outlines of zuni Creation Myths 4

outlines of zuni Creation Myths 4

The kivas, or assembly rooms of the round villages, were placed

generally in front of the houses facing the courts, as of old they had

been built in the mouths of the caverns, also in front of the houses

facing the canyons. Moreover, they were, although no longer in the

way, wholly or in part subterranean, that is, sunk to the level of the

court or plaza, as in the cliff towns they had been built (except where

crowding rendered it necessary to make them two-storied, as in some

cases) up the front slopes only to the height of the general cave floor

or of the lowermost house foundations.

 

Finally, there were no doorways in the lower stories of the rounded

villages, the roofs of which were reached by ladders; but in the upper

stories there were passages, some of which, although here no longer so

needfully small, were still economically fashioned as of old--wide at

the top, narrow at the base, like the T-shape granary avenues of the

cliff ruins.

 

The closeness of correspondence of all these features in the round

ruins to those in the cliff ruins (features which in the round ruins

appear less in place than in at least the older cliff ruins) would seem

to justify my conclusion, earlier stated, that the round towns were

simply outgrowths of the cliff villages, transplanted, as it were, into

the plains; for all of these features, as they occur in the old cliff

ruins, can, with but a single exception (that of the circular form of

the kivas or assembly chambers, which, as will presently be shown, were

survivals of a yet older phase of building), be accounted for as having

originated from necessity, whereas in the round ruins they could not

have originated even as possible expedients, since they were unsuitable

save by having become customary through long usage.

 

I have reasserted this fact because the theory that all cliff dwellings

were but outlying places of refuge or the hunting and farming stations

of larger pueblos in their neighborhood, strongly fortified by position

in order that the small parties occupying them now and then for

longer or shorter seasons might find safe retreat in them, has been

advanced quite successfully. As this theory is not unlikely to gain a

considerable hearing, it is necessary to demonstrate even more fully

the fact that at least the round towns did not give their structural

characteristics to such of the northern cliff ruins as resembled them

in plan, and that therefore the latter are to be regarded as actual

cliff-dweller remains. In the southern portions of New Mexico and

Arizona, as on the upper Salado and in canyons of the Sierra Madre,

still farther south, all the cliff dwellings and villages were built

without reference to the curved forms of the caverns in which they

occurred.[2] That is, they rigidly retained the rectangular pueblo form

of arrangement characteristic of the larger ruins in the valleys and

plains around them. Hence for this and for other reasons they may be

regarded as pueblos transferred to the cliffs, such outposts of the

larger pueblos of the plains as it is claimed all cliff dwellings were.

So, also, as hitherto intimated, many of the later cliff dwellings,

even of the north, have rectangular pueblo additions below them in

the canyons or above them on the mesas, and some of the village

ruins in the cave shelters themselves are almost faithful miniature

reproductions in general plan of the large pueblos of the plains near

at hand; but in the one case the pueblo additions above and below were

comparatively modern, and indicate either that the cliff dwellings they

are adjacent to continued to be occupied down to the time of later

true pueblo building, or that they were reoccupied from comparatively

modern pueblos and that all additions made were constructed according

to customary later forms of building. In the other case, that of the

rectangular structures in semicircular cave shelters, either a return

to cliff dwelling from pueblo dwelling is indicated, or, as with the

southern cliff villages, these also were outposts of comparatively

modern kinds of pueblos occurring in the neighborhood. Such, for

example, was the case with many of the cliff dwellings of the Tsegi or

Canyon de Chelly, some of which continued to be occupied long after the

more easterly towns of the San Juan were abandoned, and others of which

were reoccupied, probably by Tusayan Indians, in comparatively recent

time.

 

[2] See Bandelier, Final Report of Investigations among the

Indians of the Southwestern United States, etc., Part II,

pp. 425-428.

 

The occurrence of sepulchers in or near almost all the San Juan cliff

ruins would alone indicate that they were central and permanent homes

of the people who built and occupied them. The surviving Pueblo

Indians, so far as I am aware, never bury in or near their outlying

towns. Invariably the dead are taken to the central pueblo home of the

tribe for sepulture, as there only may they become tribal fetiches in

the manner I have heretofore indicated, and be properly renounced by

the clans of kin at their place of birth and rearing. If, then, all

the cliff towns were merely outlying strongholds, no interments of the

original inhabitants would be found in them save those of children

perchance born and reared in them. In fact, this is precisely the case

with some of the towns in question, those above described as manifestly

settlements from later true pueblos.

 

Another feature of the older cliff dwellings is still more significant

in this connection--the presence of the kiva; for the kiva or sacred

assembly room was never, for mythic and sociologic reasons, built

in temporary or outlying settlements. The mere council chamber was

sometimes present in these, but the true kiva never, so long as they

remained resorts of more central pueblo towns, for each kiva of such a

town located a division of the tribe as pertaining to one or another of

the quarters or mythic divisions. Hence, as might be expected, in the

more southerly cliff dwellings belonging to more recent pueblos no kiva

is ever found.

 

The evidence furnished by the kivas is significant in other ways,

for in connection with the above theory the claim has also been

advanced that the cliff villages were occupied for only brief periods

at best; that they do not, as assumed by me, represent a phase--so

much as an incident--in the development of a people. Aside from the

linguistic, sociologic, and other evidence I have to offer later on

that of not only these kivas, but also of certain other features

of the ruins themselves, is decidedly indicative of both long and

continuous occupancy; and an examination of this evidence helps to

an understanding of the culture growth of the early cliff dwellers

as being not that of Pueblos at first, but that of Pueblo ancestry,

Pueblos developing.

 

Occurring in the midst of the greater groups of northern cliff

dwellings, no less than somewhat more scatteringly and widely

distributed to at least as far south as the middle of Arizona, are

remains of cave dwellings of an older type. They are usually lower down

in the cliffs, although they once occurred also in the larger and more

accessible of the caverns now occupied by later cliff-house remains,

underneath or amid which remains they may still in places be traced.

These rude and very ancient cave dwellings mark the beginnings of the

cliff occupancy. In all essentials they correspond to the modern cave

dwellings of the Sierra Madre in Sonora, Mexico, so admirably described

by my friend, Dr. Carl Lumholtz, as built and still lived in by the

Tarahumári and Tepehuani Indians, who survive either in the state of

these first cliff dwellers of the north, or, as is more probable, have

naturally and independently resorted to a similar mode of life through

stress of similar circumstances.

 

Like the Tarahumári, these ancient people of the north at first

resorted to the caves during only portions of the year--during the

inclement season after each harvest, as well as in times of great

danger. At other times, and during the hunting, planting, and

seed-gathering seasons particularly, they dwelt, as do the Tarahumári,

in rancherias, the distinctive remains of which lie scattered near and

far on the plateaus and plains or in the wide valleys. But the caves

were their central abodes, and the rancherias, frequently shifted, were

simply outlying stations such as are the farming hamlets of the modern

pueblos.

 

The earliest of these dwellings in the caves were at first simple huts

disposed separately along the rear walls of these recesses in the

cliffs. They usually had foundation walls, approximately circular in

plan, of dry-laid stones, upon which rested upper converging courses of

cross-laid logs and sticks, hexagonal and pen-like covers surmounted,

as were the rancherias of the open plains, by more or less high-pitched

roofs of thatch--here in the shelters added rather for protection from

cold than from storms of rain and snow.

 

But in course of time, as the people dwelling, when needful, in

these secure retreats increased in numbers, and available caves

became filled, the huts, especially in the more suitable shelters,

were crowded together in each, until no longer built separately, but

in irregularly continuous rows or groups at the rear, each divided

from others by simple, generally straight, partitions, as are the

dwelling divisions of the Tarahumári today. But unlike the latter,

these hut-like rooms of the northern cave-dwellers were still rounded

outwardly, that is, each hut (where not contiguous to or set in the

midst of others, as was the case with those along the front), retained

its circular form. The partitions and foundation walls were still

built low, and still surmounted by converging cross-laid upper courses

of logs or saplings and roofs of thatch. As with the Tarahumári, so

with these earliest cliff dwellers of the north; their granaries

were far more perfectly constructed than their own abiding places.

To adequately protect their store or provision from seed-devouring

animals, no less than from the elements, it became necessary to place

it in dry crannies or pockets of the cliffs near at hand, preferably in

recesses as far back in their caves as possible, and also to seal it up

in these natural receptacles. At first (as may be seen in connection

with the caves of Las Tusas, Arizona, containing some of the oldest and

rudest separate hut remains I have yet examined) the mouths of these

receptacles were walled up with dry-laid stones, carefully chinked,

and plastered inside with mud, precisely as were the granary pockets

of the Havasupai Indians seen by me in 1881. Later, while still the

houses continued to be mere low-walled and partitioned sheds or huts

of dry masonry, these granaries came to be quite well constructed, of

mud-laid walls, and were enlarged, as stores increased with increase

of settlement and tillage, until they had to be built outward from the

niches like good sized, slightly tapering bins, protruding somewhat

from the cave walls, and finally forming, as do the granaries of the

Tarahumári today, miniature prototypes of the perfected single cliff

house of a far later day.

 

In times of great danger small children were not infrequently bestowed

for safe-keeping in the larger of these little granary rooms in the

deepest recesses at the rear of the earliest cave villages, as the

finding of their remains without burial token in such situation has

attested; and thus the folk tales which modern Pueblos tell of children

left in the granary rooms and surviving the destruction or flight

of their elders by subsisting on the scant store remaining therein

(later to emerge--so the stories run--as great warrior-magicians and

deliver their captive elders), are not wholly without foundation in

the actual past of their ancestry. It was thus that these first cliff

dwellers learned to build walls of stone with mud mortar, and thus, as

their numbers increased (through immunity from destruction which, ever

better, these cliff holds afforded), the women, who from the beginning

had built and owned the granaries, learned also to build contiguously

to them, in the depths of the caverns, other granary-like cells

somewhat larger, not as places of abode, at first, but as retreats for

themselves and their children.

 

It is not needful to trace farther the development of the cliff village

proper into a home for the women and children, which first led to the

tucking of storerooms far back in the midst of the houses; nor is it

necessary to seek outside of such simple beginnings the causes which

first led to the construction of the kivas, always by the men for

themselves, and nearly always out in front of the house cells, which

led to the retention for ages of the circular form in these kivas and

to the survival in them for a long time (as chambers of council and

mystery, where the souls of the ancients of men communed in these

houses of old with the souls of their children's grandchildren) of

the cross-laid upper courses of logs and even the roofings of thatch.

Indeed, it is only in some way like this, as survival through slow

evolution of archaic structures for worship, that the persistence

of all these strange features--the retention for use of the men,

the position in front of the houses, the converging hexagonal log

wall caps, the unplastered roofing of thatch--until long after the

building of houses for everyday use by the women, with walls continuous

from floor to ceiling, with flat and mud-plastered roofs and smooth

finishing inside and out, manifest themselves.

 

Of equal significance with this persistency of survival in the kiva,

as to both structural type and function, of the earliest cave-dwelling

hut-rooms through successively higher stages in the development of

cliff architecture, is the trace of its growth ever outward; for in

nearly or quite all of the largest cliff ruins, while as a rule the

kivas occur, as stated, along the fronts of the houses--that is,

farthest out toward the mouths of the caverns--some are found quite far

back in the midst of the houses. But in every instance of this kind

which I have examined these kivas farthest back within the cell cluster

proper are not only the oldest, but in other ways plainly mark the

line of the original boundary or frontage of the entire village. And

in some of the largest of these ruins this frontage line has thus been

extended; that is, the houses have grown outward around and past the

kivas first built in front of them, and then, to accommodate increased

assemblies, successively built in front of them and in greater numbers,

not once or twice, but in some cases as many as three, four, and in one

instance five times.

 

All this makes it plain, I think, that the cave and cliff dweller mode

of life was a phase, not an incident merely, in the development of a

people, and that this same people in general occupied these same caves

continuously or successively for generations--how long it is needless

here to ask, but long enough to work up adaptively, and hence by very

slow degrees, each one of the little natural hints they received from

the circumstances and necessities of their situation in the caves

and cliffs into structural and other contrivances, so ingenious and

suitable and so far-fetched, apparently, so long used, too, as to give

rise to permanent usages, customs, and sociologic institutions, that

it has been well-nigh impossible to trace them to such original simple

beginnings as have been pointed out in the case of a few of them.

 

The art remains of both the earliest cave dwellers and of the cliff

dwellers exhibit a like continuity of adaptive development; for even

where uses of implements, etc., changed with changing conditions, they

still show survivals of their original, diverse uses, thus revealing

the antecedent condition to which they were adapted.

 

Moreover, this line of development was, as with the structural features

already reviewed, unbroken from first to last--from cave to cliff, and

from cliff to round-town conditions of life; for the art remains of

the round ruins, of which I recovered large numbers when conducting

the excavations of the Hemenway expedition in ruins east of Zuñi, are

with scarcely an exception identical, in type at least, with those of

the cliff ruins, although they are more highly developed, especially

the potteries, as naturally they came to be under the less restricted,

more favorable conditions of life in the open plains. Everything, in

fact, to be learned of the round-ruin people points quite unmistakably

to their descent in a twofold sense from the cliff-dwelling people;

and it remains necessary, therefore, only to account for their change

of habitat and to set forth their supposed relationship finally to the

modern Zuñi pueblos.

 

In earlier writings, especially in a "Study of Pueblo Pottery,"[3]

where the linguistic evidence of the derivation of the Zuñis from

cliff-dwelling peoples is to some extent discussed, I have suggested

that the prime cause of the abandonment of the cliffs by their ancestry

was most probably increase of population to beyond the limits of

available building area, and consequent overcrowding in the cliffs; but

later researches have convinced me that, although this was no doubt

a potent factor in the case and ultimately, in connection with the

obvious advantages of life in more accessible dwelling places, led by

slow degrees, as the numbers and strength of the cliff villages made it

possible, to the building of contiguous pueblos both above their cliffs

on the mesas and below them in the valleys, still it was by no means

the only or the first cause of removal from these secure strongholds.

Nor is it to be inferred from the evidence at hand that the cliff

dwellers were ever driven forth from their almost inaccessible towns,

either by stress of warfare or by lack of the means of subsistence, as

has been so often supposed. On the contrary, it is certain that long

after the earliest descents into the plains had been ventured, the

cliffs continued to be occupied, at first and for a very long period as

the permanent homes of remnant tribes, and later as winter resorts and

places of refuge in times of danger for these latter tribes, as well

as, perhaps, for their kinsfolk of the plains.

 

[3] Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1882-83.

 

It is by this supposition only that the comparatively modern form

of the square and terraced pueblos built contiguously to the latest

abandoned of the cliff towns may be explained. For when the cliff

dwellers had become numerous enough to be able to maintain themselves

to some extent out on the open plains, it has been seen that they did

not consider their villages safe and convenient or quite right unless

builded strictly, in both general form and the relative arrangement of

parts, as had been for many generations their towns in the cliffs--did

not, it is reasonable to suppose, know at once how to build villages of

any other form. Thus we may confidently regard these round towns as the

earliest built by the cliff dwellers after they first left the cliffs.

 

The direction in which these cavoid or cliff-form or rounded village

ruins may be farthest and most abundantly traced, is, as has been said

before, to the southward into and through the land of Zuñi as far as

the cliffless valleys bordering the Rito Quemado region in southerly

central New Mexico, wherein lies the inexhaustible Lake of Salt, which

the early Spanish chronicles mention as the possession and source of

supply of the "salt in kernels" of the Zuñi-Cibolans.

 

Not only did a trail (used for such long ages that I have found it

brokenly traceable for hundreds of miles) lead down from the cliff-town

country to this broad valley of the Lake of Salt, but also there have

been found in nearly all the cliff dwellings of the Mancos and San Juan

section, whence this trail descends, salt in the characteristic kernels

and colors found in this same source of the Zuñi supply.

 

This salt, as occurring in the cliff ruins, is commonly discovered

wrapped in receptacles of corn husk, neatly tied into a trough-like

form or pouch by bands of corn-leaf or yucca fiber. These pouches are

precisely like the "wraps of the ancients," or packs of corn husk in

which the sacred salt is ceremoniously brought home in advance of the

cargoes of common salt by the Zuñi priests on each occasion of their

annual, and especially of their greater quadrennial, pilgrimages (in

June, after the planting) to the Lake of Salt. And it is not difficult

to believe that both the packs and the pilgrimages--which latter offer

many suggestive features not to be considered here--are survivals of

the time when the remoter cliff-dwelling ancestry of the Zuñi Corn

tribes ventured once in a period of years to go forth, in parties large

enough for mutual protection, to the far-off source of their supply of

salt.

 

Except this view be taken it is difficult to conceive why the "time

after planting" should have become so established by the Zuñis (who are

but two days' foot-journey from the lake, and visit its neighborhood at

other periods of the year on hunting and other excursions) as the only

period for the taking of the salt--to take which, indeed, by them or

others at any other season, is held to be dire sacrilege.

 

But to the cliff dwellers and their first descendants of the farther

north this period "after the planting" was the only available one of

the year; for the journey along their trail of salt must have consumed

many days, and been so fraught with danger as to have drawn away a

goodly portion of the warrior population who could ill be spared at a

later time in the season when the ripening and garnering of the harvest

drew back upon the cliff-towns people the bands of predatory savages

who annually pillaged their outlying fields, and in terror of whom they

for so long a time clung to their refuge in the cliffs.

 

Additional considerations lead further to the inference not only that

the Zuñis inherit their pilgrimages for the salt and the commemorative

and other ceremonials which have developed around them directly from

the cliff-dweller branch of their ancestry, but also that these latter

were led down from the cliffs to build and dwell in their round towns

along the trail of salt chiefly, if not wholly, by the desire to at

once shorten and render less dangerous their communal expeditions to

the Lake of Salt and to secure more exclusive possession thereof.

 

These two objects were rendered equally and the more desirable by the

circumstance, strongly indicated by both the salt remains themselves

and by usages surviving among the present Zuñis, that in course of time

an extensive trade in salt of this particular variety grew up between

the cliff dwellers and more northern and western tribes. When found by

the Spaniards the Zuñi-Cibolans were still carrying on an extensive

trade in this salt, which for practical as well as assumed mythic

reasons they permitted no others to gather, and which they guarded so

jealously that their wars with the Keresan and other tribes to the

south-southeastward of their country were caused--as many of their

later wars with the Navajo have been caused--by slight encroachments on

the exclusive right to the products of the lake to which the Zuñis laid

claim.

 

The salt of this lake is superior to any other found in the southwest,

not excepting that of the Manzano salinas, east of the Rio Grande,

which nevertheless was as strenuously fought for and guarded by the

Tanoan tribes settled around these salinas, and had in like manner,

indeed, drawn their ancestry down from earlier cavate homes in the

northern mountains. Hence it was preferred (as it still is by both

Indian and white population of New Mexico and Arizona) to all other

kinds, and commanded such price that in the earlier cliff-packs I have

found it adulterated with other kinds from the nearer salt marshes

which occur in southern Utah and southwestern Colorado. That the

adulteration of the lake salt with the slightly alkaline and bitter

salt of the neighboring marshes was thus practiced with a view to

eking out the trade supply is conclusively shown, I think, by the

presence in the same cliff homes from which the adulterated specimens

were obtained, of abundant specimens of the unadulterated salt, and

this as conclusively shows not only that the cliff dwellers traded in

this salt, as do their modern Zuñi representatives, but also that it

was then, as now, more highly valued than other kinds of salt in the

southwest.

 

The influence on the movements of whole tribes of people which it is

here assumed such a source of favorite salt supply as this exerted

over the early cliff dwellers, does not stand alone in the history of

American tribes. It already has been intimated that the Tanoans so

far prized their comparatively inferior source of salt supply in the

salinas of the Manzano as to have been induced to settle there and surround them with a veritable cordon of their pueblos.