Editor's note: This episode of Nature Notes marks the program's 600th episode - and marks nearly 20 years that Big Bend area resident Dallas Baxter has served as the voice of the program. Thanks for listening all these years, and for your ongoing support of Marfa Public Radio.
It features prominently in the earliest European account of the American Southwest, and it’s a fascinating chapter in Texas history. And yet, much about La Junta – the Native American society that flourished at the confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Conchos, at present-day Presidio-Ojinaga – remains mysterious. Archeologists haven’t given it the same attention as other farming and village societies.
Texas Parks & Wildlife archeologist Micah Smith is working to change that. He’s analyzing La Junta artifacts, to help clarify fundamental aspects of this important Big Bend culture.
“They did an amazing job in the 30s and 40s of getting pretty accurate dating out of the material that they had,” Smith said. “But as far as refining that and saying, okay, we're probably around these years – now we have these methods of getting tighter ranges with radiocarbon.”
Smith is seeking to understand La Junta’s story not through new excavation, but by testing existing theories with existing collections.
La Junta is truly a storied place. In his chronicle, the Spanish castaway Cabeza de Vaca described wandering “lost and naked” into these riverside villages in 1535. These were the first settled communities he’d seen in what’s now Texas. The La Juntans fed him beans and squash from their gardens.
But the earliest archeology occurred in the 1930s and 40s, led by pioneering Big Bend researcher J. Charles Kelley. Kelley determined La Junta’s history had three phases.
The first – the La Junta Phase – spanned 1200 to 1450 CE. From this period, Kelley found ceramics made by the Jornada Mogollon culture near present-day El Paso. Kelley concluded La Junta began as a colony of Jornada migrants.
La Juntans were clearly connected with the Jornada. But, Smith said, there’s strong evidence La Junta was established by deeply rooted Big Bend people, who embraced farming to feed a growing population. One sign are burial practices: La Junta burials are identical to those of older Big Bend hunter-gatherers.
“And the way they're treating their dead shows continuity of place in La Junta,” Smith said, “rather than someone coming down and saying, ‘We're doing this thing now.’”
Around 1450, amidst acute drought, the Jornada and other Southwestern societies collapsed. A new period – the Concepcion Phase – arrived at La Junta, as villagers began creating their own ceramics.
In 1684, the Spanish built a mission at La Junta, and the Conchos Phase began. La Juntans maintained their traditional village life – but incorporated Spanish ceramics and livestock.
The La Juntans had long endured Spanish slave raids, periodically rising up in revolt. But in 1760, the Spanish built a presidio – a permanent military presence. After half a millennium, the Indigenous villages were abandoned.
“And within a year of that Presidio being built, the villagers, they said, ‘We're done – we're out,’” Smith said. “There was already displeasure, you might say. The presidio was kind of the last straw.”
To test and refine this narrative, Smith has analyzed materials gathered at Big Bend Ranch State Park. He’s done radiocarbon dating on artifacts just discovered near the Rio Grande by park archeologist Tim Gibbs. And he’s dated material gathered three decades ago at Cuevas Amarillas, well away from the river.
Smith has found that, though they lacked radiocarbon dating and other contemporary techniques, Kelley and his colleagues largely got it right.
Yet there are still big gaps in the La Junta story. Most La Junta sites are south of the Rio Grande in Mexico; most have never been studied. And there’s an overarching question: How did La Junta endure for centuries after the region’s other farming cultures collapsed?
There’s still much to learn about this rich chapter in borderlands history.
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