Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2023
The Mystery of 500 Stone Towers Found in the Gallina Canyon, New Mexico
by: Dr. Greg Little
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallina#/media/File:Gallina_Towers_Reconstructed_Tower_Gallina_Culture.jpg
In 1933 a gold prospector was searching the remote area around the Gallina River in New Mexico when he came upon a stone tower. He soon found other towers here, both rectangular and rounded, reaching 25 to 30 feet in height. He found pottery strewn around the sites and collected some pieces and took them to Santa Fe hoping to sell them. There, the pottery was taken from him and taken to a museum because he had removed the pieces from state-owned land. However, the museum staff were unaware of any ruins in that area of New Mexico and knew of no site there that had stone towers.
The museum arranged an expedition to the area that year with New Mexico archaeologist Frank Hibben and a crew of students eventually pulling a wagon of supplies and equipment to the remote canyon. They moved through a narrow passage into Gallina Canyon revealing a 200-300 yard wide, mile long canyon. On the upper edges of the steep canyon wall they saw the first tower. Scanning the pinnacles along the top of the wall, they saw more and more towers, often arranged into groups. Over the next few years they eventually found more than 500 towers in the canyon area, after the search area was expanded to about a 35-mile swath.
The first towers they examined were the first ones they spotted. They were rectangular structures 25-30-feet high. They were well-made structures constructed with sandstone blocks with adobe mortar. There were no external ladders or doorways, but on the inside of the towers they found ladders and the remains of collapsed and burned roofs. The interior walls were brightly painted with illustrations of plants, symbols, animals, and what they interpreted as "flags." At the bottom strewn around on stone slab floors they found unbroken pottery, leather articles, clothing, feathers, benches, masks, horns and more. In the very first tower they explored, they were stunned when they found the occupants at the bottom. Hibben wrote, "What fairly made us gasp as we carefully uncovered them was the occupants of the tower itself. They were still here, and their story was with them. In all, scattered about the tower in various positions and attitudes, were sixteen people!"
Examination revealed that they had been killed. The wood roof had been set on fire and collapsed, and the bodies had been mummified in near perfect condition. A woman at the bottom had been crushed by falling stones but she had carried 16 arrows with her and had the remains of a bow in her hand. Two men were lying in the center, one with three bows in his hand and the other holding 27 arrows. Another man was found with an axe in his skull. Another woman had an arrow in her shoulder. They also found a small boy who apparently died after falling from the roof area.
Hibben cleared 17 towers during their explorations and all showed the same result. All of the towers had been attacked and burned and all of them had the remains of the defenders in them. Analysis of the wood showed that the towers were probably made around AD 1143-1245 and other analyses on the pottery and artifacts showed more unexpected results. The pottery was made and designed in styles found in the Mississippi River Valley. The corn they had grown at Gallina was found only in Iowa and the Missouri River Valley. Hibben concluded that around the year 1000 these people, now known as the Gallina People, migrated here from the Mississippi River Valley for unknown reasons. They chose a very remote and nearly inaccessible place to live and they flourished for a period. Then, for unknown reasons they were attached and killed off by the Puebloan People who had inhabited the area long before these intruders came. The evidence that it was the Puebloans came from the style of arrow points found in the remains of the bodies.
References: Hibben (1944) The Mystery of the Stone Towers, "Saturday Evening Post." Hibben (1949) "American Antiquity."
