Archaeologists Found Something in Mexico's Desert That Doesn't Fit Any History Book

[00:00:00]The entrance is not what anyone expected. It does not open at ground level or through a visible cliff face or across a broad cave mouth. It is a vertical shaft, a narrow chimney in the rock, dropping down into darkness from the surface of the desert floor. The Sierra de la Candelaria rises in the southwestern part of Kowila at the northern edge of the Karka Laguna [music] roughly 50 mi northeast of Torian and the terrain around it looks from the surface like most of the Chihiwahan desert dry washes leaguilla sparse grasses the occasional meay a sky that offers no interruption the cave is underneath all of this invisible from any angle announced by nothing in early 1953 a local farmer worker from the municipality of San Pedro de los colonius was working land in the va de los delissius when he broke through into it. The accounts preserved in later publications do not record his name.

[00:00:57]What they record is that he understood when he looked down into what he had opened that what was below had significance and that he reported it to the authorities rather than returning alone. Within weeks his report reached the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. Pablo Martinez del Rio, a prehistorian who was then one of Mexico's leading figures in the study of early huntergatherer societies and who had helped establish the institutional infrastructure for that research at INH organized a response. The first field season began in late March 1953. The team that descended into the cave was interdisciplinary [music] by design. Luis Avalera Aoyo Deanda, an archaeologist with extensive experience in northern [music] Mexican prehistory, led the excavation work. Manuel Maldonado Cordal, a geologist [music] and paleontologist, assessed the cave's formation and physical environment.

[00:01:52]Physical anthropologists, textile specialists, and conservators joined across three field seasons, spring 1953, September 1953, [music] and spring 1954.

[00:02:04]What they found at the bottom of the shaft and in the interior passages beyond it had not been [music] touched in 600 years. The dry desert air inside the cave had done something that no laboratory could replicate. It had stopped time for the objects deposited there between approximately 1,00 and 1350 CE. The cave had never been a dwelling. Avalera Aoyo de Anda was precise about this in the 1956 publication that summarized the three field seasons. Qua de Lockandaria volume 1 published by I inh memorialia's Dell Institut Nasionalda Anthropologia Ehis Histori number five he wrote that the cave showed no stratographic accumulation of cultural deposits no hearths no food preparation debris no evidence of sustained occupation it was in his words a large fissure with a vertical entrance and an extremely irregular interior used by the ancient lagonaros as an enormous mortuary deposit closet. The people who came here did not live here. They came to leave their dead, wrapped, and equipped, and then they left. What the INAH team recovered across those three seasons amounted to more than 2,000 objects.

[00:03:15]Rigid baskets constructed using spiral winding technique in concave and conical forms of various sizes. Lengths of rope and cordage twisted from agavei and yucka fiber. Sandals woven from plant fiber. cotton cloth, some of it joined by stitching to form mantles large enough to wrap a person. Knife handles, decorated reads, simple cradles, net fragments, collars assembled from freshwater and marine shells, from seeds, from small animal bones. Deer antlers with what researchers identified as ritual significance. The catalog published by INH documented the variety with precision. [music] And that variety is what distinguished Candelaria from almost any comparable site in arid North America. Not just quantity, but completeness. Functional objects and ornamental objects, daily tools, and ceremonial items. The full range of what a person would carry, wear, and use preserved in its entirety because the desert sealed the shaft and kept the humidity out. The textile specialist who arrived at the Iron Age laboratory in Mexico City, carrying samples from the Candelaria collection was Mrard White Loner Johnson, an American anthropologist who had begun her systematic study of Mexican textiles in 1951 and would later become curator of textiles at the Museio Nasalda Anthropologia. She had studied cultural anthropology and ethnographic textiles at the University of California, Berkeley. And by the time the candelaria materials reached her hands, she had already documented textile traditions from Chiapas, Haliscoco, and the Mixca Alta. What she found in the Candelaria collection was unlike anything she had encountered before. Not because the techniques were unfamiliar, but because the preservation made them readable in a way that degraded archaeological textiles almost never are. Normally, plant fiber cloth from a thousand years ago survives as fragments. a corner, a border, a few centimeters of structure from which a specialist infers [music] the rest. The candelaria material came out of the cave with structure intact across entire lengths. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, the desert had not spared a fragment. It had preserved the argument. What White Loner Johnson documented in her 1977 [music] monograph. Los textiles de la Qua de la Kendallaria. Coowila published by Iron Age as colle Scientifica number 51 was a textile tradition built almost entirely from two plant genera that grew within reach of the gunarose as they moved across the Chihuahuan desert. The first [music] was yaka. Howard Arnut of the University of California had identified the specific [music] species in 1954 during the field analysis phase of the original excavation. Yaka carnneros Santa and yaka tricculana both native to the coowiller region from the leaf fibers of these plants. The Lagona Rose produced loom woven cloth, narrow bands, and large mantels using a twobar loom whose structural principle White Loner Johnson identified as characteristic of inland northern Mexico. Throughout prehistory, the weave structure was warp dominant plain [music] weave. The vertical elements, the warps, dominated the surface of the fabric rather than the horizontal WS. This placed the candelaria textiles technically closer to central Mesoamerican weaving traditions than to the more balanced weave structures found on Mexico's west coast. A connection that would become significant when researchers began asking where these people came from and how they related to the broader world of Erido America. The second plant was agavei, specifically agavei lechiguila, the low spiny plant that covers the slopes of the Chihiwahan desert and has been used for fiber production in northern Mexico for millennia. Where yaka fiber went into loom woven cloth, lecheilla fiber went into cordage. The rope, the netting, the bindings, the structural elements of the baskets, all of it in large part twisted from agave.

[00:07:19]White Loner Johnson analyzed the twist direction of the candelaria threads. The spinning had been done predominantly in Z direction with fibers wound upward and to the right and then pied in S direction to create the final cord. She further proposed based on the consistency of the thread profiles that the spinning had most likely been done by rolling fiber bundles along the bare thigh with the palm of the hand. a technique that leaves a characteristic twist angle in the finished thread that laboratory analysis can read as clearly as a signature. Among the unprocessed materials recovered from the cave were skes of unspun fiber, balls of finely spun thread, portions of cordage at various stages of completion, and piles of fiber arranged in parallel, evidently prepared and waiting to be twisted. The cave had preserved not just the finished objects but the production process itself frozen at multiple stages. The baskets belong to a separate technical tradition from the textiles but are equally precise. The rigid baskets documented by the INA team and later analyzed in depth by Gloria Martha Sanchez Venzuela and Alejandra Quinninari Sea published in the proceedings of the pre-Colombian textile conference 8 [music] in 2020 were made using spiral coiling technique. In spiral coiling, the weaver begins with a starting knot and builds outward [music] and upward in a continuous horizontal spiral, stitching each new coil to the road directly beneath it using a vertical sewing element passed through an all punched hole. The resulting structure is rigid, thickwalled, [music] and interlocked across its entire surface. The candelaria baskets [music] came in two primary forms, concave and conicle, in multiple sizes. Some were large enough to serve as containers for substantial loads. Others were small enough to be carried in one hand. The plant material used for the coiling foundation and the sewing [music] element came again from the desert itself. Agavei and lechigilla fiber in most cases sometimes combined with other [music] local materials. What the baskets show beyond the technical competence required to produce them is that the lagonaros carried significant quantities of processed [music] and stored material as they moved. These were not people improvising containers from whatever the landscape offered at a given camp. They were people who made durable precisely [music] constructed vessels, used them, maintained them, and when an individual came to be interred at Candelaria, placed them in theerary bundle as objects worth taking. The presence of cotton in the collection is the element that complicates any simple reading of the lagona rose as a fully self-sufficient desert society. Cotton does not grow in the Chihuahua desert.

[00:10:05]The climate is too cold in winter and too dry in summer for sustained cotton cultivation and there is no evidence that the groups using the candelaria cave maintained agricultural plots of any kind. The cotton cloth found in the collection, some of it stitched together to form the large mantels used in theerary bundles, had to have [music] come from somewhere else. The same applies to the marine shells in the ornament assemblage. Both Pacific and Gulf [music] species appear among the collars and pendants in a region hundreds of kilometers [music] from either coast. Freshwater shells from local river systems appear alongside them. What this means at [music] minimum is that the Lagonaros were connected to exchange networks that extended far beyond the Kamarco Lagona networks [music] that move cotton cloth, marine shell, and possibly other goods across the desert through mechanisms that the surviving documentary record dominated as it is by colonial Spanish descriptions of these groups as simply wild and ungovernable. [music] Never described. The physical anthropologist who analyzed the skeletal assemblage from Quuea de Laendellaria was Artro Romano Pacheo and his work presented initially as a master's thesis at the Esqa nasala anthropologia ehistoria in 1956 titled Los [music] Resto's humos de laqua de la candelaria coowila cranologia remains the most complete [music] systematic study of an individual population from arido America's arid north carried out in the 20th century Romano examined 81 individuals from the collection. Of those, 44 were identified as male and 37 as female. The age profile was striking in its consistency. [music] The majority were young adults between 25 and 35 years of age with males showing a slightly higher average age than females. No pattern of violent injury was identified in the assemblage that would suggest conflict as a cause. What Romano was reading through bone and preservation [music] was the demographic record of a population group operating at the edge of what a desert environment [music] could sustain. People who reached Candelaria for the same reason generation after generation [music] across a period of roughly three centuries because the cave represented something stable in a world built around seasonal movement. Theerary bundles, the Boltos Morurios, were the unit of analysis that organized everything else in the cave. [music] Each bundle was a structured object assembled with care and according to a consistent protocol.

[00:12:35]The individual was placed in a flexed position. The limbs drawn toward the body and wrapped in cloth made from yaka or agavei fiber. Sometimes a single textile, sometimes a layered combination of fabrics tied at intervals with agave cord to hold the wrapping firm. Arturo Romano documented in his analysis of the placement of each bundle within the cave that the groups bringing their dead here had developed a spatial logic for the interior of the shaft. Each bundle was set on a shallow base of digging sticks, reed mats or palm and tuli fiber matting. Between one bundle and the next, the group placed [music] prickly pear pads, no and leaves of palm and lechuilla, creating a natural separator between individuals. The effect was a layered deposit, bundles stacked [music] and arranged across the irregular floor of the cave interior, each separated from the next [music] by desert vegetation that the living had carried down through the shaft. Outside the wrapped bundles, but associated directly with them, too large to place inside were bows, arrows, curved wooden sticks, cradle frames, and throwing implements.

[00:13:44]Some of the wooden objects had been deliberately broken before being placed.

[00:13:48]bows and projectile related objects found in fragmented condition. A practice documented in mortuary contexts across Erdo America and interpreted by researchers as a form of ritual decommissioning releasing the object from functional use by ending its structural integrity. The question of who these people were, [music] what name they gave themselves, what language they spoke, what relationships they maintained with other groups across the region has no straightforward answer.

[00:14:16]And the difficulty of that answer is itself archaeologically significant. The colonial Spanish terminology for the nomadic groups of northern Mexico was chichchamika, a nawad derived umbrella term applied by sedentary southern peoples including the Aztecs to any group that did not build permanent settlements or practice intensive agriculture. The term carried explicit contempt. Its connotations in nawat included references to barbarity and social inferiority and it was so broadly applied that it obscured rather than described the actual diversity of groups living across the arid north within Kowila. Specifically, researchers have identified subgroupings that colonial documents name the Kowilticos along the river systems and into what is now southern Texas. The Guacyles across a broad territory from Halisco to Kowila.

[00:15:07]The Aritilus also called Lagunaros who inhabited the zones around the rivers Nazis and Auan Naval in the lakes of the Kamar Lagona. It is the Lagunaros specifically who are most frequently associated with the Candelaria cave based on the cave's location at the northern edge of their documented territory. But the Lagono identity itself is a colonial construct, a geographic label applied from outside.

[00:15:32]The groups who used the cave left no written record of what they called themselves. What the archaeological record does show across the three centuries of use documented at Candelaria is a mortuary practice that remains stable in its essential structure while incorporating objects whose origin lay far outside the desert.

[00:15:51]The cotton cloth that wrapped theerary bundles came from an agricultural zone.

[00:15:55]The Lagonaros did not inhabit [music] the marine shells and the personal ornaments came from coastlines hundreds of kilometers away. The radiocarbon dates published by Avala Aoyo Deanda and Analropoia in 1964. Two dates derived from organic material recovered during the 1953 to 1954 excavations placed the cave's period of primary use within the general range confirmed by subsequent analysis.

[00:16:22]The centuries between approximately 1,00 and 1350 CE. Across that span, the fundamental structure of theerary bundle did not change. The materials that composed it did not change. The spatial organization of the deposit did not change. What that continuity implies is not a static people. Nomatic groups are by definition dynamic, reshaping their lives around seasonal resource availability, but a stable set of beliefs about what the passage from life required, maintained across generations with a consistency that no documentary record from the colonial period attributed to them. The Spanish described the Lagonaros and their neighbors as people without institutions, without structure, without the organized social life that European observers recognized. The cave suggests otherwise. The personal ornaments deposited with the individuals at Candelaria are the material dimension of that social life. Collars assembled from freshwater shells obtained from the rivers of the region, the Nazis and the Auan Naval appear alongside pendants made from marine mollisks that could only have come from the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific coast. Ornaments made from small animal bones, from seeds, from stones appear in the same assemblage. feathers were incorporated into some of the bundles. The presence of these materials together, local freshwater shells and distant marine shells, desert gathered seeds, and non-local cotton implies that the Laguna were not isolated from broader exchange networks moving goods across northern Mexico. They were embedded in them. The objects that traveled with a person through life and then traveled with that person into the ground came from a world that extended far beyond what any Spanish colonial account acknowledged.

[00:18:08]The Musio regional de la Lagona sits [music] inside the Bosque Venustiano Coranza in the center of Torian Kowila a modern building in a municipal park [music] which is not where anyone would expect to find one of the most significant collections of pre-Colombian organic material in the Americas. The museum was created specifically because of the Candelaria cave. When the INAH team completed its field work in 1954 and the scope of what had been recovered became clear, more than 2,000 objects, most of them organic, most of them requiring controlled storage. The need for a regional institution dedicated to the collection became impossible to ignore. [music] The museum opened in Toan in the heart of the Kamarcoa Laguna and a dedicated gallery for the candelaria materials has been part of its permanent exhibition since its founding. The baskets, the textiles, the cordage, the ornaments, the few flint knives with their red pigmented [music] wooden handles. All of it held within reach of the region where the Lagonaros had moved and lived and eventually brought their dead to this single point in the Sierra deandelaria. The archaeologist who has done the most to interpret the candelaria collection for the public and for the broader field of Mexican archaeology is Leticia Gonzalez Arasia, a researcher at the Centro Age Coowila whose work concentrated on Aerido America at a time when northern Mexican archaeology attracted little institutional attention. In a profile published by Mellinio, Gonzalez Arasia recalled that when she began her research in Kowila, the desert north was an area that held little interest for her contemporaries in the discipline.

[00:19:45]The prestige projects were in the south among the architecturally visible cultures. It was the Candelaria cave that reoriented the field's attention.

[00:19:54]The quantity and quality of its materials, the speed with which the 1956 Iron Age publication made them available to the academic community, and the specificity of what had been recovered forced a [music] recognition that nom hunter gatherer societies in northern Mexico had. As Gonzalez Arasia wrote in Archeologia Mexicana number 30, an important history to tell. Her research project, which she named Mortuary Packages, extended that recognition beyond Candelaria to funeral caves throughout Kowila, La Coyote, La Espintosa, La Chuparosa, and more recently documented sites, building a comparative record of burial practice across the arid north that no single site could provide alone. In Gonzalez Archia's analysis, the presence of personal objects both inside and outside the textile wrappings of the bundles reflects something specific about the beliefs these communities held. That the objects a person used in life remained tied to that person after life [music] and that the act of bringing them to the cave and placing them there was an act of continuity, not simply of disposal.

[00:21:00]The conservation project that is currently active at Torian is the clearest expression of how much the collection still has to yield. In 2013, the coordination nasional de conservation delp patatrimonio cultural of INH, the CNCPC launched a long-term project specifically dedicated to the candelaria organic materials held by the Musio regional Dal Laguna. The project's approach is dual scientific analysis to establish the biological origin of each fiber, plant species by plant species, and experimental archaeology to reconstruct the techniques used to produce each object category. The restorers working within the project, including Julieta Montiel Perez and Diana Delgado Cordova of the CNCPC Laboratory, have over more than a decade of work treated more than a 100 pieces from the museum's collection. The process is a [music] circuit. The restoers travel periodically from Mexico City to Torian, select pieces requiring intervention, bring them to the laboratory for treatment, and return them to the museum for display once stabilized. The Museio Regional Da Lagoon's dedicated candelaria gallery makes a rotation system possible. As treated objects go back on display, deteriorated ones come off, reducing the cumulative damage that sustained exhibition causes to organic material.

[00:22:23]Among the objects currently under active treatment when the project's most recent public communications were issued, the INH bulletin identified a fragment of a fishing net, a detail that carries its own implication. A fishing net found in the Chihiwahan desert associated with groups described by colonial sources as wandering hunter gatherers without fixed economy or social structure is a material argument for a subsistent strategy more complex than any Spanish document acknowledged. The Laguna took their name from the lakes the Lagona de [music] Marin the Lagona dea and from the river systems the Nazis and the Auanaval that fed those lakes. They were not people of pure desert. They were people of a desert that contained water, fish, repairarian vegetation and seasonal abundance. And they built their material culture around all of it. The fishing net in the conservation laboratory in Mexico City is what is left of that relationship. Its fibers are being analyzed, its construction technique documented, its condition stabilized so that it can be displayed in toan alongside [music] the baskets and the sandals and the cotton cloth that crossed hundreds of kilometers of terrain to reach this cave. The question that Candelaria poses, the one that the 1953 excavation opened and that no subsequent research has fully closed, is not archaeological in any narrow [music] sense. It is a question about what gets recorded and what disappears. The Lagonaros left no architecture that survives above ground. They left no writing. They left no monument that anyone could see from the surface. The Spanish colonial record described them in terms of what they lacked. Settled life, agriculture, permanent structures, the markers that European observers used to measure civilization against its absence. What the desert preserved in a vertical shaft in the Sierra Dea Kandelaria was the opposite argument.

[00:24:19]Baskets made with a technique precise enough to reconstruct from a single surviving example. Textiles [music] whose thread twist direction can be read by a laboratory instrument 700 years after the spinner stopped. [music] Cotton cloth that implies a trade connection spanning hundreds of kilome.

[00:24:37]Marine shells from two separate coastlines worn as personal ornaments in the middle of a continental desert. A fishing net. A deer antler deposited as a ritual object. [music] Sandals woven from the fiber of a plant that the desert grew in abundance. Worn until they were worn out and then carried here anyway because they had belonged to someone. The cave held all of it. The desert held the cave. And for 600 years before a farm worker broke through the surface in the spring of 1953, none of it moved.