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https://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. They lived in fancy pit houses but built cliff dwellings. They also built quite a few large towers and walls in what appears to be a purely defensive nature. The towers have a commanding view of the surrounding valleys and from what I have gathered from friends who know archaeologists and who work at the New Mexico Office of Archaeology, these towers are on every single high point in the area that the Gallina occupied. And that area includes two natural corridors north of the Jemez Mountains that facilitates some of the largest Elk herds in the region. The Gallina made ceramics but the only kind found so far are grey with black markings.Although alternatively, some evidence has been found that the Gallina actually imported ceramics from every direction around them. They’ve found Mesa Verde, Rio Grande, and Chaco ceramics.
The Gallina are not Anasazi, but they’re not Puebloan and in fact, on their way to the Rio Grande Valley, the Mesa Verdeans, specifically the Jemez, appears to have wiped out the Gallina people completely. No modern tribe or Puebloan group claims to be the descendants of the Gallina. There’s a good chance the isolationist Gallina have no living descendants.
The area they inhabited is stunningly beautiful. It is a perfect mix of the southern Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau. The sandstone is yellow and chalky Mesa Verde sandstone. The adobe structures at the cliff dwelling sites are almost Hohokam in appearance. The tops of the mesas they occupied were at 9,000 feet and while walking around Rattlesnake Ridge, you can certainly feel it if you’re not used to the elevation. It seems the Gallina people came from the lower elevations on the San Juan River but were forced OR left the area all by themselves to head to higher elevations when they chose not to be part of Chaco. And I think that’s the key to it all. They chose not to be part of Chaco and the Chaco Anasazi &/or Mesa Verdeans never forgot that fact.
They did not build above ground Pueblos like those cultures did at the same time that the Gallina were in pit houses. They also, and I believe this is key, did not have Kivas. They did not build ceremonial structures, as far as archaeologists can tell. Which means they didn’t share a religion with their western and northern neighbors. In addition, the Gallina sites aren’t concentrated like their neighbors, but instead they are relatively small and dispersed throughout this Gallina region. Most curiously, a lot of the habitation sites are found clustered around one of those large and impressive towers I mentioned earlier. And these towers can be found every 50 - 100 meters from each other on each and every ridge throughout the area.
These cliff dwellings were built in the middle of the 1200s and it seems the people moved from their scattered pit houses to these highly defensive cliff dwellings that exist on very steep ridges in the canyons of the area. Clearly, the Gallina people felt threatened. The towers, the Cliff Dwellings, the walls, are all evidence of some sort of warfare or strife. Then there’s the excavated buildings, what few there are. Most of them seem to have been burned. And found inside them, often, are the charred remains of the inhabitants. Also, plenty of other bodies have been recovered with signs of blunt force trauma. There was also a skeleton recovered with three arrows embedded in its chest. Another with 2 arrows in the hip. Another skeleton was found still holding a bow and a quiver of arrows. And it was a female. More than half of the excavated sites contain murdered men, women, and children.
The walls I mentioned were about 9 feet tall and much thicker than other walls built at that time to the Gallina’s west and north at Chaco and Mesa Verde.
William Whatley, who used to be the official Jemez Tribal Archaeologist, was interviewed by David Roberts for his book In Search of the Old Ones and he believes the Gallina were wiped out by the Jemez.
“Over the years, the elders have given me pieces of the migration story the whole ting takes twelve hours to tell. But the gist is this. The people came from the Four Corners area, somewhere near Sand Canyon. As they migrated south and east, they left markers. I’ve actually found some of these on the ground, just from the elder’s descriptions- markers that no living Jemez have ever seen.