52 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 63 



ancient people inhabiting its banks is not found or expected. It is not 

 known whether the pottery from the Upper Salt and that from the 

 Upper Gila is similar, for our museums have no extensive collections 

 from the latter region from which to make comparisons and draw 

 conclusions. We know practically nothing of the prehistoric culture 

 of the Upper Gila. 



The aborigines of the Mimbres, like those of some of the former 

 dwellers in Pajarito Park in New Mexico, practised a modified form 

 of urri burial, but the latter rarely decorated their pottery with figures 

 of animals. As compared with known Pueblo ceramics, the Mimbres 

 pottery appears to be more closely allied to ancient Keresan than to 

 old Tewan. Judging from what remains, the houses architecturally 

 had little in common with true pueblos. 1 There are no evidences of 

 circular subterranean kivas with pilasters, ventilators, deflectors, and 

 niches, as in northern New Mexico, although there is a fairly 

 large proportion of subterranean rooms or pit dwellings which may 

 have been their prototypes. Architecturally the prehistoric habita- 

 tions of the Mimbres Valley represent an old house form widely dis- 

 tributed in the Pueblo region or that antedating the pueblo or ter- 

 raced-house type before the kiva had developed. 



There are not sufficient data at hand to determine satisfactorily the 

 kinship of the prehistoric inhabitants of Mimbres Valley, but as far 

 as may be jud^^d by pottery symbols it may be supposed that their 

 culture resembled that of other sedentary people of New Mexico and 

 Arizona in early times, as well as that of peoples of Chihuahua. It 

 appears to the author that there are so many cultural similarities 

 among the sedentary people which inhabited the Sierra Madre 

 plateau, of which the Antelope Plain of Mimbres Valley is only a 

 northern extension, that we may regard their culture as closely 

 related. A specialized high development of this inland culture took 

 place along the Casas Grandes River, culminating in Chihuahua. The 

 Mimbres Valley was inhabited by people somewhat less developed in 

 culture. 



Although the ancients of the Mimbres were related on the one side 

 to the Pueblos of New Mexico and on the other to more southern 

 people, that relationship existed between the ancestors of the same 

 rather than with modern Pueblos, and reached back to a time before 



1 While neither the terraced nor the " compound " type of architecture has 

 been seen in the Mimbres for the reason that both were specialized in their 

 distinct geographical areas, the fragile-walled, jacal type of habitation is 

 identical in form, though not in time, in all three localities. 



