The Mimbres people of southwestern New Mexico belonged to a branch of prehistoric Southwestern culture that we call the Mogollon. From about 200 to 1000, they lived in small pithouse villages that rarely included more than ten or fifteen households. Later, their settlements comprised suites of contiguous rooms that were built around plazas and numbered at most two or three hundred people. As subsistence farmers, they cultivated the river valleys that traversed the arid Sonoran desert and also …