How did the people of the Lower Pecos sustain their culture over such a long period of time with so few people?

As one of my old professors was fond of saying, we have to look at this problem from two perspectives (or three or four, however many you had failed to consider). First, let's think about culture as a two-tiered system - first we have the broad based culture of hunters and gatherers, in this case in arid lands, where economy, environment, technology, low population density, and usually some sort of shamanistic religion have

conspired to create a system that is worldwide. These societies respond quickly to environmental changes, adapting their economy and technology and even their social structure to cope with the exigencies of everyday life, but the base remains relatively stable. One of the prime movers in such cultures is population density - when it increases, means of responding to the "information overload" have to be found (as well as to the physical stress of providing for more people in areas with a limited carrying capacity). This response can take a number of paths - one was the development of agriculture and the total revamping of almost every aspect of life - we call these folks evolutionary successes even though their health deteriorated, they became slaves of the calendar and climate; and their work load increased dramatically. Another response, and this is the one we see in the Lower Pecos, is the elaboration of ritual, resulting in such apparently uneconomical activities as painting on shelter walls. So to return to the question, as long as the people of the Lower Pecos remained hunters and gatherers they were part of the same over-arching complex adaptive mechanism we call culture - of course there were changes in the system - for example, the adoption of the bow and arrow - but in general arid lands hunter-gatherers (and for that matter hunters and gatherers in general) have maintained a remarkable stability until forced to do otherwise. However, on our second tier, which one might call ethnicity, there is considerable variability which we tend to overlook when we measure culture by physical traits such as basketry or lithic technology, food stuffs, even transformations in culture took place in the Lower Pecos several times during its long prehistory and this variability is most apparent in the art. There can be little doubt that new people with a different economy (still hunting and gathering but this time following the migratory bison herds), social organization, and rock art came into the Lower Pecos about 3000 - 2600 years ago. They left a significant imprint on the archeology of the region during a period of climatic clemency that was wetter and probably cooler than that experienced by the people who made the Pecos River style. When they left, probably due to a resumption of aridity, their place was taken by people better equipped to deal with a desert environment but these folks did not, as far as we can tell, revert to painting monumental art. Their rituals included more elaborate grave goods and more elaborate matting and basketry but none of the painting styles can be specifically attributed to them (this may change as dating progresses). Again, about 1000 years ago we see massive changes in Lower Pecos culture - technology (bow and arrow), burial practices (cairns as opposed to caves), settlement patterns (more open camps), art styles (Red Monochrome and perhaps Bold Line). These folks were apparently intrusive from the Big Bend and Mexico - what about the people that were already there? Don't know - perhaps they were allies, perhaps enemies.

Of course, all this came to a crashing end with the advent of the Plains Indians who took over and hastened the demise of the native people, either driving them out, killing them, absorbing them - the breakdown of culture is usually accompanied by high death and low birth rates added to which the Spanish managed to introduce European diseases, slavery, and other traits of equally negative affect, such as domestic livestock. So the answer to this question is - the broad based culture attributable to arid lands hunter-gatherers is a stable adaptation that developed to insure their viability. It has to survive in order for the people to survive. Within that almost universal sphere, there is considerable variability - people came and went in the Lower Pecos region, each bringing their own suite of cultural traits so it is perhaps a mistake to think of them in generic terms. They were certainly as different from each other as the Kiowas and Apaches were from the Comanches - their sworn enemies - but all three of those named tribes were members of the overarching Plains horse culture. Unfortunately, in prehistory, these differences are blurred by time and by the vagaries of the archeological record so we tend to see the stability mirrored in the material culture and overlook the variability - in the Lower Pecos we are extremely fortunate to have dramatically different art styles that signal changes in ethnicity. For those of you interested in some of the mechanics of change, I have two papers that I wrote to directly confront the notion of an unchanging Archaic continuum - one is in the 1989 ARARA volume from the International Congress in San Antonio "Speculations on the Age and Origin of the Pecos River Style" and one was published in the Journal of Field Archaeology "Rock Art and Hunter-gatherer Archaeology: A Case Study from SW Texas and Northern Mexico" 1990.