No more interesting question in southwestern archeology awaits an
answer than the query: What became of the former inhabitants of the
Chaco ruins, one of the largest clusters of deserted buildings in
New Mexico? Like the cliff dwellers of the Mesa Verde, their former
inhabitants have disappeared and left no clue as to where they went,
the date of their occupation of the ruins, or their kinship with
other peoples. Existing legends relating to them among supposed
descendants who are thought to live in modern pueblos are fragmentary
and knowledge of their archeology is defective. The Hyde Expedition
made an extraordinary collection of artifacts from Pueblo Bonito, the
largest and formerly the best preserved ruin of the group, but the
excavations there have yielded little information on the kinship of
its inhabitants. Until we know more about the Chaco Canyon ruins we
are justified in the belief that there still remains a most important
problem for the archeologist to solve.
In seeking the prehistoric migration trail of the Hopi before they came
to Fire House, the author examined ruins near Crown Point identical
with those of the Chaco Canyon. There are in fact two ruins within a
few miles of the Crown Point Indian school, one of them known among
the Navaho Indians as Kin-a-a (the name of the other unknown to the
author), which are structurally members of the Chaco series.
The ground plan of the largest, Kin-a-a,[7] is rectangular and was
apparently oriented north and south, the walls on the north side
being the highest and best preserved and those on the south possibly
terraced. On the south side remnants of a court or enclosure surrounded
by a low wall can still be detected. The ruin is compact with embedded
kivas and measures approximately 150 feet long by 100 feet wide, the
north walls rising in places to 50 feet, showing good evidences of
five stories, one above the other. The high walls reveal rooms of
rectangular shape. Situated midway in the length of the north wall
(pl. 4, _a_, _b_, _c_) is a circular chamber like a kiva on the ground
floor, with high walls about it. The recesses between the wall of the
circular room and the rectangular wall enclosing it are solidly filled
in with masonry, a mode of construction adopted in the great ruins of
the Chaco Canyon. The kiva of Kin-a-a (pl. 5, _a_, _b_), like those of
the great building of the same canyon, are built into the mass of rooms
and not separated from them as in the modern pueblos, Walpi, those of
the Rio Grande, and the ruin of Sun Temple on the Mesa Verde. This
separation of the kiva from the house mesa is regarded by the author
as a late evolution, being unknown among the cliff dwellers, and very
rare in pueblo ruins possessing ancient characteristics. A union or
huddling together of sacred and secular rooms is characteristic of the
period when each kiva was limited to the performance of clan rites,
the separation of the kiva from secular rooms marking the development
of a fraternity of priests composed of different clans. The diameter
of the kiva in Kin-a-a is about 15 feet, the average size of these
rooms, no doubt determined by the length of logs available for roofs.
When the diameter is greater than that it is customary to make the roof
in a vaulted form by utilizing shorter roofing, but kivas as small as
10 feet in diameter were sometimes roofed by vaulting. Depressions,
in mounds, measuring as much as 50 feet in diameter, in ruins in the
Montezuma Valley have been identified as circular ceremonial rooms, but
as these have not been excavated, there is always a doubt, for instead
of being ceremonial and roofed they may have been uncovered reservoirs
for storage of water, for not all circular depressions are kivas. In
Far View Pueblo,[8] in the Mummy Lake Group, the author excavated a
kiva 32 feet in diameter, which was found to have pilasters for a
vaulted roof. No such pilasters occur in Kin-a-a, showing that the roof
was flat with a central hatchway, as is customary in all these rooms
with two or more stories.
It is difficult to explain the enclosed space above the kiva in this
ruin. Was it occupied by rooms one above another, or was the lower
open to the sky? The rows of holes interpreted as indicating floors
is without significance, unless there were a number of superposed
rooms. It must be remembered that the ceremonial room or kiva, in
modern mythology, represents the underworld out of which, according
to legends, the early races of men emerged through an opening in the
roof or hatchway. Among the Hopi it is never covered by another room,
and this is carried so far that it is forbidden to walk on a roof
of a kiva, especially at a time when rites are being performed.[9]
Such an act would be regarded as sacrilegious, and the same taboo
is now probably universal: consequently walls constructed 40 feet
above the top of the kiva, showing evidence of rooms superposed in
stories, are exceptional. The object of rooms above a kiva can only be
surmised; possibly there may have been four kivas, one above another,
to represent the underworlds in which the ancestors of the human race
lived in succession before emerging into that in which we now dwell.
The inner walls of this kiva are shown in plate 5, _a_. It was evident
to the author when examining the inner wall of the superposed room,
above that identified as the kiva, that it belonged to a room with a
roof, as appears also from the view here given (pl. 5, _a_). Whatever
explanation of this exceptional condition may be suggested, we cannot
question the fact that here we have remains of a kiva below one or more
other rooms.[10]
A well blazed trail passes the ruin and is lost in the distant hills.
This trail was at first mistaken for an irrigation ditch, but an
examination of its course shows that it runs up a steep hill, which
precludes such a theory. It is a section of an old Indian trail,
indications of which occur elsewhere in the State, a pathway over which
the rocks used in the construction of the ruins were transported. A
similar trail used for a like purpose is recorded near the great ruin
at Aztec, New Mexico.