Gallina Ruins at Nogales Cliff House Archaeological District in New Mexico in the American Southwest
17https://www.theamericansouthwest.com/nogales-cliff-house-archaeological-district The Gallina (AD ~1050 - 1300) are truly mysterious. Not in the Pueblo Mystique style of mysterious, but they are genuinely mysterious from their origins, to their culture, to their demise. Well, that last bit, what happened to them is the only thing archaeologists are certain of. As we began the hike, we looked at the soft ground which had recently been inundated with snow and found the unmistakable prints of a mountain lion. Nearby, we saw the ripped off hide of an Elk. It still had some meat on it. I was thankful for my sidearm.
Then, once we began ascending the trail to the ruins from the canyon floor, we realized we weren’t the first visitors to the area recently. Although, we were the first human visitors. Because of the snow melt, the ground was quite soft and as we climbed up to Nogales, every step of the way, we were following in the footsteps of an Elk. This Elk turned with each switchback in the trail. He hopped over rocks and climbed the steps. At the site, he entered the small collapsed rooms and left his large prints in the ancient dust. He walked along the edge of the alcove, beneath the melting snow and its drips. And then he ascended further up the ridge, above the ruins where it was too slippery from snow and steep for me to follow. What was that Elk doing? Admiring the ruins? Path of least resistance? He, his tracks, the lion’s prints, and the rare overcast, windy, snow driven air certainly added to the mystique of the day and the mystery of the Gallina People’s ruins.
The story of the Gallina gets more convoluted though when you introduce the evidence of lambdoid cranial modification (found both on Gallina skeletons and Pueblo Bonito in Chaco skeletons), the snake iconography, the Twisted Gourd symbolism (found as far away as the Maya heartland but also at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco), the strange way they built their Cliff Dwellings which resemble more Hohokam, their ties to the Plains, the multitude of ceramics from around the American Southwest, and the fact that Gallina artifacts have been found at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon; including 6 toed sandals (polydactyly).
A picture slowly began to form when studying all of the evidence thus far compiled (that I’ve gotten my hands on) about the Gallina:
When Chaco was coming together and the Gallina were living further north that they do now, in the San Juan area, somehow, a Matriarch from these early Gallina, the Rosa-Piedra Era, was sent to Chaco and became the founder of the Matrilineal line at Pueblo Bonito. The Gallina people then moved to their scattered ridges, mined obsidian, and enjoyed a plethora of Elk, Bison, and Deer meat which they hunted in that natural corridor they oversee. They could have taken on people from all over the region or at the very least they traded their obsidian and pelts or even meats with the people of the American Southwest. There’s a good chance that trade would have been facilitated through Chaco. Then the “Civil War” happened in the Chaco region during the 1200s and the entire Southwest changed dramatically. Some violence engulfed the region, the politics may have changed, the religion definitely changed, and Chaco lost some of its power. Whatever happened at that time, Gallina may have opted out of the whole process, built their towers, walls, and inaccessible cliff houses in the 1250s, and closed themselves off from the west, hoping they would be spared. But they weren’t, and in 1300, during the Great Migrations of the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans, they were caught up in the violence and were burned, arrowed, and wiped out by a people who were remaking themselves in the Rio Grande Valley.