What's now West Texas was home to nomadic societies for more than 10,000 years. But, about 1,500 years ago, some Chihuahuan Desert peoples began to adopt a different way of life. They embraced agriculture – farming corn, beans and squash using rainfall and mountain runoff. They established settled communities, of pithouse villages and, later, adobe pueblos. Trade connections brought goods, and ideas, from far corners of the Southwest, and from deep in Mexico.

Archeologists call this distinctive culture the Jornada Mogollon. Its civilization stretched from the Guadalupe Mountains to present-day Las Cruces and northern Chihuahua. Around 1450, its communities were abandoned.

But its leg...