The name Mogollon, pronounced "mug-ee-yan, comes from the Mogollon Mountains, which were named after Don Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón, Spanish Governor of New Spain in New Mexico from 1712 to 1715 CE.

This culture flourished in southern New Mexico, eastern Arizona, northern Sonora and Chihuahua and western Texas, until the Spanish arrived in the 1500s.

The Mogollon culture spans much the same period as the Hohokam, from 100 to 1450 CE, or possibly beginning a short time after the Hohokam. The culture is divided into three periods, Early Pithouse (100-550 CE), Late Pithouse (550-1000 CE) and Mogollon Pueblo (1000-1450 CE).

The Mogollon culture covers a very large area, as large as the Anasazi to the north. However, unlike their northern neighbors, most of their ruins apparently did not survive the tests of time and weather. The reason for the ruins not to have survived, methinks, could have been the style of their architecture, or could have been that most structures did not have overhanging cliffs, or could have been that the materials used were inferior. Whatever the reason, I have found that this most populous and most widespread of cultures, has the least number of viewable ruins.

The Mogollon culture has a uniqueness from other near by cultures; differences included brown-paste, coil-and-scrape pottery, deeply excavated semi-subterranean pithouses and different ceremonial architecture. Today, the distinctiveness of the Mogollon pottery manufacture, architectural construction, ground-stone tool design, habits and customs of residence location, and mortuary treatment is generally recognized by archaeologist.

There trading neighbors include the Anasazi to the north, the Sinagua to the northwest, the Hohokam to the west, the Trincheras to the southwest. To the east is Texas and it′s inhabitants, the Coahuiltecan Indians.

This gallery divides the culture by location, those in the West (Arizona), the East (New Mexico) and the South (Chihuahua, Mexico).