential dietary protein and carbohydrates” that suppressed the disease pellagra.

Foraging dominated until about 1500 B.C., when domesticated garden crops like small-cobbed corn, beans and squash became available.

At about the same time, the book calculates, larger game animals in the basin — bison, deer and elk — were being killed off.

A table in the book states that from about 1300 B.C. to 500 B.C. life in the basin had shifted to a combination of foraging, small-scale gardening and small-game hunting. New varieties of corn and squash were planted. Gardeners harvested more protein-rich grass seeds.

From 300 B.C. to 500 A.D. there were more settled homesteads, and more gardens and foraging, with occasional game hunting.

The period saw a rapid rise of women gardeners, a task more physically arduous than hunting. The men helped women with some ditch-digging or punching holes in the soil for corn seed.

A rubric of Chapter Four vividly imagines one family’s existence in the Chuska Mountains, southwest of the basin, in mid-March in the year 336 B.C. 

“The icy spring winds howl. … grandmother has made gruel with the last of the fall seeds harvested from her garden’s two large amaranth bushes.

Grandmother’s garden has saved them from starvation so far this winter.

Her daughter, granddaughter and two grandsons bundle up in layers of thinly woven cotton and tree fiber rags. Yucca fiber sandals receive a warming layer of mashed leaves, and their feet are swathed in loosely worn wild cotton and scrap leather.”

The family exits their camp, a brush-roofed dugout tucked under trees at 6,800 feet. They climb and, at a clearing, meet other members of their shared food network. They walk together to a steep hill where they eventually strip some 30 acres of dense, gray-green Indian rice grasses, about 700 pounds of grass seed fill baskets. Three young men with dogs and atlatls stay to protect the unharvested seed.

Stuart said the women gardeners mostly relied on Indian rice grass.

“It was high in protein, easy to store. Just keep it dry. That would carry them through the rest of the winter,” he said.

If it didn’t, women would forage for late-season berries to get them through.

Much of the early gardening was in the Chuska Mountains and other upland areas.

Stuart writes that if dried cornstalks were left standing, they would trap moisture from drifting snow and draw rabbits, wild turkey and migratory birds. Foraging coyotes, weasels and deer were attracted to these fields. Collectively, their nibbling, excrement and rooting the cornstalk patches fertilized future plantings, the book notes.

Between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. successful crossbreeding experiments produced sweeter, larger, easier-to-grind strains of corn that had higher caloric value. That resulted in a population increase and greater demand for high-protein crops.

In some foraging places, Stuart writes, pieces of hair, which was used to make small or medium-size nets, were found. The nets captured squirrels, skunks and rabbits.

Women also hunted small game. 

“The favorite meal was the back haunch of the rabbit. Some of the small rabbit bones were turned into tools — needles, files. The women prepared the skin. It was immensely intense work,” Stuart said.

By about 500 A.D. the Chacoan world began expanding, connecting it with the Mexican world, Stuart said, mostly through trade and some migration.

Turquoise discovered at a Cerrillos mine found its way through the San Juan Basin to Mexico. 

“By 500 A.D. the hunger for turquoise in the Aztec world was tremendous,” Stuart said.

He said that as Chacoan Great House society failed to provide sufficient protein to its women, pellagra cases increased, as did the rate of stillbirths. All were factors in the downfall of the society, he noted.

The Chacoan world declined in the 1100s A.D.

Stuart’s book is part of the University of New Mexico Press’ “New Century Gardens and Landscapes of the American Southwest” series.

Series editor Baker Morrow said, “I couldn’t think of a better guy than Dave Stuart to talk about the earliest origins of gardening in New Mexico and the Southwest. Dave is fascinating and he thinks very deeply about the ancient culture in New Mexico.”

Morrow said not only is Stuart’s book the first comprehensive account of the origins of these ancient pocket gardens but it gives women the credit they’re due as early gardeners.

Stuart is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and is former acting director of the School of Advanced Research where he served as a senior scholar for six years.