Land Use and Looting Shape Archaeology in Chihuahua

Land Use, Looting, and Archaeology in Chihuahua, Mexico: A
Speculative History
Jane H. Kelley, David A. Phillips Jr., A.C. MacWilliams, Rafael Cruz Antillón
Journal of the Southwest, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2011, pp. 177-224
(Article)
Published by The Southwest Center, University of Arizona

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jsw.2011.0006
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/458530
[ Access provided at 21 Mar 2022 22:18 GMT from Florida State University Libraries ]
Land Use, Looting, and Archaeology in
Chihuahua, Mexico: A Speculative History
J a n e H. K e l l e y , D av i d A. P h i l l i p s J r ., A.C. M a c W i l l i a m s ,
a n d R a fa e l C r u z A n t i l l ó n
The present state of archaeological resources forms the baseline for

thinking about the past. Archaeologists tend to think in terms of what
they encounter on or in the ground, or in collections. The way in which
archaeological resources reached their current state is also worthy of
consideration (Schiffler 2009), so we have learned to modify our thinking
to include “formation processes” (Schiffer 1987), meaning alterations
leading to the archaeological record as we know it. This essay focuses on
a specific formation process (or, more accurately, a deformation process),
looting, and seeks to understand historical forces that shaped it. As the
first attempt to understand the sociology of looting in northwest Mexico,
our essay is necessarily sketchy and fraught with untested statements.
Our particular concern is the part of Chihuahua in which the Proyecto
Arqueológico Chihuahua (PAC)1 has worked (figure 1). In recent
decades, a triple whammy—looting, land alteration using heavy equip-
ment, and a scarcity of professional archaeologists working in Chihua-
hua—has meant that many local sites have disappeared, or will soon
disappear, without the most basic archaeological information being
recorded. As we will show, however, the impacts are not confined to
the recent past. Instead, the destruction of Chihuahua’s archaeological
resources has a long and tangled history.
Of course, looting is not unique to Chihuahua. It is essentially a
global problem that varies in its particulars and raisons de être: selection
of what is to be looted; who does the looting and who buys; market
values; motivations; timing of the looting; and procedures of extraction,
transport, and marketing . Looting can be done out of sheer curiosity,
J a n e H. K e l l e y is Professor Emeritus, Department of Archaeology, University

of Calgary. D av i d A. P h i l l i p s is curator of archaeology, Maxwell Museum,
University of New Mexico. A.C. M a c W i l l i a m s is with the Department of
Archaeology, University of Calgary. R a fa e l C r u z A n t i l l ó n is with the Chi-
huahua office of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
Journal of the Southwest 53, 2 (Summer 2011) : 177–224

178 ✜ J ournal of the S outhwest
Figure 1: The state of Chihuahua, with a rough approximation of the PAC

research area, based on map from Wasserman (1984:2). (Cartography by David
A. Phillips, Jr.)
as a form of amusement that is preferable to other possible activities in

terms of keeping young people off the streets, for building private and
museum collections, and for profit. Not infrequently, looting is done by
the poorest of society for most basic of economic reasons and benefits
the economically more advantaged (figures 2a and 2b).
Land Use, Looting, and Archaeology ✜ 179
If looting precluded practicing good archaeology, archaeology would

have a much smaller data base than exists. One has only to think of
documentation of the past from continuously occupied urban centers
like London, Jerusalem, Paris, or Rome to appreciate both the impact
of disturbance of archaeological deposits through urban development
or looting and the gems of discovery that have come from even such
thoroughly worked-over landscapes.
Chihuahua shares with the adjacent American Southwest the impact of
museum collection-building, and there has been no shortage of looting
north of the border. However, the different landholding systems have
exerted interesting differences on looting patterns on each side of the
border. Large landholdings on the scale of Chihuahuan haciendas were
not part of the historical development of the American Southwest, nor
were their accompanying social, economic, and political systems. The
Southwest became more economically diversified after 1847 when the
United States took over the northern half of Mexico.
Another enormous difference between the state of archaeological
resources in the two adjacent areas concerns the development of the
discipline of archaeology. In the United States, archaeology developed
more or less in parallel with looting. While both pursuits suffered from
the era in which museums and private individuals built collections, one
might say that the developing state of archaeology in the United States
more or less kept pace with looting in terms of background knowledge of
looted sites, ever more precise attributions of looted materials by area or
region, and, most importantly, the growth of background archaeological
knowledge and the application of good archaeological methods in the
hands of trained archaeologists. It is the lack of an ongoing development
of archaeology in parallel with looting that most noticeably distinguishes
Chihuahuan archaeology and its history of looting from that north of
the international border.
We are interested in understanding the particular historical, social,
economic, and political factors that have resulted in the condition of
its archaeological resources at the present time. The state of archaeo-
logical resources at any particular time can affect the nature of ques-
tions perceived to be important, the methods used, and the theoretical
frameworks that govern research. Perhaps one reason we have become
interested in this topic can be traced to the fact that in our own research
we have repeatedly been told that a site we were interested in was either
pristine or in much better shape just ten or twenty or forty years ago.
Figure 2a: A Ramos

Polychrome pot,
without provenience.
(Reproduced with
permission, Maxwell
Museum Collections)
Figure 2b: A Babí-

cora polychrome pot.
(Reproduced with
permission, Maxwell
Museum collections)
Conversely, we have seen a mildly looted site that we worked on in the

early 1990s develop the contours of a moonscape or minefield in less
than twenty years (figures 3a and 3b; Kelley 2009). Therefore, there is
a certain anguish in having been so close, temporally, to sites in much
better condition, and in having seen a site that we regarded as having
long-term potential being thoroughly damaged within the relatively
short time of our work in Chihuahua.
Once we started our sleuthing, we were led into hacienda and land-
redistribution history, and we met a number of memorable characters.
Figure 3a: The site of

El Zurdo (Ch-159) as
it was in 1992; view to
north across the main
house mound. (Photo-
graph Courtesy of PAC)
Figure 3b: The same site

in 2008; this looted section
(characteristic of the entire
site) is roughly at middle
left of the 1992 photo.
(Photograph by Loy Neff,
courtesy of PAC)
We have only scratched the surface of the totality of looting and illegal
export of archaeological materials. Much more could be done in tracking
when and where and by whom materials were removed from the ground
and moved to other locations, mostly illegally.
Initial Historical Context of Looting
When the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, Chihuahua was

inhabited by small bands living in rancherías, or dispersed communities
(Griffen 1979:38; Sheridan and Naylor 1979:7). These groups had no
known relationship to the preceding Chihuahua Culture (often called
the Casas Grandes culture) sites, and we do not know what they thought
of the village ruins left by the earlier inhabitants. Archaeological sites in
west-central Chihuahua, where we have worked, show little or no mix-
ing of Chihuahua Culture–age and later materials, so perhaps the ruins
held little interest for the contact-period people. The sites may even have
been places to be avoided.
With the arrival of the Spanish, the path to today’s landownership
patterns began. The change involved two insidious processes: reducciones
(resettlement of natives at missions, in small fractions of their former
territories) and the imposition of exclusionary control (ownership) of
natural resources. The consequences of both processes are seen to the
present day. The Rarámuri, or Tarahumara, are the principal surviving
native inhabitants of Chihuahua, and of the PAC study area. They often
reacted to attempted reducción by withdrawing, ultimately vacating the
study area and retreating to the Sierra Madre on the west side of the
state. The other native inhabitants known from the colonial period, the
Conchos, did not survive as an ethnic group. Apaches lived in some
areas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Griffen 1979,
1988), but were latecomers who did not overlap, insofar as we know,
with the sites we are discussing here. Meanwhile, Spanish missions and
presidios of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were rapidly fol-
lowed by mines, poblaciones or towns, and military colonies. Mission
sites such as Cusihuiriáchic, Caráchic, Bachíniva, Namiquipa, and Janos
became centers of settlement, as did earlier presidios. Rural space was
to a large extent reorganized as large private holdings, culminating in
semi-feudal haciendas.
Brand (1961) divided the Mexican and Nueva Vizcayan range cattle
industry into nine periods from the initial introduction of cattle into
Mexico circa 1521 to the beginning of the modern ranching industry
beginning circa 1923 with fencing and windmills. Ranching spread
into northern Mexico in Brand’s period III, 1562–1680, when both
cattlemen with their cattle as well as wild cattle from farther south
spread rapidly. By the late sixteenth century, large herds were present.
Beginning in 1832 and continuing until 1884 (period VI), Indian raids
and other problems caused a decline, followed by the prosperity of the
Porfirio Díaz era (1884–1910), followed by another serious decline
during the revolution (period VIII). Earlier markets for the cattle were
to the south, and the Puebla–Mexico City area was supplied by cattle
driven from the northern ranges. It should be remembered that Mexico
lost more than 50 percent of its territory to the United States (all in the
north) with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, meaning that
the earlier ranching eras involved far different international boundaries
than was the case after 1848.
We have very little information about the use of archaeological

resources during the Spanish colonial and early Mexican statehood
periods. Observations during these times are scarce and generally focus
on Paquimé in northwest Chihuahua (e.g., Album mexicano 1848;
Clavigero 1787; Hardy 1829). Epstein (1991) states that during the
colonial period, the site of Casas Grandes (Paquimé) was used as a source
of copper by native people. Hardy (1829) remarked that Apaches had
dug in Paquimé. Perhaps more importantly, Mexico was part of the Age
of Enlightenment, and educated Mexicans—much like educated British
Americans such as Thomas Jefferson—had begun collecting curiosities
relating to the nation’s natural history during what Ignacio Bernal (1980)
calls the Age of Reason and the Era of Travellers and Historians. Across
Mexico, educated individuals commissioned excavations for antiquities,
or purchased discoveries that came their way in the name of intellectual
progress.
Along with an interest in the past came an early awareness of the need
to protect it. Much of this task initially fell to museums in Mexico, as
elsewhere (Bernal, 1980:130ff, discusses museums and the protection of
antiquities). Mexico’s first federal antiquities law predates the first com-
parable U.S. law by more than four decades. A commission established
in 1862 drafted the first Mexican antiquities law, which was enacted on
June 3, 1886 (Suárez 1987:47). A more comprehensive law, enacted
the following year, declared all archaeological monuments in Mexican
territory the property of the nation (Rubin de la Borbolla 1953: 35).
According to the law, “objects, mobile and immobile, considered to be
of interest for the study of civilization and the history of the aborigines
and ancient inhabitants of America, and especially Mexico, could not
be exported without legal authorization, under threat of fine” (Suárez
1987:48; translated by J. Kelley).
In northwest Mexico, as elsewhere in the country, the antiquities laws
were rarely obeyed. The fact that so many objects, and even large collec-
tions, were spirited across the border indicates that many of those who
removed pottery from Chihuahua knew that they were acting illegally.
Indeed, when W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian accepted a collection
from a dig by members of the U.S. Punitive Expedition (of which more
later), he acknowledged that the dig violated Mexican law (Cruz Antillón
2008; Cruz Antillón and Maxwell 2009). In 1933, Brand noted that
the only collection of Chihuahua pottery legally in a U.S. museum was
that made by Lumholtz at the American Museum of Natural History.
It is also clear, however, that the Mexican authorities seldom exercised

their authority with regard to the patrimony of the northern part of the
country.
Haciendas: The Nexus of Looting in the

L at e 1800 s a n d E a r l y 1900 s
We have little information about looting prior to 1910,2 but assume

that Enlightenment practices prevailed and some items were collected
by intellectuals and by people on the land; the latter group probably saw
archaeological pieces more as curiosities than as avenues to enlightenment.
Bernal notes, for example, that “the work done by Gerste, Villado and
Río de la Loza at Casas Grandes, in the Huasteca area and at Comalcalco
respectively” was carried out in order to provide materials for the 1892
Madrid exhibition in order, “as they put it, to prove the unquestionable
importance of the American Egypt” (Bernal 1980:155).
While some looting occurred during the height of the hacienda era,
a noticeably increased flow of undocumented Chihuahuan pottery
begins to enter major museum collections in the United States during
and immediately after the revolution. However, the foundation of early
twentieth-century looting patterns are firmly rooted in the hacienda sys-
tem and the advent of the railroad. Although direct information about the
relationships between landownership and land usage and archaeological
resources during the era of the large haciendas is sparse and indirect, some
clues about this topic emerge from a variety of historical sources.
The Hacienda System
Prior to 1910, the “bread basket” of Chihuahua extended from Casas

Grandes through Galeana and Buenaventura, into what was then the
Guerrero district. This area corresponds roughly to the main regions of
the prehistoric Chihuahua Culture—probably not a coincidence. The
main economic endeavors in the late 1800s were ranching, mining, and
logging, with most of the acreage devoted to ranching. The area was
economically dominated by haciendas, of various sizes but sometimes
of baronial scope. Although there are undoubtedly archaeological sites
beneath modern population centers (one thinks of the Viejo period sites
within Janos and Buenaventura), few such sites have been recorded by
archaeologists. Most of the recorded sites of the Chihuahua Culture are

located in what are still rural settings. Beginning about 1880, the trail-
ing off of wars with the Apache, Comanche, and other native groups,
as well as the introduction of railroads, made it possible to extend the
hacienda system over most of Chihuahua.
As Brand (1961) points out, 1787 to 1832 was a relatively peaceful
period that saw the expansion of cattle ranching to its earlier seven-
teenth-century limits, and an enormous increase in the numbers of
cattle. However, the next period, from 1832 to 1887, saw an increase
in Indian incursions and a corresponding decrease in land dedicated to
cattle ranching and numbers of cattle. It is this period that precedes the
formation of the large end-of-the-century haciendas with which we are
concerned here. By the late 1800s, with the exception of rock shelters
deep in the Sierra Madre, most Chihuahua Culture sites were probably
located within hacienda boundaries.
By the late 1800s the hacienda system dominated rural Mexico and,
like the plantations of the antebellum southern United States, were geared
to exploiting human labor in order to mass-produce agricultural products
for external markets. The product depended on the local setting—on the
Yucatán Peninsula, for example, that product was sisal fiber for rope and
cordage. As Wasserman (1984, 1993) notes, Chihuahua’s arid climate,
vegetation, and isolation made it an ideal place for cattle ranching. More-
over, the grasslands were in pristine condition. The prehistoric popula-
tion had no grazing animals, and continual European-Indian conflict
had severely limited the spread of Hispanic ranches. As Native American
resistance ceased and railroads spread in the second half of the 1800s, all
of arid North America saw an explosion of ranching operations.
The simultaneous emergence of large cattle ranches and railroads
was no coincidence. Large-scale cattle ranching emerged to provide live
animals to the railroads, which shipped the cattle to feedlots and meat-
packers, all to satisfy the needs of an increasingly urban population, much
of which resided in the United States, with El Paso being a major entry
point for Mexican cattle from Chihuahua during this era. The railroads’
arrival in Chihuahua also led to the expansion of existing towns, along
with the founding of new towns such as Cuauhtémoc (originally San
Pedro de Arenales), and increased the population influx from other parts
of Chihuahua and Mexico. Despite the rural nature of Chihuahua’s cattle
operations, they were inseparable from the urban industrial societies of
the United States and Mexico during the late 1800s.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most of the land within the PAC
study area belonged to haciendas. The rest of the study area was taken up
by forestry holdings, mines, a sprinkling of independent pueblos, mines,
and a military zone at Namiquipa and Cruces that had long served as a
buffer against Apache raids (Alonso 1995; Nugent 1993).
Rural Chihuahua’s emphasis on cattle ranching, an extensive rather
than intensive economic activity, almost preordained the existence of
giant haciendas. One family empire, headed by Luis Terrazas, became
the largest (as measured in land) in nineteenth-century Latin America,
and he may have been the wealthiest landowner in the world. This
founding father began his adult life on an ecclesiastical path, which he
soon abandoned. He married Carolina Cuilty Bustamente, the daughter
of a wealthy hacendado. They had fourteen children and seventy-one
grandchildren. Luis, his four sons who survived to adulthood, and four
sons-in-law, formed the core of the Terrazas empire. The extended clan
included the Zuloagas (“best” Indian fighters in Chihuahua), Creels,
Lujáns, and Falomirs. Terrazas used his political positions (he was gover-
nor over three terms for a total of more than twenty years between 1860
and 1907) to acquire land at low cost for himself and his family, after
expropriating church property and terrenos baldios (common lands). They
stole land from local smallholders and pueblos. They foreclosed on lands
through their banks. He bought land cheaply following Indian raids. He
owned surveying companies that manipulated property boundaries to
his advantage, intimidating small landholders and villagers who might
object. He was unique in pursuing a long-term strategy of economic
diversification, including mining and banking, which allowed him to
take advantage of slumps in the cattle markets.
The largest Terrazas hacienda, Encinillas, was obtained in bits and
pieces over four decades through various of the tactics at the family’s
disposal. He expanded his Hacienda de San Miguel de Bavícora by
invading 52,000 acres belonging to the ejido of Cruces in the Guerrero
district. The Hacienda del Carmen was enlarged by stealing common
lands from ejidos in Galeana. They expropriated pueblo lands in Caráchic,
Nonoava, and Sisoguichi; these practices earned them lasting bitterness
in each of these, and other, regions (Wasserman 1984:50).
By 1884, Luis Terrazas owned more than 1.4 million hectares (3.5
million acres) of the most fertile and best-watered land in Chihuahua.
Terrazas, his sons, and one son-in-law (Enrique Creel) together controlled
more than 4 million hectares (10 million acres). Other members of the
extended family controlled another 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of

Chihuahua. Among the family holdings were 2 million hectares of timber
(Wasserman 1984: 44–48). The Terrazas family properties included five
geographic clusters: (1) Casas Grandes, Galeana, and Buenaventura; (2)
the Encinillas property that ran from north of Chihuahua City to Villa
Ahumada, reaching east to Aldama and also to the west; (3) the Jiménez
area; (4) the Camargo area; (5) near Ojinaga (Wasserman 1993: 48).
Of these, the first is most relevant to our interest in Chihuahua Culture
sites.
Wasserman (1984:106–8) lists forty-two large landholdings other
than those of the Terrazas family, ranging in size from 40,000 to 1.4
million hectares (100,000–3.5 million acres). Many of these were owned
by foreigners; in 1887, American and British entrepreneurs owned 4.9
million hectares (12 million acres) of Chihuahua (Wasserman 1984:75).
One such operation, the Corralitos Land and Cattle Company, held
356,393 hectares (880,634 acres) in the Casas Grandes and Galeana
areas. Following the lead of Luis Terrazas and other native-born entre-
preneurs, the Corralitos Company stole thousands of acres from villages
in the Guerrero district (Wasserman 1984:82). The company operated
until 1941, when it was bought by Rodrigo M. Quevedo and William
W. Wallace (Wasserman 1993:102).
Despite variations in social and economic structure, all haciendas were
built on strict notions of hierarchy. The various categories of workers—
managers, servants, vaqueros, tenants, peones, unskilled workers—were
treated differently in terms of pay, social interactions, and the degree
of force employed to ensure obedience. People living today still speak
of conditions of “slavery” on the Terrazas properties, extending even
to managers exercising droit de seigneur with peons’ brides (Wasserman
1984:52). Among Luis Terrazas’ haciendas, San Miguel de Babícora3 was
considered to have the most repressive regime. In 2006, we interviewed
a number of agronomists and farmers. One of the agronomists had been
born on the San Miguel de Babícora hacienda. He vividly recalled the
“slavelike” conditions of his early childhood. Bitter memories persist.
Hacienda power was based in part on taking control of all available
land, so that subsistence farmers had nowhere else to turn, but indebt-
edness to the hacienda was also used to keep workers tied to the place.
Hacienda workers were often required to purchase all their goods at the
hacienda store, or tienda de raya; to reinforce this requirement, workers
were paid in scrip good only at that store (Wasserman 1984: 53). The
system was rigged so that workers soon found themselves in perpetual,

even inherited debt, as was the case in many other contexts that depended
on cheap labor (such as the American South, Peru, parts of Africa, and
Southeast Asia). Peons did sometimes rebel against their lot, of course.
Unruly peons could be conscripted into the army. Those deemed to
have broken the law could find themselves in convict brigades on other
haciendas, including the gulag-like henequen plantations of Yucatan.
Thus, on all haciendas, there were those who ordered and those who
obeyed. In the giant cattle-based operations, the hierarchy was neces-
sarily spatially decentralized, so that workers were found in villages and
small ranchos as well as at hacienda headquarters.
The Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, introduced various kinds
of challenges to the cattle-raising systems of northern Mexico (Brand
1961; Machado 1975; Wasserman n.d.). Much of the land dedicated
to haciendas and cattle was actively contested by various revolutionary
armies. In Chihuahua, the main contenders were, first, Orozco (Meyer
1967), and later, Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza (then governor
of Coahuila), whose armies occupied haciendas from time to time. All
of these armies financed some of their campaigns by selling stolen or
appropriated cattle in El Paso or at other border points (Machado 1975),
as well as using hacienda resources to feed and house troops.
Foreign-owned haciendas were especially hard-hit. Wasserman (n.d.)
has closely analyzed the records of the Hacienda Corralitos to evaluate
the financial success of one American-owned operation, concluding that
the American-owned haciendas were not at all successful financially. His
study offers a detailed look at the effects of the revolution on a foreign-
owned hacienda in terms of occupations of certain ranch areas by both
Pancho Villa and Black Jack Pershing, the pressure for land redistribu-
tion, loss of livestock, damage to capital improvements, and the many
and variously structured legal battles that were waged. He details the
many strategies that the American manager, E. C. Houghton (whom we
will meet again), employed to protect the investments of the Corralitos
owners, some of which were frustrated by those very owners.
A Case Study: The Hacienda Babícora Owned by the Hearst Family

The Babícora Basin and the upper Santa María Valley are prominent
parts of the PAC study area, so we have developed a deep interest in
the large hacienda owned by the Hearsts. It was the last of the great
haciendas to be dissolved. It functioned until 1954, which means that

older people with whom we interact remember the hacienda days, and
two contemporary residents of Oscar Soto Maynez that we interviewed
actually worked for the Hearsts.
Accounts of the size of the ranch vary greatly, perhaps because its size
changed as lands were added and others were lost. Wasserman (1993:75,
106) gives the figure of 360,000 hectares (900,000 acres). Hart (2002:
apps. 1 and 2) cites data from the American Mexican Claims Commis-
sion (in the National Records Center, College Park, Maryland) to arrive
at a figure of 483,000 hectares (1,192,000 acres). Anecdotal accounts
of the hacienda’s size run as high as 1 million hectares (2.5 million
acres), but when J. Frank Dobie visited the ranch in 1935 (as part of
his research for Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver), he reported that it was
about 400,000 acres (1 million acres) after losing land to the agraristas
(Hilliard 1996:58).
The hacienda was established in 1882, when George Hearst—or per-
haps a consortium led by Hearst—purchased the land at a nominal cost
of twenty to forty centavos per hectare (Brechin 2006:219; Palomares
Peña 1991:111). The nominal seller was Jesús Valenzuela. Valenzuela
was also the nominal prior owner of the 360,000-hectare (890,000-
acre) Hacienda Corralitos, purchased by a different group of Americans
(Edward Shearson, Edwin D. Morgan, Thomas W. Peirce, and George
Bliss) at roughly the same time (see Wasserman 1984).4
Hearst had made his fortune in mining and was a U.S. senator. Brechin
(2006) notes that Hearst moved to purchase the property as a result of
his newspaper son’s inside information about the capture of Geronimo.
With the surrender of the final armed group of Apaches, rural Chihuahua
was suddenly a much wiser place to invest in than it had been.
In A Hundred Years of Horse Tracks, George Hilliard describes how
the Gray Ranch, in the “boot heel” of New Mexico, was established by
Hearst, James Ben Ali Haggin, and Addison Headthree. All were from
San Francisco; they had mostly made their fortunes in mining and were
first attracted to southern New Mexico by the mining opportunities, but
saw the potential of cattle ranching. In the 1880s and 1890s, more than
one hundred land transactions were recorded in their names (Hilliard
1996:23). The Gray Ranch was later added to the Diamond A. In Henry
Brock’s reminiscences of the Diamond A (in Hilliard 1996), the same
group of men, or else an overlapping group, were involved in the initial
purchase of the Babícora hacienda. In the mid-1880s Hearst traded away
his interest in the Gray–Diamond A holdings in exchange for the other

men’s interests in the Hacienda Babícora (Hilliard 1996:71). Hilliard’s
account suggests that George Hearst was the owner of record of the
Babícora until his death in 1891, when his widow Phoebe Hearst and
his son William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Citizen Kane)
inherited the property.
In a different telling of the story, one Jack Folamsbee5 led a band of
“hardy souls” into Chihuahua “perhaps to encounter roving Apaches
and to see what the eastern slope of the eastern Sierra Madre could
promise” (Barker 1967:1). They found a “paradise” in the Babícora
Basin. Folamsbee used Hearst money (and that of the other San Francisco
moguls, if Hilliard is correct) to purchase 200,000 hectares (500,000
acres). Barker adds that after George Hearst’s death, and acting on behalf
of Phoebe Hearst, Folamsbee added another 200,000 hectares to the
ranch. It was Phoebe Hearst who organized the Babícora Development
Company and made some arrangement with Folamsbee that allowed his
return to his native Kentucky.
Wasserman gives the location of the Hacienda Hearst, as it is some-
times known, as Temósachic, in the municipio of Guerrero (Wasserman
1993:106). It was also known as the Hacienda Babícora Alta and, for
that part lying in the Santa María Valley, as the Babícora Baja. In the
early 1880s Temósachic was near the end of a rail spur from Chihuahua
City, and the closest railroad to the Babícora area. It may have been
one of several headquarters, given the vastness of the holdings. We have
been told that the main administrative and supply offices were at San
José Babícora, with nearby subsidiary headquarters at places such as Las
Varas (figure 1), Las Varitas, and Rancho San Juan. In the Babícora Baja,
Santa Ana de Babícora was a subsidiary headquarters to which several
smaller ranch headquarters reported (Ing. Manuel Alderete, personal
communication, 2008). The main post office for at least some of the
American personnel was at Madera after the completion of the railroad
from El Paso to Casas Grandes and Mata Ortiz, which met up with the
line out of Chihuahua City to Tomósachic.
Most of the time, the hacienda divisions had American managers. We
have met Jack Folamsbee already; born to a Keene, Kentucky, racehorse-
breeding family, Folamsbee was the first general manager of the ranch, as
well as a friend and associate of Alberto Terrazas (Wasserman 1993:88).
Folamsbee was followed by Tom Bailey of El Paso, then by John C. Hayes
of California (Barker 1967). Hayes hired Frank Logan to run the Baja
Babícora until 1910, when Logan accepted management of the adjacent

Hacienda Santa Clara—illustrating the relationships among haciendas
at the management level.
By the early 1900s, the operation included an estimated 75,000 head
of cattle, 2,000 horses, and 6,000 sheep (Barker 1967). In general, the
region’s large hacienda owners “bred up” (improved) criollo cattle using
mostly Hereford and Durham imported blood stock from the United
States, and exported cattle to the States through cattle drives or by means
of the railroads (in which American investors had major interests). Cer-
tainly by 1910, the Hearst, like other northern haciendas, had achieved
major herds of improved stock that found favor with American buyers.
Between 1906 and 1909, some 150,000 head of cattle entered the
U.S. market, and the U.S. market absorbed some 93 percent of exported
cattle, according to Machado (1975). One of the largest known cattle
drives out of Chihuahua occurred about 1887, when 4,000 head were
driven from the Babícora hacienda (with 2,000 more picked up en
route) to the Gray Ranch in New Mexico (Hilliard 1996:46). The port
of entry for this drive was most likely Antelope Wells, which has the
dubious distinction of being the least-used border crossing between the
United States and Mexico. The Antelope Wells crossing was reportedly
established at the order of President U. S. Grant, as a personal favor to
his poker buddy Luis Terrazas.
The American managers and their wives were said to feel the plight of
those serving them and the hacienda (Barker 1967). Nonetheless, one
story about Santa Ana de Babícora suggests that the Hearst operation
was well within the norm for Mexican haciendas. This story involved
the firing of the keeper of the company store because he spilled flour on
the manager’s wife’s patio garden while repackaging the flour for resale
in the company store.
At the apex of hacienda society were, of course, the owners. George
and Phoebe Hearst were personal friends of Porfirio Díaz, and when
in Mexico City they stayed at Chapultepec Castle as honored guests
(Brechin 2006). Over time the family became one of the largest foreign
landowners in Mexico, with—besides the Babícora holdings—some
300,000 hectares (750,000 acres) in southern Mexico and mines and
other holdings in Sonora (see Brechin 2006:219). George and Phoebe
introduced their son, William Randolph, to the life of the Mexican upper
classes when he was six, and he forever afterward regarded the family’s
Mexican holdings, and the social order that allowed them to exist, as
part of his birthright. The Hearst sense of privilege went much farther
than this. The senior Hearsts belonged to the “All Mexico” movement,
which advocated moving the southern U.S. border to Guatemala. Once
William Randolph became a newspaper publisher, his support for Ameri-
can expansionism reached the level of outright propaganda. The term
yellow journalism was coined to describe one of the Hearst newspapers,
the New York Journal, most famously over Hearst’s encouragement of
the Spanish-American War (Brechin 2006:213).
Díaz, for his part, needed the Hearsts’ political clout in the United
States and, once William Randolph Hearst became a newspaper owner,
as a source of positive accounts of Mexican affairs. Díaz reportedly
regarded the younger Hearst as a favorite—almost as a son. On Sep-
tember 25, 1910, as the Mexican Revolution was beginning, Díaz
telephoned William Randolph to assure him that the perpetrators were
few and would be punished, and that “the Hacienda de Babícora will
receive assistance necessary to protect its interests” (Brechin 2006:217).
Earlier, Díaz had sent federal troops to clear residents from a ranch
that George Hearst bought for oil exploration (Wasserman 1984:88).
The sense of entitlement seen in the Hearsts was perhaps extreme,
but the entire group of foreign owners, managers, and investors saw
themselves as above the law, or at least as exempt from it, in Mexico
(as in other countries experiencing American foreign ownership and
resource exploitation).
Challenges and Changes
The haciendas faced legal challenges from the beginning of their for-
mation, especially where prior land tenure was ignored in sales or other
forms of acquisition that ranged from the dubious to the outright illegal.
Long before the revolution broke out, they had to respond to repeated
and constant petitions to higher authorities, legal suits, and other forms
of protest. Nugent (1993) and Alonso (1995) give full accounts of the
ongoing conflict between the residents of Namiquipa and the Hacienda
Santa Clara. Palomares Peña (1991) and Romero Blake (2003) discuss
land issues with the Hearst, among other haciendas. Nonetheless, the
same power structure that made it possible for a few individuals to amass
large properties made it easy for them to defend their acquisitions, even
well into the revolutionary period.
Ing. Manuel Alderete, a local amateur historian, sees deep local roots
for the Mexican Revolution. Bachíniva, Namiquipa, Guerrero, and other
local settlements helped foment, and provided personnel for, the conflict.
Pancho Villa’s elite troop, the Dorados, contained many recruits from
Namiquipa. His cabalgata for the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, left
from the Hacienda San Gerónimo. The first use of aircraft for military
purposes reportedly occurred here, according to Enrique Arias, one of
the present owners of the Hacienda San Gerónimo. Many historians,
including Nugent (1993), Alonso (1995), Wasserman (1984), Katz
(1998), Palomares Peña (1991), and Romero Blake (2003) note how
the complex and contested history of this region helped produce a breed
of independent-minded fighters.
In December 1915, Villa declared the Hacienda Babícora expropriated
in what appears to have been an empty gesture (Machado 1975:15).
On July 14, 1916, a New York Times article filed from San Francisco
was headlined: “Mrs. Hearst Makes Protest, Wires Lansing Against
Seizure of her Mexican Ranch.” The article went on, “In a telegram to
the U.S. Secretary of State, Phoebe Hearst said that ‘the de facto Gov-
ernment of Mexico has taken possession of the property in the State of
Chihuahua known as the Hacienda de Babicora . . . which belongs to
me.’” Hilliard (1996:58) estimates that the Hearsts lost at least 10,000
cattle—first to Pancho Villa’s troops, and later to Carranza’s. People
now living in the Babícora Basin claim that the American managers
left the Hacienda Babícora ranch during the revolution, but we cannot
confirm this. Some ranchers armed their workers in an effort to protect
their investments.
As the revolutionaries prevailed, they proceeded to break the back of
the hacienda system, including by ending the haciendas’ exclusive control
over rural land. Revolutionary and agrarian reforms included Pancho
Villa’s expropriation of many of the large Chihuahua haciendas in 1913,
Article 27 of the Constitution of Querétaro (May 1, 1917), and other
measures (see, for example, Palomares Peña 1991 and Romero Blake
2003). Luis Terrazas saw his lands appropriated by Pancho Villa, and in
1914 Terrazas left for the United States with a mere five million pesos.
Rather than face expropriation, some haciendas were sold to foreign-
ers; in the 1920s, the Zuloaga heirs sold the Hacienda Bustillos to the
Mennonites. Others were foreclosed on by banks, then sold. All of the
largest haciendas lost at least some property between the revolution and
the 1950s as part of the redistribution of lands.
The new government’s primary instrument for land reform, the ejido,
consisted of a grant of communal land to a group of peasant families. To
prevent land grabs by the rich, the property thus granted could not be
sold (a provision overturned by the Salinas administration in 1992). The
ejidos of Namiquipa and Las Cruces were formed in the 1920s out of the
military colony of Namiquipa, and were among the first and largest of
the ejidos in all of Mexico. Other ejidos were carved out of hacienda lands
between the 1930s and 1940s, while colonias (with farm plots belonging
to individuals, and communal lands reserved for forestry and grazing)
were formed in the same areas—many during the 1950s.
Even so, some of the most influential prerevolutionary families, such
as the Terrazas-Creel extended family and the Zuloagas, survived the
process and by the 1920s, were re-establishing their old prominence.
Wasserman (1993:83) refers to these re-emergent power bases as the
New Oligarchs. Luis Terrazas returned to Mexico in 1920, and received
23 million pesos from the Obregón government for his losses. The
family soon returned to a leadership role in Chihuahua, albeit more
as capitalists than as semi-feudal overlords. In diminished form, both
Mexican-owned and American-owned haciendas (or their replacements)
could be found from Galeana to the Janos area, where many Chihuahua
Culture sites are located.
In the PAC study area, ejidos were carved from the Hearst hacienda
in response to a series of agrarian movements. One was led by Socorro
Riviera, originally from Michoacán and killed at Los Ojos (in the Babícora
Alta) in the 1930s. Peña Blanca, the first ejido formed in the Babícora
Alta, still commemorates Riviera’s death every April 12 (Palomares Peña
1991:129). The Hearst hacienda survived in diminished form until 1954,
when the Mexican government parceled out the remaining portions as
new colonias and ejidos.
Haciendas, Archaeology, and Looting
Looting of archaeological sites occurred prior to the onset of the Mexican

Revolution. However, if we can judge from the dates of acquisition of
Chihuahuan pottery into major museum collections, looting increased
after the railroads were built. The earliest Casas Grandes pot in the
National Museum of Natural History, in Washington D.C., is in the
Oder collection. The pot, collected in or before 1883, was part of a lar-
ger and quite mixed natural history collection from “the Casas Grandes,
on Eastern border of the Apache country” (Phillips 1992:6) during the
early period of the florescence of the large Chihuahua haciendas. The
hacienda system combined with the railroad provided ways and means of
acquiring artifacts and getting them out of the country. As we mentioned
at the start of this essay, our motivation for understanding the rise and
fall of the hacienda system stems from our interest in the relationships
between land tenure and the caliber of archaeological resources, and our
concern with the looting of Chihuahua Culture sites—particularly those
of the culture’s southern or upland zone, where the PAC has worked.
As we have learned, the two phenomena were intertwined.
Most of the known archaeological sites within the PAC study area were
located on haciendas: the Hearst hacienda stretched from Madera across
the entire Babícora Basin (the Alta Babícora) and into the upper Santa
María Valley (the Baja Babícora). The San Gerónimo hacienda (in the
municipio of Bachíniva) took up another sector of the upper Santa María
Valley. A few sites are recorded on the former Hacienda Santa Gertrudis
between the Santa María and Santa Clara valleys. The Tepehuanes and
Santa Clara haciendas occupied the Santa Clara Valley and spilled over
into the Namiquipa area to the west and the San Andreas area to the
east. There were other, smaller ranches, where we have recorded other
sites, but Chihuahua Culture habitation sites tended to cluster along
larger drainages, which the large haciendas also sought to control. Thus,
as a matter of historical accident, a few large land-owners wound up
controlling most of the southern Chihuahua Culture sites. The same
pattern of large-landowner control of key prehistoric remains extended
to sites of adjacent horticultural groups such as the La Cruz Culture,
around Laguna Bustillos (MacWilliams 2001). The latter area was part
of Hacienda Bustillos, owned by the Zuloaga family.
Given the extent, power, and distribution of the haciendas, it would
have been impossible to visit archaeological sites in the PAC study area
without the permission and assistance of hacienda owners and managers.
We suspect the same was true of the lower-elevation grasslands to the
north, where most known Chihuahua Culture sites are located. We are
aware, for example, that Edgar Lee Hewett (figure 4) stayed at haciendas
while conducting the northwest Mexican portion of his grand recon-
naissance of 1906 (see Hewett 1908), and also during his second visit to
Chihuahua in 1922, and that A. V. Kidder stayed at the Hacienda Hearst
during his own sojourn in the area (see Kidder 1939), as did Carey in
Figure 4: Edgar L.
Hewett in 1922.
(Reproduced with
permission, Palace
of the Governors
Photo Archives)
the late 1920s and E. B. Sayles in 1933. Sayles’ diary and notes, made
during his 1933 survey of Chihuahua for Harold Gladwin of Gila Puebla,
include accounts of visiting the Las Varas headquarters, having a ranch
manager take him on a trip to rock shelters in the Sierra, and visiting
the Hearst Baja headquarters. We infer that Donald Brand, during his
survey of the late 1920s, visited the Hacienda San Gerónimo.
The hacienda-archaeology connection extends far beyond providing
U.S. archaeologists with sites to study and places to stay. In the late 1800s
and early 1900s, museums in Europe, the United States, and Canada
were building collections of ethnographic and archaeological materials
under the philosophy that any natural history collection that could be
built, should be built. Even after the Mexican Revolution, the hacienda
system was ideal for scratching this itch, as the managers and owners had
authority over extensive stretches of land where Medio period sites were
located (and a ready-made labor force ready to do their bidding).
In 1933, for example, E. B. Sayles (working for Harold Gladwin and
Gila Pueblo) negotiated with Gus McGinnis (a lawyer at the Hearst
Babícora spread) for a collection of whole Chihuahua pots (figures 5a
and 5b). McGinnis had amassed the collection based on advice from
Henry Carey, who had done dissertation research in the area during
the late 1920s in the Las Varas drainage. The 203 pots included in the
sale were stored at R. C. Dusang & Son in El Paso, and came from five
areas: the Babícora (7), Galeana (11), Casas Grandes (66), Janos (92),
and Ascensión (27). It is interesting that so few were said to have come
from the Babícora, given where McGinnis worked. Once the sale went
through, Sayles took possession of the unboxed collection in El Paso, but
the count was only 198 pots. Edward Ledwidge, apparently McGinnis’
agent, fetched five more pots—perhaps from some other McGinnis col-
lection, or perhaps (as we shall see) from his own. Sayles asked Gladwin
to send the check for the collection directly to McGinnis at the hacienda’s
Madera post office (letter from Sayles to Gladwin, July 22, 1933, Sayles
papers at Arizona State Museum). Although this particular collections
was acquired by Gladwin through the same networks as those involved
in looting and building large museum collections, and although this col-
lection ultimately ended up as a major museum collection in the Arizona
State Museum, it is important to note that Gladwin was not interested
in the collection because of its appeal as a museum collection. Rather,
he used this collection in his gargantuan task of identifying pottery areas
of the Southwest and adjacent areas such as Texas and Chihuahua. This
collection contributed in fundamental ways to archaeological taxonomic
systems (figure 6).
The history of an American who accumulated a large collection of
Chihuahuan pottery is of interest as we trace the relationships of haciendas
and looting. Gustavo E. McGinnis6 was born September 10, 1877, in
Lampasas, Texas, to Christopher McGinnis and Fanny Langhamer. He
was in Chihuahua before 1903. He married Ramona Lucero Vizcarra
in Casas Grandes on September 7, 1903. They had five children, all
born in Casas Grandes, two of whom did not survive infancy. From the
recorded birthplace of the children, we infer that he made Casas Grandes
his home during the years that he worked for the Hearst. However, he
traveled frequently to the Hearst Babícora holdings, and was well known
Figure 5a: From left: Roberto
McGinnis (son of Gustavo
McGinnis), Charles Renfroe
(Sayles’ assistant from Amarillo,
Texas), and E. B. Sayles (right),
at the Las Varas headquarters, in
1933. (Reproduced with permis-
sion, Arizona State Museum)
Figure 5b. The

Las Varas group
readying for a
foray into the
rock shelters of
the Sierra, 1933.
(Reproduced
with permission,
Arizona State
Museum)
Figure 6: E. B. Sayles’ 1933 photos of the Santa Ana de Babícora

headquarters of the Hearst Babícora Baja hacienda. (Reproduced
with permission, Arizona State Museum Archives—Gila Pueblo
collection)
to older people living today in Oscar Soto Maynez (Santa Ana de Babí-
cora) because of his visits to that Hearst headquarters and because one
of his sons married a woman from Oscar Soto Maynez who still lives in
El Paso. Genealogical records show that Gustavo died July 5, 1948, in
El Paso, Texas.7 We had inferred from Sayles’ papers that McGinnis was
the manager of the Las Varas headquarters; however, people living in
Oscar Soto Maynez who knew McGinnis described him as “a rounded
man” and not at all a rancher. Rather, they say that he was the lawyer
for the Hearst. Clearly, his years on the Hearst provided him with the
opportunity to accumulate prehistoric pottery.
The sale of the McGinnis collection is the second major sale of Chi-
huahua artifacts we can associate with Edward Ledwidge, who collected
Chihuahua pottery himself. Ledwidge was the El Paso agente de contribu-
ciones for the Compañía de Ferrocarril Noroeste de México (Northwest-
ern Mexico Railway Company) and as such, was directly involved in the
railroad’s cross-border shipments. The Ferrocarril Noroeste was British
owned, and incorporated in Canada in 1909. An American consortium
bought four short railroads and built another, all definitely designed to
link Chihuahuan mining, lumbering, and agricultural interests to El Paso
for exports.8 The revolution was hard on the railroad and it was frequently
out of service. In 1945 it was sold to a Chihuahuan banker.
It seems likely that the illegal export of pots funneled out through the
railroad to El Paso, in which Ledwidge played a major role, slowed circa
1917–1920, or even longer, due to disruptions of the railroad (figure
7). By the time the McGinnis collection was to be sold, the railroad was
presumably back in action. So perhaps it is no accident that major exports
occurred from the early 1920s through early 1930s.
Just as the history of Gus McGinnis is of interest to us, so is the his-
tory of Edward Ledwidge. His obituary in the El Paso Times says that
he originally came from Little Rock, Arkansas, spent years (i.e., since
circa 1914) in El Paso, and was an employee of the Mexico Northwest
Railroad. He never married, and was known locally as a philanthropist,
a categorization suggesting some degree of personal wealth. He was also
identified as an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. He was seventy years
old at the time of his death in 1934. From records accompanying collec-
tions he sold to museums, we have gleaned a bit more. In the Museum
of the American Indian online collection records, he is described as a
“tax collector,” whereas in the 1926 Arizona State Museum collection
records he is described as a “trader from El Paso.” We have begun a
Figure 7: A roll out design by Kenneth Chapman of a pot in the 1922 Led-
widge collection at the Museum of New Mexico; drawing (Reproduced with
permission, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives)
tabulation of documented instances of artifacts associated with Ledwidge

that ended up in museums between 1914 and 1934, plus the ultimate
disposition of his estate in 1959. Without being too wildly speculative,
we can estimate that the number of whole pots illegally exported from
Chihuahua that passed through Ledwidge’s hands number more than
2,000, and perhaps considerably more. This list does not include the
transactions that provided the collections, or sales to individuals, and is
undoubtedly incomplete with regard to his sales—even to museums:9
1914 Bought Chihuahuan pots, possibly from Blackiston.
1917 Four Chihuahuan pots sold to the Museum of the American
Indian in New York.
1917 Purchased another Chihuahua polychrome pot in San Diego.
1921–22 The major collection was split between three museums (see
below), in a sale organized by Hewett.
1923 Three other Chihuahuan pots loaned to the Museum of the
American Indian.
1925 The pots on loan to the Museum of the American Indian were
bought with funds from Harmon Hendricks, a board member.
1926 The first sale of a collection to Gila Pueblo (848 archaeological
and 189 ethnographic specimens; of these, 755 lots are from
Chihuahua).
1926 Sale of a Nampeyo (Hopi) pot to the Arizona State Museum.

1933 Ledwidge acted as an agent for McGinnis in the sale of 203 pots
to Gila Pueblo.
1934 A large collection bought by Byron Cummings from the Ledwidge
estate (with money donated for this purpose) for the Arizona
State Museum (74 catalog lots, of which 46 are whole pots; 72
of the lots are from Chihuahua).
1959 The rest of the Ledwidge collection was acquired by the Wilder-
ness Museum of El Paso, now the El Paso Museum of Archaeology
(984 vessels, mostly Chihuahuan, but pots from other prove-
niences also included). Hendrickson (2000:64) gives the total
for Chihuahuan pots in this museum as 666 pieces, of which 17
were added to the collection after the Ledwidge sale in 1959.
The Centennial Museum in El Paso received 251 pots, which were

donated in the early 1930s by the University’s Ladies Auxiliary (Scott
Cutler, personal communication to Jane H. Kelley, Feb. 2, 2010). We
wonder if they also might have come from Ledwidge’s collection.
Included with the catalog records of the collection now in the El Paso
Museum of Archaeology are the prices marked on each pot at the time
of receipt, indicating that these pots were once for sale. Prices that are
assumed to represent early 1930s values range from $1.00 to $25.00,
with the higher-priced vessels being polychromes, some of them effigy
vessels.
The 1921–22 tripartite sale through Hewett is of particular inter-
est because of its size and disposition. In 1921 Ledwidge offered his
personal collection to Edgar Lee Hewett, director of the Museum of
New Mexico in Santa Fe.10 The offer stemmed from an incident in
April of that year: Eduardo Noguera, one of the first archaeologists to
be employed by the new Mexican government, had visited Ledwidge
to inform him that as an agent of a Mexican railroad, Ledwidge must
end his involvement with looted Mexican antiquities. After Noguera’s
visit, Ledwidge wrote to Hewett, “The principal object of this letter is to
announce with deep regret that it appears that the end of Casas Grandes
pottery is in sight.”
While Ledwidge needed to divest himself of his collection, Hewett’s
operation was too modest to absorb it for the asking price of $6,000.
Instead, Hewett arranged for three institutions to purchase and split
the collection, a deal consummated in 1922. Besides his own Museum
of New Mexico (see Chapman 1923), the purchasers included the
Archaeological Society of Washington (Hough 1923; many pieces of

this collection of 497 specimens were later transferred to the National
Museum, the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C.; see Phillips 1992), and
“several hundred” to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (Harcum
1923; Hendrickson 2000).
The surviving correspondence reveals not only Hewett’s respect for
Ledwidge but Ledwidge’s involvement with other professionals. He
explained in one letter that he had been unable to locate beams or other
wooden structural elements for A. E. Douglass, who during his most
recent visit to Chihuahua had asked Ledwidge to obtain dendrochrono-
logical samples for him. The correspondence also makes it clear that
Ledwidge felt, and Hewett concurred, that Ledwidge was preserving
archaeological remains that would otherwise be lost. Given the primitive
field techniques practiced by Hewett and most of his regional colleagues,
it is perhaps understandable that a railroad agent would be asked to pro-
cure samples for archaeological study. It is difficult to imagine anyone
with rigorous archaeological training making the same request today.
An undated letter from Noguera to Ledwidge responded to a letter
from Ledwidge, in which Ledwidge praised Hewett for his contributions
to Chihuahuan archaeology and revealed Hewett’s plans for a second
expedition to Chihuahua—this time involving excavation. Noguera replied
that “Dr. Hewett must request permission from the Mexican govern-
ment through the Department of Anthropology to make excavations in
this country” but continued, “I do not doubt that the Government will
accede to all the requests because we are in a bad need of cooperation.”
In the 1920s Hewett did manage to return to Chihuahua, but without
the funding needed to mount a serious study, settling for a junket in Ken-
neth Chapman’s company in 1922. During this jaunt, as he had in 1906,
Hewett relied on the hospitality of American-managed haciendas.
Ledwidge’s abnegation of looted Mexican antiquities was short-
lived. As we have seen, he served as McGinnis’ agent in the 1933 sale.
By the time he died in 1935, he had again amassed a large collection of
Chihuahua pottery, which he left to the Wilderness Museum (now the
El Paso Museum of Archaeology), or which was given to that museum
by his estate.
Ledwidge wasn’t the only link between the haciendas and the rail-
roads. For example, Thomas Wentworth Peirce Jr. was a major player
in the railroads of Texas and adjacent areas, and he was on the board of
the Corralitos hacienda until his death in 1923.11 We do not imply that
Peirce was involved in collecting Chihuahuan pottery, merely that he

represents a powerful link between railroads and Chihuahuan ranching
interests.
We know of other sales or donations of looted pottery to institu-
tions. Weissheimer (1917) notes that a Peabody Museum collection
of Chihuahua pots was sent out of Mexico by a Mr. Houghton of the
Corralitos Land and Cattle Company. After Gila Pueblo was founded
in 1928, Harold Gladwin bought a large collection of Chihuahua cul-
ture pots from a Mrs. Houghton of Amarillo (David Wilcox, personal
communication to Jane H. Kelley, 2008; records of the Arizona State
Museum show that the sale occurred in March 1933). The Arizona State
Museum collection contains 257 catalog numbers with the provenience
given as Rancho Corralitos (Mike Jacobs, personal communication to
Jane H. Kelley, Sept. 18, 2007).
E. C. Houghton therefore becomes a person of interest in our sleuth-
ing. Houghton was first hired at the hacienda in 1895. He was the ranch
manager by 1905; he was still fighting the good fight to protect the
interests of the owners as late as 1923, and probably later (Wasserman
n.d.). There is no collection at the Harvard Peabody attributed to E. C.
Houghton. However, a large 1907 collection of Casas Grandes pottery
donated by Dr. John A. Phillips includes a single-page donation document
on letterhead stating: “Corralitos Company, Corralitos, Chihuahua, E.
de Goncer, resident director, E. C. Houghton, manager, E. C. Morgan,
president, C. I. Reeves, secretary and treasurer.” Steven LeBlanc, curator
at the Peabody, feels that the collection likely came from the company
rather than E. C. Houghton (personal communication to Jane H. Kel-
ley, Feb. 4, 2010). The Phillips collection includes circa 140 whole or
nearly whole vessels, plus other artifacts.
H. A. Carey (1931: 347–49) reproduces the panel design from a
Chihuahuan polychrome pot that was in the El Paso collection of E. C.
Houghton, and mentions that Mrs. Houghton had excavated mounds
in the Ramos district (1931:367). We infer that Carey’s contact with
the Houghtons was in the mid- to late 1920s. Carey’s information
offers a glimpse into interrelationships between different haciendas at
the managerial level, since Carey was working on the Hearst hacienda,
where he advised Mr. McGinnis to collect Chihuahuan pottery, and was
in contact with the Houghtons of the Corralitos hacienda—probably in
both Chihuahua and El Paso. El Paso residents interested in Chihuahuan
pottery are now, and have long been, well known to each other.
We have found out very little about E. C. Houghton in Internet

searches, but an E. C. Houghton Jr. (a son?) married Martha Shelton
(1893–1983) of Amarillo, and the couple moved into the Shelton home
at 1700 S. Polk St. after the death of her father, well-known Texas
rancher John M. Shelton. She lived in that house until she donated it to
the Amarillo Junior League. The Gila Pueblo/Arizona State Museum
collection was bought from a Mrs. Georgia Houghton of Amarillo. We
infer that at least one major collection of Casas Grandes pottery from
the Corralitos Company reached the Peabody Museum; Houghton may
or may not have been involved, but as ranch manager, he certainly had
the authority and access to the land and the people on the land. Further,
we infer he probably left a collection in his estate that someone in his
family sold to Gila Pueblo.
The evidence just presented, as sketchy as it is, allows us to make a few
tentative inferences about the nature and scope of the early-1900s network
for looted pottery. New insights will be gained through tracking other
private and museum collections. There have been many Chihuahuan pots
in private collections in, for example, El Paso, Deming, and Silver City,
many of which have already ended up in museums or will ultimately do
so. The sales we know about, combined with Ledwidge’s bequest to the
El Paso Museum of Archaeology, involved thousands of vessels. If we
consider known acquisitions by other museums and private collectors dur-
ing the same general period, the outflow of vessels was even greater. This
suggests a sustained process, not a sporadic one. In any sustained effort,
the critical need would have been to get the pots across the border—a
job tailor-made for the El Paso–based international agent of a Chihua-
hua railroad. Ledwidge may well have been the endpoint of one looting
network; consider that a Mexican official found it necessary to visit him
and shut down his operation. From Ledwidge the Chihuahua Culture
pots spread across the United States, with the knowledge and support of
professional archaeologists. Other networks undoubtedly existed, and it
may be that the Corralitos exports exited Mexico by other avenues.
It is less clear how the network obtained its pots. The excavators may
well have been peones seeking a little extra income, as their descendants
often do today—or perhaps they were assigned the task—but someone
else must have gathered the pots and sent them on to El Paso and other
gathering points. Brand (1933) described a system in which local labor-
ers found pots, and these trickled up through several levels to buyers in
Chihuahua City, El Paso, and Mexico City.
It is striking that whereas McGinnis worked in the Babícora Basin,

most of the pots he sold in 1933 were not from that area where he held
some authority and had access to sites. Instead, they were from the
Janos–Casas Grandes area where we infer he maintained his residence
and family. Mrs. Houghton excavated in ruins of the Ramos district,
and E. C. Houghton of the Corralitos hacienda appears to have amassed
one, and probably two or more collections. We suspect that higher-level
employees of various haciendas had the authority to allow or even require
the collection of whole pots, maintained contact among themselves, and
sometimes cooperated to create large collections that went to El Paso
or other points for sale.
There seems to have been a loose and informal, but effective net-
work. Given Ledwidge’s involvement in sales of major collections in
1921–1922 and 1933, the network must have worked well for more
than a decade—probably much longer. The great majority of pots now
in museum collections seem to have left Mexico during this period.
Other Early Looting
The hacienda-railroad network was not the only basis of early looting in
Chihuahua. In the late 1800s the Mormons expanded into Sonora and
Chihuahua, and even though many left during the Mexican Revolution,
Mormon settlements continue in northwest Mexico to this day. Mor-
mons of the Casas Grandes area are widely rumored to have exported
Chihuahua culture pottery to the United States. We have not seen any
documents to this effect, but the colonists’ own networks would have
been well suited for the movement of “Lamanite” pots.
One specific instance of looting must rank as the most bizarre episode
in the history of Chihuahuan archaeology. In 1916, after Pancho Villa’s
raid on Columbus, New Mexico, the U.S. Army launched a “punitive
expedition” into northern Mexico under the command of John “Black
Jack” Pershing. The invading force was deeply resented by Mexican
officials and citizens alike, and in mid-1916 the army ceased its offensive
efforts. As a consequence, “A new enemy, boredom, now tormented the
troops” (Yockelson 1997). In response, the army organized entertain-
ments such as baseball games and movies. Officers in an outlying encamp-
ment in San Joaquín Canyon (south and east of Nuevo Casas Grandes)
took the effort a step further and obtained General Pershing’s permission
to keep troops occupied by digging Medio period house mounds (Cruz

Antillón 2008; Cruz Antillón and Maxwell 2009; Weissheimer 1917).
Over three months, the detachment dug through seven house mounds,
using up to fifty soldiers at a time (figures 8 and 9). The army then
shipped looted artifacts to the National Museum of Natural History in
Washington, D.C., where they mostly remain to this day. Weissheimer
(1917) notes that the supervising officers were instructed not to ship
“repeat” specimens but, knowing the limits of their knowledge, they
were careful to ship an inclusive sample of what they found, including
debitage. Once the shipment arrived in Washington, the museum records
show that the “trained” staff threw out the debitage as unimportant.
Army officers from Pershing on down were aware that the dig violated
Mexican law, so we do not hesitate to label it as an instance of loot-
ing. Ironically, it was one of the better early studies of a Medio period
settlement. The work included the systematic clearance of entire room
blocks, photography and mapping, retention of representative artifacts,
and preparation of a report (Weissheimer 1917). Recent survey work in
Chihuahua by one of the authors has documented what remains of the
San Joaquín Canyon sites (Cruz Antillón 2000, 2008; Cruz Antillón
and Maxwell 2009).
Land Reform and Looting
Whatever the particular historical trajectory of individual haciendas, large

tracts of land, including many containing Medio period sites, passed
out of their control as a consequence of the revolution. As lands were
transferred to ejidos or colonias, the number of people in rural Chihuahua
increased exponentially. The new small-scale farmers included workers
from the old haciendas but also individuals who came from far and wide
to take advantage of free or heavily discounted land.
While the new settlements were a step up for Mexico’s peones, in
hindsight the land reforms were insufficient to lift rural Mexicans out of
poverty. The new settlers seldom obtained enough land to support their
families—and if they did, more children soon arrived to change that. The
new landowners almost never had the capital needed to compete with
more established ones, so that improvements (from pedigreed livestock
to barns, fences, and silos to power equipment) were slow to happen.
This was more true for ejidos, where private ownership was banned for
Figure 8: Top two photos: The
1916 San Joaquin dig by soldiers
of Pershing’s Punitive Commis-
sion. (Reproduced with permis-
sion, Smithsonian Institution);
bottom two photos: the same area
today. (Photograph by Rafael
Antillón Cruz)
Figure 9: The 1916 plan of the San Joaquin excavations. (Repro-

duced with permission, Smithsonian Institution)
many years, than for colonias. Additional income was essential to family
survival, and one way to gain that additional income was the sale of looted
pots. In the grand scheme of rural life, this was a minor and sporadic
activity, both less predictable and less rewarding than, say, working ille-
gally in the United States. Until the growth of the contemporary drug
trade, finding and selling pots could be one of the few ways to acquire
additional cash. In some areas, nonetheless, including the southern zone
of the Chihuahua Culture where we work, looting by the new campesino
class had a real effect. In addition to looting for income, or perhaps it is
better to say in conjunction with looting for income, schoolteachers in
various localities used excavation of Medio period sites as an extracur-

ricular activity for their students.
At this point in Chihuahua’s history, we suspect, the process by which
pots were acquired for sale began to shift from one dominated by haci-
enda managers and their railroad contacts to one dominated by small
landowners. On their own land, or at least on land assigned to them, they
could dig in a site that happened to be there, or let others do so.
In time, towns tended to form around ejidos and colonias. The old
Santa Ana de Babícora (of the Hearsts’ hacienda) evolved into the pueblo
for the colonia of Oscar Soto Maynez, for example. The old Las Varas
and San José Babícora hacienda headquarters, in the Babícora Alta,
evolved into pueblos of the same names. As stores and other commer-
cial services sprang up in these towns, and as transportation improved,
residents tended to move off the farm plots and into the towns, leaving
sites unprotected between growing seasons. Local residents with whom
we are in contact indicate that between the 1950s and 1990s, a few
individuals became well known for supplementing their agricultural
activities with late-fall and winter searches for pots.
While we have postulated an informal but widespread and effective
antiquities network involving the hacienda managers, the post-hacienda
farmer-looters do not appear to have had any such system. Instead, they
tended to operate individually. It was during this time, as local residents
were also moving from their plots into small towns, that enterprising
American buyers began making regular circuits of rural Chihuahua, in
order to visit known looters who might have pots or other interest-
ing archaeological pieces for sale. While there may have been earlier
itinerant buyers, we think that their contacts shifted with the shifts in
land-ownership.
In recent years, within the area where the PAC has worked, a few
residents have built collections that, at their peak, included upward of one
hundred or so pots. The two such collections that we heard about were
sold to buyers from the United States. A more common pattern is to find
a few pots in businesses or households, which sometimes hang on to them
for many years. With the death of the owner, however, when the offer is
a generous one, these small collections move on. Whatever the number
of pots looted from the southern zone, very few have stayed within the
area, and the indications are that most of them have left Mexico.
We know of one other common source of looting in the 1900s. Once
Mexico’s revolutionary troubles had faded, individuals in the El Paso
area (including members of the El Paso Archaeological Society) often

prospected in Chihuahua. In addition, Rex E. Gerald, a professional
archaeologist, seems to have excavated in Chihuahua without securing
the necessary permits. Presumably, similar activities occurred in other
towns near the border, such as Deming and Silver City.
S i t e D e s t r u c t i o n T o d ay
The current status of archaeological resources in Chihuahua is tied

not only to looting, but also with the long lack of a professional
archaeological presence in the state. Northern Mexico held little inter-
est for Mexico’s first archaeologists, who understandably focused on
the pyramids and temples of the southern half of the country (Kelley
and Villalpando 1996; Kelley and MacWilliams 2005; Bernal 1980).
Nonetheless, in 1933 Eduardo Noguera was sent from Mexico City
to Ciudad Juárez to go over the archaeological collections made by E.
B. Sayles during his Chihuahua survey, before Sayles could export his
finds. In a letter to Harold Gladwin dated July 1, 1933, Sayles stated
that “Dr. Noguera was much interested in going through the boxes
in order to learn more about Casas Grandes pottery.” Noguera was
one of the few Mexican archaeologists of his era who had already been
to the Mexican Northwest and had published an early paper on Casas
Grandes (Noguera 1930).
Until late in the twentieth century, most of the survey and excava-
tion work in Chihuahua was done by gringos. Many of these projects
were done on a small scale and, if published, resulted in scattered bits of
information. The great exception, an epic research project at Paquimé
(Contreras 1970; Di Peso 1974; Di Peso et al. 1974) seemed so defini-
tive that, arguably, for many years it discouraged further research on the
Chihuahua Culture (Kelley and Villalpando 1996).
With the establishment of Instituto Nacional de Antropología e
Historia (INAH) regional offices beginning in the 1970s, and with the
inception of several new research projects in the late 1980s and early
1990s, regional archaeology changed for the better. Today, northwest
Mexican archaeology involves a permanent Mexican presence, supple-
mented by foreign-sponsored projects that tend to be multiyear collab-
orative efforts. The former drop-by-drop accumulation of knowledge
has turned into a steady trickle.
Nonetheless, the five INAH archaeologists assigned to Chihuahua

work out to one professional per 49,400 square kilometers. In 2005,
Lynne Sebastian made what she calls a “deer in the headlight” estimate
that there were 582 archaeologists in New Mexico (personal commu-
nication to Jane H. Kelley, 2008). By way of contrast, the estimated
500-plus archaeologists in New Mexico work out to one professional per
630 square kilometers. Five archaeologists in Chihuahua contra 500-plus
archaeologists in New Mexico yields a sobering ratio of 1:100+. More-
over, INAH’s regional archaeologists are not given the resources needed
to routinely mount major projects, or to conduct rescue work at a rate
matching site destruction through development. INAH archaeologists
do have a legal power to stop the destruction of specific sites, through
denuncios,12 which appear to be effective when invoked and for a while
thereafter. Even so, the low numbers of archaeologists involved, and
the relative lack of logistical and other support, ensure that INAH’s
efforts in northwest Mexico are insufficient to halt the destruction of
archaeological sites.
It might be worse. In 2006, legislation jointly sponsored by the two
leading parties (PRI and PAN) proposed to shift many activities con-
ducted by the federal government to the state and local levels, and also
to allow some privatization of government functions. The legislation
failed—but had it been enacted, the effects on Mexican archaeology
would have necessitated drastic changes, at least in the short run. For
many decades, archaeology in Mexico has been a highly centralized fed-
eral effort dominated by one agency, INAH. For a while it seemed that
INAH might become an arm of the tourist industry, or might even be
disbanded. Its functions would have devolved on state governments with
no tradition of protecting patrimony and with no history of training and
employing archaeologists. Nor do the states have the financial resources
to take over the responsibilities currently funded through INAH. The
Escuela de Antropología e Historia in Chihuahua lacks archaeology
courses at this time, and the future of regionally based anthropology
programs is likely to be linked to the future of INAH. We do not know
whether there will be further efforts to devolve federal authority on the
states, but if such efforts extend to archaeology we fear for the conse-
quences to Chihuahua’s archaeological sites until the state has adequate
resources to assume control of the state patrimony.
In the PAC study area, certain sites seem to have been looted many
times—to the point where recent looters have gone through the fill
from three or four previous looting episodes. Members of the PAC have
observed certain sites over some twenty years. A given site can present a
very different surface appearance at different times, as a consequence of
varying rainfall, cycles of looting, and changes in land use. In 1990 and
1991, for example, the Raspadura site (Ch-011), the largest known site in
the southern zone of the Chihuahua Culture, exhibited massive amounts
of recent digging, with large numbers of sherds visible on backdirt. At
that time the area was experiencing normal amounts of rainfall, and
most of the site was neither plowed nor used for cattle, and the absen-
tee owner of the main part of the site lived in Chihuahua City, leaving
the land available for looting during off-seasons. By the late 1990s, the
ownership of CH-011 had changed; in response to a long drought, the
new owner used the central part of the site as a feedlot, and he or his
workmen were on the site daily throughout the year. He was quite averse
to people digging on his land, and looting diminished markedly. Few
sherds were visible, and trampling by cattle assumed a new importance
in our thoughts. In the early 1990s the site was mostly grass-covered.
By 2005, cholla had invaded the site and a significant amount of surface
erosion had occurred. One recent owner of the Raspadura site repeatedly
threatened to level the site with heavy equipment, and would have done
so by now had he not sold it.
As the Mimbres area has taught us, even badly looted sites can still
produce pockets of deposits and useful architectural information (LeBlanc
1983). We know that significant information remains at this important
site. Nonetheless, the site cannot produce the kind of information it
once might have, and we have watched major sites deteriorate over the
twenty years we have worked in the area.
The sorry condition and precarious outlook for the Raspadura site
is repeated at many, although not all, Medio period sites across rural
Chihuahua. Given the scarcity of resident archaeologists in Chihuahua,
and their lack of institutional resources, we do not expect the situation
to improve in the near future. The PAC operates in an area that one
student estimated was the size of Belgium; during our ten field seasons
thus far, no other archaeologist worked anywhere in the area. Externally
funded projects , of which PAC is one, tend to be driven by problem-
oriented research plans and are not designed to monitor or actively protect
archaeological remains, so are a poor substitute for ongoing efforts by
government archaeologists.
Since 1990, members of PAC have observed a great many cases of

recent or ongoing damage to sites, of which the following cases consti-
tute a partial list.
• Landowners leveling sites to prepare the land for agriculture (an entire
mound was leveled to put in an orchard at Ch-153, in the upper Santa
María Valley).
• Mounds being removed with power equipment, so that the fill could be
used to make adobe bricks (the southeastern mound at the Raspadura
site).
• An arroyo being rerouted across a site to improve farmland (also at
the Raspadura site, where the new channel cut across the south edge
of a mound).
• Virtual destruction of a Medio period site during construction of
an apple orchard; the deep holes dug for tree planting extended
over the entire mound (the San Blas site in the upper Santa Maria
Valley).
• Construction of a cattle tank within a mound site (about one-quarter
of El Zurdo was removed). This site has additionally been greatly
damaged by looters.
• Erosion along arroyos, with mound fill falling into the arroyos (the
Palacios site in the upper Santa María Valley and the La Mulata site in
the Babícora Basin—both significantly diminished).
• Excavation as part of extracurricular activities organized by a school-
teacher (some forty-four rooms of an estimated sixty-plus-room pueblo
were cleared by students at the Palacios site. Recovered artifacts were
for some years stored at the secondary school in Oscar Soto Maynez,
but disappeared after the reported murder of the teacher).
There can be no doubt that throughout the former range of the

Chihuahua Culture, the status of archaeological resources, and thus our
ability to study the past, is steadily degrading. Moreover, the looting
seems to follow specific patterns. To begin with, site visibility is a factor.
Medio period adobe house mounds are far more likely to be attacked
than earlier and later sites, which lack mounds and thus attract less
attention. During long droughts, such as the one beginning in the early
1990s, the reduction in plant cover increases site visibility. The drought
also worsened the economic status of many farmers, providing multiple
motivations for this cycle of increased looting.
There seems to come a point when local looters regard a site as “mined
out.” If professional archaeologists begin working at the site, the looting
may begin anew. An example of this was our work at El Zurdo in the early
1990s. Although recent looting was evident, it seemed to have slowed
considerably from earlier periods, judging from our observations as well
as information provided by local residents. Our fieldwork inspired a new
round of looting: our units were dug into during absences from the site,
and looters’ pits were dug next to our test pits. There may be no way for
archaeologists to conduct projects without reawakening looters’ interest
in sites (Kelley 2009). We cannot sort out how much of the subsequent
looting was due to drought, economic factors, or our example, but the
site has deteriorated markedly since 1992 (figures 4a and 4b).
The Consequences for Archaeology
Looting has warped our understanding of the ancient Chihuahua Culture

in two ways. The first and obvious way is the destruction of archaeo-
logical deposits that could have provided us with fuller inventories and
contextual information. Because of the looting to date, there are certain
things that we will never know about ancient life in Chihuahua’s north-
west quadrant. Although there will always be things we don’t know
about any archaeological area, and new methods and techniques can
overcome some problems, present efforts to understand Chihuahuan
archaeology begin at a far different resource condition than was the case
in the adjacent Southwest.
There is also the looters’ booty to consider. Many museums’ Chihua-
huan collections consist primarily or entirely of painted Chihuahua Culture
pots and other items selected for their aesthetic appeal to collectors, and
in most cases the collections lack even the vague five-region provenience
that accompanied the 1933 McGinnis collection. The collections can be
used to good advantage, as when the VanPools (2007) argued that Casas
Grandes society included shaman-leaders, based largely on evidence in
pottery motifs. Their case would have been much stronger, however, if
the pots bearing the relevant symbolic representations had come from
a well-documented series of contexts. Instead, those who disagree with
their conclusions can simply cite the lack of provenience as sufficient
reason for disbelief. The same can be said of other analyses involving
inferences from pottery designs—such as those by Michael Mathiowitz
(2008), Maria Sprehn (1999, 2003), and Hendrickson (2000)—insofar

as museum collections form the basis of their inferences.
Archaeologists constantly agonize over the two-edged sword of
extracting every ounce of information from whatever source (and so feel
justified in using looted collections for what information they obtain),
and the other edge of the blade—which is that museums that accept or
buy looted materials are ultimately major contributors to ongoing loot-
ing (Coggins 1969). As Salazar (2007) points out, various professional
archaeological societies have tended to opt for increasingly strenuous
ethical guidelines (also see Lynott and Wylie 1995), but the Biblical
Archaeology Society argues that biblical history cannot be written without
the use of looted materials. The problem is still very much debated, and
in practice, professional archaeologists tend to hold somewhat different
views from museums.
In addition, a pot without a pedigree is at least potentially a fake
(Kelner and Bruhns 2010). For years it has been rumored that the Mata
Ortiz renaissance as a pottery-making center had its roots in an earlier
tradition of faking Chihuahua Culture pottery for sale. Kirk Gittings
is a friend of ours who, in his youth, worked in a cannery in El Paso.
He reports that a fellow worker known as El Maestro (because he ran
cockfights) told him that his family in the Casas Grandes region had
been faking pots for five generations. Also, before Juan Quezada became
famous, dealers sometimes scratched his name off the bottoms of pots,
dirtied them, and passed them off as prehistoric (D’Agostino 1994:74).
We have yet to find any evidence linking the rumored fakery with Mata
Ortiz families who produce such beautiful pottery today, so that part of
the rumors should be treated as a potential canard, but the rumors serve
as a warning to those using unprovenienced pottery. Hendrickson is the
only archaeologist we know of who worries about faking of Chihuahuan
pottery. In his design study of Babícora, Ramos, and Villa Ahumada
polychromes, based on 361 whole vessels in the Royal Ontario Museum
and the Museum of Archaeology in El Paso, he discusses several vessels
in each collection (collections that mostly passed through Ledwidge’s
hands) as possible forgeries. Vessels that “felt wrong” exhibited excep-
tional traits such as “flaking paint, errant shapes, very poorly or oddly
articulated designs, or on the opposition end of the spectrum, very
well-articulated designs” (Hendrickson 2000: 125–26, fig. 6.20). One
of the “too good” pots has more in common with modern Mata Ortiz
pottery than prehistoric examples. Contrast the general acceptance of
Chihuahuan pots in museum collections as genuine with the concerns

routinely expressed about Jaina figurines and Colima dogs, or Mochica
pots, where faking is something that all museums and collectors worry
about. As Chihuahua Culture pottery gains in value among collectors,
the temptation to fake such pots will probably increase. Consider that
Ledwidge asked from $1.00 to $25.00 for Chihuahuan pots, while the
Wheaton-Smith collection of some 700+ pieces recently went on the
market for $175,000. One vessel from the Wheaton-Smith collection,
formerly on loan to the Silver City Museum, was recently advertised on
the Internet by Fort Knox Antiquities of Scottsdale for $950.
Concluding Remarks
The history of landownership and land management is directly relevant

to the current state of Chihuahua Culture sites, and thus to our ability
to interpret those sites. For Medio period sites in particular, the damage
is so extensive that we may never be able to make up the loss. Systematic
looting has always been driven by collector demand, but that demand—
and the networks that fed it—changed through time. Before the great
haciendas stretched into the Chihuahua Culture area, looting appears to
have been sporadic and driven by demand from relatively few individuals
grounded in the international natural history movement. We suspect that
in most cases, the pots did not travel very far, or, conversely, were used
to display Mexico’s prehistoric treasures to an international audience.
Once rural Chihuahua was carved up into haciendas, sites were mined
for salable pottery—but because that mining was by permission of an
hacienda owner or manager, the damage may have been, in a sense, self-
limiting. In contrast, the contemporary development of North America’s
railroads increased the incentives to loot by providing high-status hacienda
employees with an easy way to smuggle pots out of Mexico to potential
buyers in the United States. Finally, the progressive dissolution of the
large haciendas meant that more people had access to sites and loot-
ing became more of an individual pursuit, carried out mostly by poor
farmers. In all likelihood, the intensity of looting increased as the large
haciendas passed away.
Although Mexico was quick to accord its sites legal protection, that
progressive attitude has yet to bear practical results. The scarcity of profes-
sional archaeological projects in west-central Chihuahua, the infrequent
exercise of authority by Mexico City–based government archaeologists

until a few decades ago, and the tiny number of INAH archaeologists
currently assigned to the state, have combined to leave most of the
management of archaeological resources to those who control the land.
In many cases, that “management” has led to looting or eradication of
archaeological remains. The situation is not utterly hopeless, however.
Mexico’s archaeological establishment, along with its inhabitants, are
slowly learning to appreciate the country’s northern past, in addition
to its Mesoamerican heritage. If that appreciation continues to grow, in
time it may lead to widespread support for the systematic protection of
northern antiquities.
The history of looting in Chihuahuan sites is a reflection of many
processes. These include the commoditization of artifacts, changes in
who has access to lands, changes in the political history of northern
Mexico, and the progression of North American archaeology. Hewett and
Ledwidge assuredly were products of their times. They collected in an
era when museums across the continent were eager to build up exhibits
of Native American artifacts and crafts. The museum era of American
anthropology is a well-known part of our history. Today’s archaeologists
are a product of an era in which context and association are as import-
ant as the artifact; for that reason the large, unprovenienced collections
amassed decades ago are seen as rather limited sources of information,
though there have been some analytical successes. Today’s Chihuahuan
archaeologists are compelled to glean information from Chihuahua
Culture sites while contributing to their demise by excavation, and at
times, by unwillingly inspiring looters. <
Acknowledgments
Karen Bruhns, Alice Kehoe, and David Wilcox commented on drafts

of this paper. Steven LeBlanc of the Harvard Peabody Museum, and
Scott Cutler of the Centennial Museum, consulted records to provide
information on pots in their collections. Mike Jacobs, Alan Ferg, and
Todd A. Pitezel at the Arizona State Museum provided information
about Chihuahuan collections in that museum and their history. An
unknown reader of the manuscript also made excellent suggestions.
Our thanks to all.
Notes
1. The PAC was codirected by Jane H. Kelley and Joe Stewart from 1990 to
2000, with Kelley and Richard Garvin as codirectors in 2005 and from 2007 to
2009. The projects were funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Councils
of Canada, Lakehead University, the University of Calgary, and the University
of British Colombia, Okanagan. Permission to carry out the work in Chihuahua
was granted by the Consejo de Arqueología, Instituto Nacional de Antropología
e Historia, Mexico.
2. Most of our information on the hacienda period, especially regarding the
Terrazas-Creel empires, comes from Wasserman (1984, 1993).
3. “Babícora” and “Bavícora” are alternate spellings of the same place-name.
4. Hart (2002:500–1) notes that merchants and financiers pioneered Ameri-
can expansion into Mexico, followed by “infrastructure men,” who in turn were
followed by investors in industry, agriculture, and ranching. George Hearst and
his partners belonged to Hart’s third wave of American expansionists.
5. We have found two spellings for this last name, “Folamsbee” and “Folan-
bee.” A U.S. online genealogical service (www.ancestry.com) lists the last names
“Folamsbee” and “Folansbee” as centered in the Northeast, but provides no
listing for “Folanbee.”
6. We have found two versions of his middle name: Edvard and Etheling.
7. Information from the Mormon Genealogical Archives.
8. Railroad records for at the period of 1910–1920 are at the Nettie Lee
Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin.
9. Museum of the American Indian records are available online; Gila Pueblo
records are archived at the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, and
the Gila Pueblo collections are deposited in the Arizona State Museum collec-
tions.
10. The discussion that follows is based on Hewett’s papers (at the Angélico
Chávez Library in Santa Fe), which preserve the cited letters between Hewett
and Ledwidge and between Ledwidge and Eduardo Noguera.
11. Thomas Wentworth Peirce papers, Benson Latin American Collection
Inventory, University of Texas, Austin.
12. A denuncio is a document that, in the case of archaeological resources,
informs local officials and local land users or landowners of their responsibility to
protect the patrimony of the country. The documents can originate with INAH
archaeologists or with the regional director of INAH.
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Land Use and Looting Shape Archaeology in Chihuahua

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Land Use, Looting, and Archaeology in Chihuahua, Mexico: A

Published by The Southwest Center, University of Arizona

For additional information about this article

The present state of archaeological resources forms the baseline for

J a n e H. K e l l e y is Professor Emeritus, Department of Archaeology, University

Journal of the Southwest 53, 2 (Summer 2011) : 177–224

Figure 1: The state of Chihuahua, with a rough approximation of the PAC

as a form of amusement that is preferable to other possible activities in

If looting precluded practicing good archaeology, archaeology would

Figure 2a: A Ramos

Figure 2b: A Babí-

Conversely, we have seen a mildly looted site that we worked on in the

Figure 3a: The site of

Figure 3b: The same site

Initial Historical Context of Looting

When the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, Chihuahua was

We have very little information about the use of archaeological

It is also clear, however, that the Mexican authorities seldom exercised

Haciendas: The Nexus of Looting in the

We have little information about looting prior to 1910,2 but assume

The Hacienda System

Prior to 1910, the “bread basket” of Chihuahua extended from Casas

archaeologists. Most of the recorded sites of the Chihuahua Culture are

extended family controlled another 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of

system was rigged so that workers soon found themselves in perpetual,

A Case Study: The Hacienda Babícora Owned by the Hearst Family

haciendas to be dissolved. It functioned until 1954, which means that

his interest in the Gray–Diamond A holdings in exchange for the other

Babícora until 1910, when Logan accepted management of the adjacent

Challenges and Changes

Haciendas, Archaeology, and Looting

Looting of archaeological sites occurred prior to the onset of the Mexican

Figure 5b. The

Figure 6: E. B. Sayles’ 1933 photos of the Santa Ana de Babícora

tabulation of documented instances of artifacts associated with Ledwidge

1926 Sale of a Nampeyo (Hopi) pot to the Arizona State Museum.

The Centennial Museum in El Paso received 251 pots, which were

Archaeological Society of Washington (Hough 1923; many pieces of

Peirce was involved in collecting Chihuahuan pottery, merely that he

We have found out very little about E. C. Houghton in Internet

It is striking that whereas McGinnis worked in the Babícora Basin,

Other Early Looting

to keep troops occupied by digging Medio period house mounds (Cruz

Land Reform and Looting

Whatever the particular historical trajectory of individual haciendas, large

Figure 9: The 1916 plan of the San Joaquin excavations. (Repro-

various localities used excavation of Medio period sites as an extracur-

area (including members of the El Paso Archaeological Society) often

The current status of archaeological resources in Chihuahua is tied

Nonetheless, the five INAH archaeologists assigned to Chihuahua

Since 1990, members of PAC have observed a great many cases of

There can be no doubt that throughout the former range of the

The Consequences for Archaeology

Looting has warped our understanding of the ancient Chihuahua Culture

(2008), Maria Sprehn (1999, 2003), and Hendrickson (2000)—insofar

Chihuahuan pots in museum collections as genuine with the concerns

The history of landownership and land management is directly relevant

exercise of authority by Mexico City–based government archaeologists

Karen Bruhns, Alice Kehoe, and David Wilcox commented on drafts

Alonso, Ana María

on file at Subdirección de Estudios Arqueológicos del INAH,

Hendrickson, Mitchell James