The earliest professional excavations of Mimbres sites were completed in the 1920s and 1930s. Through decades of research, archaeologists pieced together continuity and change within Mimbres culture.

They learned that people who made the Classic Mimbres black-on-white-pottery:

lived in large villages

irrigated large fields where they grew corn, beans, squash, and gourds

traded with the Hohokam in Arizona

left their villages around AD 1150

For over sixty-plus years archaeologists have looked for evidence that answered:

What happened to the Mimbres people?

Where did they go when they left their large villages?

Theft has been the biggest obstacle to answering these questions.
Thieves who illegally dig up and sell Mimbres pottery
destroy evidence of past lifeways.