The Archaic tradition

The invention of metates and other stone instruments to grind seeds marks the end of the Paleoindian tradition, and the beginning of the Arcaic period. This later period will vary, in this region, between around 7,000 B.C. and 300 B.C., as we can see in the diagram.

During this later period, the small bands of people didn´t have to wander anymore, following the hunt, as they did previously, so they turned into semi nomads.

While all of this happened in this region, in today´s Mexican central plateau the already sedentary bands living there, also through unaccountable generations of selecting them, had achieved the domestication and improved some plants on which they fed.

This is how corn was created, probably derived from teosinte, a native graminea from the semi arid and semi tropical regions of Mexico. At the left we can see how this plant evolved. And even though corn was the most important contribution to human diet from Central Mexico, it certainly wasn´t the only one.

In central Mexico were created also, between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, chili, pumpkins, avocados and beans, among other plants.

The Arcaic Tradition in the Nogales Region

The dissemination of these plants, that is of agriculture towards other regions of America, took place in different times. The arrival of agriculture to Northwestern Mexico and Southwestern US, has been dated some 3,000 years ago, although we don´t know the mechanism through which it arrived.

However, the fact that during the following 800 years after it´s arrival, agriculture accompanied hunting and food collection as another one way of subsistence, or in other words, the natives didn´t use agriculture as a way to improve the productivity of the land but as a supplement to their established diets, makes us think that it wasn´t an introduction through colonization or migration, because in that case, other cultural elements also would have been imported, producing more social complexity. And this didn´t happen.

Agriculture was followed by the introduction of ceramics much later, around 200 AC, also as an technological introduction from central Mexico.

In any case, the better supply of food produced by agriculture, brought with it an increase of population, as the primitive inhabitants didn´t have to depend just on hunting and collecting to feed themselves, and grow numericallly.

This is how agriculture turned gradually into a more prominent role in the lives of the native population.