University of Colorado Studies, Series in Anthropology, No. 7. Archaeological Excavations in the Northern Sierra Madre Occidental, Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico

Since 1951, our archaeological research in northwest Mexico has focused on solving the common problem of the Southwest-Mexican connections. For a long time, it was believed that a number of elements underlying the cultures of the Southwest came from Mexican sources. In particular, it is believed that corn cultivation, pottery, and possibly cotton cultivation spread northward and influenced the development of southwestern crops. Later, a number of other features of southern origin, including ball courts, brass bells, certain forms and techniques of pottery decoration, clay figurines, spindle whorls, and mosaic discs, also reached the Southwest and were incorporated into Southwest culture (Haury, 1945 ). The authors focused their fieldwork on trying to collect material concerning the problem of early contacts between Mexico and the Southwest. They hoped that archaeological evidence from this period could be found in caves in the north of the Sierra Madre Occidental, as they believed that this mountain range could serve as a corridor for the movement of peoples and / or cultures northward. Prior to their exploration, attempts to establish connections were unsuccessful on either the west coast or the central plateau of Mexico. Visible details and some archaeological excavations of a number of caves in the Western Sierra Madre in northwest Chihuahua and northeast Sonora have been documented in the literature for a considerable time. The work of Lumholtz (1902), the first description of the natural history and archeology of the area, is still valuable today.