It seemed to me in making a plan for archeological field work in 1895,
that the prehistoric cliff houses, cave dwellings, and ruined pueblos
of Arizona afforded valuable opportunities for research, and past
experience induced me to turn my steps more especially to the northern
and northeastern parts of the territory.[1] The ruins of ancient
habitations in these regions had been partially, and, I believe,
unsatisfactorily explored, especially those in a limited area called
Tusayan, now inhabited by the Moki or Hopi Indians. These agricultural
people claim to be descendants of those who once lived in the now
deserted villages of that province.
I had some knowledge of the ethnology of the Hopi, derived from
several summers' field work among them, and I believed this
information could be successfully utilized in an attempt to solve
certain archeological questions which presented themselves.[2] I
desired, among other things, to obtain new information on the former
extension, in one direction, of the ancestral abodes of certain clans
of the sedentary people of Tusayan which are now limited to six
pueblos in the northeastern part of the territory. In carrying out
this general plan I made an examination of cliff dwellings and other
ruins in Verde valley, and undertook an exploration of two old pueblos
near the Hopi villages. The reason which determined my choice of the
former as a field for investigation was a wish to obtain archeological
data bearing on certain Tusayan traditions. It is claimed by the
traditionists of Walpi, especially those of the Patki[3] or
Water-house phratry, that their ancestors came from a land far to the
south of Tusayan, to which they give the name Palatkwabi. The
situation of this mythic place is a matter of considerable conjecture,
but it was thought that an archeological examination of the country at
or near the headwaters of the Rio Verde and its tributaries might shed
light on this tradition.
It is not claimed, however, that all the ancestors of the Tusayan
people migrated from the south, nor do I believe that those who came
from that direction necessarily passed through Verde valley. Some, no
doubt, came from Tonto Basin, but I believe it can be shown that a
continuous line of ruins, similar in details of architecture, extend
along this river from its junction with Salt river to well-established
prehistoric dwelling places of the Hopi people. Similar lines may
likewise be traced along other northern tributaries of the Salt or the
Gila, which may be found to indicate early migration stages.
The ruins of Verde valley were discovered in 1854 by Antoine Leroux, a
celebrated guide and trapper of his time, and were thus described by
Whipple, Ewbank, and Turner in the following year:
The river banks were covered with ruins of stone houses and
regular fortifications; which, he [Leroux] says, appeared to
have been the work of civilized men, but had not been
occupied for centuries. They were built upon the most
fertile tracts of the valley, where were signs of acequias
and of cultivation. The walls were of solid masonry, of
rectangular form, some twenty or thirty paces in length, and
yet remaining ten or fifteen feet in height. The buildings
were of two stories, with small apertures or loopholes for
defence when besieged.... In other respects, however, Leroux
says that they reminded him of the great pueblos of the
Moquinos.[4]
A fragment of folklore, which is widely distributed among both the
aboriginal peoples of Gila valley and the modern Tusayan Indians,
recounts how the latter were at one time in communication with the
people of the south, and traditions of both distinctly connect the
sedentary people of Tusayan with those who formerly inhabited the
great pueblos, now in ruins, dotting the plain in the delta between
Gila and Salt rivers. That archeology might give valuable information
on this question had long been my conviction, and was the main
influence which led me to the studies recorded in the following pages.
An examination of a map of Arizona will show that one of the pathways
or feasible routes of travel possible to have been used in any
connection between the pueblos of the Gila and those of northern
Arizona would naturally be along Rio Verde valley. Its tributaries
rise at the foot of San Francisco mountains, and the main river
empties into the Salt, traversing from north to south a comparatively
fertile valley, in the main advantageous for the subsistence of
semisedentary bands in their migrations. Here was a natural highway
leading from the Gila pueblos, now in ruins, to the former villages in
the north.
The study of the archeology of Verde valley had gone far enough to
show that the banks of the river were formerly the sites of many and
populous pueblos, while the neighboring mesas from one end to another
are riddled with cavate dwellings or crowned with stone buildings.
Northward from that famous crater-like depression in the Verde region,
the so-called Montezuma Well on Beaver creek, one of the affluents of
the Rio Verde, little archeological exploration had been attempted.
There was, in other words, a break in the almost continuous series of
ruins from Tusayan as far south as the Gila. Ruined towns had been
reported as existing not far southward from San Francisco
mountains,[5] and from there by easy stages the abodes of a former
race had been detected at intervals all the way to the Tusayan
pueblos. At either end the chain of ruins between the Tusayan towns
and the Gila ruins was unbroken, but middle links were wanting. All
conditions imply former habitations in this untrodden hiatus, the
region between the Verde and the Tusayan series, ending near the
present town of Flagstaff, Arizona; but southward from that town the
country was broken and impassable, a land where the foot of the
archeologist had not trodden. Remains of human habitations had,
however, been reported by ranchmen, but these reports were vague and
unsatisfactory. So far as they went they confirmed my suspicions, and
there were other significant facts looking the same way. The color of
the red cliffs fulfilled the Tusayan tradition of Palatkwabi, or their
former home in the far south. Led by all these considerations, before
I took to the field I had long been convinced that this must have been
one of the homes of certain Hopi clans, and when the occasion
presented itself I determined to follow the northward extension of the
ancient people of the Verde into these rugged rocks. By my discoveries
in this region of ruins indicative of dwellings of great size in
ancient times I have supplied the missing links in the chain of
ancient dwellings extending from the great towns of the Gila to the
ruins west of the modern Tusayan towns. If this line of ruins,
continuous from Gila valley to Tusayan and beyond, be taken in
connection with legends ascribing Casa Grande to the Hopi and those of
certain Tusayan clans which tell of the homes of their ancestors in
the south, a plausible explanation is offered for the many
similarities between two apparently widely different peoples, and the
theory of a kinship between southern and northern sedentary tribes of
Arizona does not seem as unlikely as it might otherwise appear.
The reader will notice that I accept without question the belief that
the so-called cliff dwellers were not a distinct people, but a
specially adaptive condition of life of a race whose place of
habitation was determined by its environment. We are considering a
people who sometimes built dwellings in caverns and sometimes in the
plains, but often in both places at the same epoch. Moreover, as long
ago pointed out by other students, the existing Pueblo Indians are
descendants of a people who at times lived in cliffs, and some of the
Tusayan clans have inhabited true cliff houses in the historic period.
By intermarriage with nomadic races and from other causes the
character of Pueblo consanguinity is no doubt somewhat different from
that of their ancient kin, but the character of the culture, as shown
by a comparison of cliff-house and modern objects, has not greatly
changed.
While recognizing the kinship of the Pueblos and the Cliff villagers,
this resemblance is not restricted to any one pueblo or group of
modern pueblos to the exclusion of others. Of all modern
differentiations of this ancient substratum of culture of which cliff
villages are one adaptive expression, the Tusayan Indians are the
nearest of all existing people of the Southwest[6] to the ancient
people of Arizona.
The more southerly ruins of Tusayan, which I have been able
satisfactorily to identify and to designate by a Hopi name, are those
called Homolobi, situated not far from Winslow, Arizona, near where
the railroad crosses the Little Colorado. These ruins are claimed by
the Hopi as the former residences of their ancestors, and were halting
places in the migration of certain clans from the south. They were
examined by Mr Cosmos Mindeleff, of the Bureau of American Ethnology,
in 1893,[7] but no report on them has yet been published.
While, however, the Homolobi group of ruins is the most southerly to
which I have been able to affix a Hopi name, others still more to the
southward are claimed by certain of their traditions.[8] The Hopi
likewise regard as homes of their ancestors certain habitations, now
in ruins, near San Francisco mountains. In a report on his exploration
of Zuñi and Little Colorado rivers in 1852, Captain L. Sitgreaves
called attention to several interesting ruins, one of which was not
far from the "cascades" of the latter river. After ascending the
plateau, which he found covered with volcanic detritus, he discovered
that "all the prominent points" were "occupied by the ruins of stone
houses, which were in some instances three stories in height. They are
evidently," he says, "the remains of a large town, as they occurred at
intervals for an extent of eight or nine miles, and the ground was
thickly strewn with fragments of pottery in all directions."
In 1884 a portion of Colonel James Stevenson's expedition, under F. D.
Bickford, examined the cliff houses in Walnut canyon, and in 1886
Major J. W. Powell and Colonel Stevenson found scattered ruins north
of San Francisco mountains having one, two, or three rooms, each
"built of basaltic cinders and blocks of lava." These explorers
likewise reported ruins of extensive dwellings in the same region
made of sandstone and limestone. At about 25 miles north of the
mountains mentioned they discovered a small volcanic cone of cinders
and basalt, which was formerly the site of a village or pueblo built
around a crater, and estimated that this little pueblo contained 60 or
70 rooms, with a plaza occupying one-third of an acre of surface.[9]
Twelve miles eastward from San Francisco mountains they found another
cinder cone resembling a dome, and on its southern slope, in a
coherent cinder mass, were many chambers, of which one hundred and
fifty are said to have been excavated. They mention the existence on
the summit of this cone of a plaza inclosed by a rude wall of volcanic
cinders, with a carefully leveled floor. The former inhabitants of
these rooms apparently lived in underground chambers hewn from the
volcanic formation. Eighteen miles farther eastward was another ruined
village built about the crater of a volcanic cone. Several villages
were discovered in this locality and many natural caves which had been
utilized as dwellings by inclosing them in front with walls of
volcanic rocks and cinders. These cavate rooms were arranged tier
above tier in a very irregular way.
At this place three distinct kinds of ruins were found--cliff
villages, cave dwellings, and pueblos. Eight miles southeastward from
Flagstaff, in Oak creek canyon, a cliff house of several hundred rooms
was discovered. It was concluded that all these ruins were abandoned
at a comparatively recent date, or not more than three or four
centuries ago, and the Havasupai Indians of Cataract canyon were
regarded as descendants of the former inhabitants of these villages.
The situation of some of these ruins and the published descriptions
would indicate that some of them were similar to those described and
figured by Sitgreaves,[10] to which reference has already been made.
In 1896 two amateur explorers, George Campbell and Everett Howell, of
Flagstaff, reported that they had found, about eighteen miles from
that place, several well-preserved cliff towns and a remarkable tunnel
excavation. The whole region in the immediate neighborhood of San
Francisco mountains appears, therefore, to have been populated in
ancient times by an agricultural people, and legends ascribe some of
these ruins to ancestors of the Hopi Indians.
There are several ruins due south of Tusayan which have not been
investigated, but which would furnish important contributions to a
study of Hopi migrations. Near Saint Johns, Arizona, likewise, there
are ruins of considerable size, possibly referable to the Cibolan
series; and south of Holbrook, which lies about due south of Walpi,
there are ruins, the pottery from which I have examined and found to
be of the black-and-white ware typical of the Cliff people. Perhaps,
however, no ruined pueblo presents more interesting problems than the
magnificent Pueblo Grande or Kintiel, about 20 miles north of Navaho
Springs. This large ruin, lying between the Cibolan and Tusayan
groups, has been referred to both of these provinces, and would, if
properly excavated, shed much light on the archeology of the two
provinces.[11] Kinnazinde lies not far from Kintiel.
The ruins reported from Tonto Basin, of which little is known, may
later be found to be connected with early migrations of those Hopi
clans which claim southern origin. From what I can judge by the
present appearance of ruins just north of the Mogollon mountains, in a
direct line between Tonto Basin and the present Tusayan towns, there
is nothing to show the age of these ruined villages, and it is quite
likely that they may have been inhabited in the middle of the
sixteenth century. While it is commonly agreed that the province of
"Totonteac," which figures extensively in certain early Spanish
narratives, was the same as Tusayan, the linguistic similarity of the
word to "tonto" has been suggested by others. In the troublesome years
between 1860 and 1870 the Hopi, decimated by disease and harried by
nomads, sent delegates to Prescott asking to be removed to Tonto
Basin, and it is not improbable that in making this reasonable request
they simply wished to return to a place which they associated with
their ancestors, who had been driven out by the Apache. Totonteac[12]
is ordinarily thought to be the same as Tusayan, but it may have
included some of the southern pueblos now in ruins west of Zuñi.
Having determined that the line of Verde ruins was continued into the
Red-rock country, it was desirable to see how the latter compared with
those nearer Tusayan. This necessitated reexamination of many ruins in
Verde valley, which was my aim during the most of June. I followed
this valley from the cavate dwellings near Squaw mountain past the
great ruin in the neighborhood of Old Camp Verde, the unique Montezuma
Well, to the base of the Red-rocks. Throughout this region I saw, as
had been expected, no change in the character of the ruins great
enough to indicate that they originally were inhabited by peoples
racially different. Stopped from further advance by a barrier of
rugged cliffs, I turned westward along their base until I found
similar ruins, which were named Palatki and Honanki. Having satisfied
myself that there was good evidence that the numbers of ancient
people were as great here as at any point in the Verde valley and that
their culture was similar, I continued the work with an examination of
the ruins north of the Red-rocks, where there is substantial evidence
that these were likewise of the same general character.
The last two months of the summer, July and August, 1895, were devoted
to explorations of two Tusayan ruins, called Awatobi and Sikyatki. In
this work, apparently unconnected with that already outlined, I still
had in mind the light to be shed on the problem of Tusayan origin. The
question which presented itself was: How are these ruins related to
the modern pueblos? Awatobi was a historic ruin, destroyed in 1700,
and therefore somewhat influenced by the Spaniards. Many of the
survivors became amalgamated with pueblos still inhabited. Its kinship
with the surviving villagers was clear. Sikyatki, however, was
overthrown in prehistoric times, and at its destruction part of its
people went to Awatobi. Its culture was prehistoric. The discovery of
what these two ruins teach, by bringing prehistoric Tusayan culture
down to the present time and comparing them with the ruins of Verde
valley and southern Arizona, is of great archeological interest.
While engaged in preparing this report, having in fact written most of
it, I received Mr Cosmos Mindeleff's valuable article on the Verde
ruins,[13] in which special attention is given to the cavate lodges
and villages of this interesting valley. This contribution anticipates
many of my observations on these two groups of aboriginal habitations,
and renders it unnecessary to describe them in the detailed manner I
had planned. I shall therefore touch but briefly on these ruins,
paying special attention to the cliff houses of Verde valley, situated
in the Red-rock country. This variety of dwelling was overlooked in
both Mearns' and Mindeleff's classifications, from the fact that it
seems to be confined to the region of the valley characterized by the
red-rock formation, which appears not to have been explored by them.
The close resemblance of these cliff houses to those of the region
north of Tusayan is instructive, in view of the ground, well taken, I
believe, by Mr Mindeleff, that there is a close likeness between the
Verde ruins and those farther north, especially in Tusayan.