Authors: Carroll L Riley

Tags: #History, #Native American, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #Social Science, #Anthropology, #General, #Ethnic Studies, #Native American Studies, #test

Kachina and the Cross (5 page)

Page 13

in the Americas. It is roughly equivalent in technology and economic strategy and overlaps to a certain degree in time with the group of post-Pleistocene societies sometimes called the
Mesolithic
in Europe and the Mediterranean region. The Southwestern Archaic involved very small family groups who wandered over the desiccated landscape searching for fruits, berries, roots, or grass seeds in season and hunting rabbits and other animals.

Several Archaic traditions eventually established themselves in what later became the Pueblo Southwest. In the Rio Grande Valley they included the
Oshara
, a largely indigenous development in the upper valley, while to the west was the
Cochise
and to the south a tradition called the
Chihuahuan
, both of which extended into the Rio Grande Valley south of Oshara. People of these various Archaic traditions had a tool kit somewhat like that of the Paleo-Indians: they used the atlatl and a variety of chopping and grinding tools. They lived in caves and rock shelters or had huts of jacal (interlaced poles and branches daubed with mud) or, perhaps, skin tents of some sort. Life in general was hard, and populations rose very slowly over the millennia.

About 2000 B.C., at a time when the climate was slowly ameliorating from the "long drought" of the previous several thousand years, a new and revolutionary idea began to penetrate the Southwest from the more advanced societies of Mexico to the south. This was the concept of plant domestication, which had begun some two thousand to three thousand years before in southeastern Mexico. The plants that spread into the Southwest were descendants of these early domesticates, a rather primitive form of maize (
Zea mays
), squash (
Cucurbita pepo
and
C. moschata
), and the bottle gourd (
Lagenaria siceraria
), the latter plant dried and used as a container. Two other plants of very great importance spread out of Mexico later, reaching the Southwest in the early post-Christian centuries: bean (
Phaseolus vulgaris
) and cotton (
Gossypium hopi
).

Maize and squash had become well-known food crops in various parts of the Southwest by the last centuries B.C., and beans and cotton by the early A.D. centuries. They demanded new skills and a considerable amount of time devoted to planting, weeding, guarding, and harvesting the crops. The importance of agriculture, once it took firm hold in the Southwest, was enormous; however, there continued to be gathering and hunting. For the latter, another invention, the bow and arrow, gradually spread across the Southwest, reaching the Basketmaker-Pueblo areas in the early A.D. centuries.

The term
Basketmaker-Pueblo
, or
Anasazi
(for the latter name, see below), refers to the peoples in the upper Southwest, descendants of the Oshara Archaic, who gradually developed their very distinctive culture in the period from around A.D. 300 to 400 and were the ancestors of the historic and modern Pueblo Native

Page 14

Americans. Appearing in the same general time frame as the Anasazi were three other major cultural traditions that developed primarily from the Cochise Archaic. By the early A.D. centuries these traditions were established, and in one way or another they all affected the Anasazi. Farthest west were the
Patayan
peoples of the lower Colorado River. In southern Arizona lived the desert farmers known as the
Hohokam
who irrigated the basins of the Salt and Gila Rivers to raise their crops. In the mountain region of the modern New Mexico-Arizona border were other groups of Indians called
Mogollon,
and Mogollon-like villagers also extended eastward to the Rio Grande and deep into western Mexico. All these traditions had agriculture, and they all developed pottery, though the Patayan perhaps not until the latter part of the first millennium A.D. It was from the Mogollon area that simple red and brown hand-molded ceramics spread to the Anasazi. These latter people quickly began utilizing different clay sources and producing what became the typical late Anasazi black-on-white pottery. At about the time the Anasazi Indians began making pottery, they also began cultivating protein-rich beans that had made their way northward. Mogollon peoples and ideas were to strongly influence the western Anasazi region; in earliest historic times the Pueblo people of Zuni and Hopi were an amalgam of Mogollon and Anasazi.

Basketmaker-Pueblo began when groups of Archaic peoples who lived in caves and rock shelters turned agriculturist, growing maize and squash, and made sophisticated basketry. They inhabited both the Rio Grande and the San Juan river basins. These early farmers lacked pottery, the bow and arrow, and certain agricultural crops (beans and probably cotton). Their name comes from the well-made baskets used for food storage, transport, and probably to a limited degree, cooking. Around the time these Basketmaker II groups adopted pottery, beans, and probably the bow and arrow from Mogollon Indians farther south, they also began to build a relatively sophisticated type of structure called a pit-house. The idea for this structure, called a pit-house because a portion of it is excavated into the earth, probably also came from the Mogollon. Such cultural innovations ledby the period A.D. 500-700to a new synthesis that we call Basketmaker III.

By the way, there is no Basketmaker I. When the term was first coined in the early part of the twentieth century, archaeologists felt that there should be an earlier, more primitive culture from which the Basketmaker II people derived. We can now say that Basketmaker I is late Oshara Archaic.

The alternate name, Anasazi, was suggested by A. V. Kidder in 1936 because the term Basketmaker-Pueblo was somewhat cumbersome. Kidder employed the name for the entire Basketmaker-Pueblo sequence beginning with Basketmaker

Page 15

II and extending through Pueblo V (fig. 2). This is the way many archaeologists still use the term, though, personally, I prefer to call Anasazi only that period from Basketmaker III to the beginnings of historic times. It seems to me that Basketmaker IIIwith its new cultural inventory of pit-houses, pottery, bow and arrow, and the incorporation of beans into the agriculturerepresented a major cultural break. Of course, this was an ongoing process, and such things as pit-houses and an early brown pottery actually begin in Basketmaker II times; still, the complex as a whole characterizes Basketmaker III. At the other end of the sequence, Pueblo V was the period of Spanish intrusion into the Southwest, with its accompanying drastic changes in the Pueblo world.

The word
Anasazi
is Navajo, and Kidder thought that it meant "Old People." Actually,
Anasazi
is a composite word meaning something like "non-Navajo ancestors," rather a contradiction in terms if used by a Navajo speaker. In any case, the name is now well embedded; in fact, it has entered the popular literature in the Southwest in a rather unfortunate way. A great deal is often made in magazine articles and especially on television about the "mysterious Anasazi" who disappeared from the Southwest, leaving only massive ruined towns. In reality, the direct descendants of the Anasazi, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, are very much with us today.

Basketmaker III and the early Pueblo period were marked by a large expansion of population in various parts of the San Juan Valley. The Rio Grande, which became a major heartland of the Anasazi from about A.D. 1300 on, seems to have had only a small population in the early Anasazi centuries. As time went on, the Basketmaker experiment led to new building forms: aboveground structures, usually a series of contiguous houses made by setting stone blocks in mud mortar. These are referred to as
pueblos
, the Spanish word for "village" or "town." In certain areas the pit-house type of construction maintained itself for some centuries after the appearance of pueblos.

The early Pueblo period (what is sometimes called
Developmental Pueblo
in the Rio Grande Valley; see fig. 2) saw a gradual expansion in population, particularly in the region north of the San Juan River in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. This area was, by Pueblo II times, heavily peopled. The turkey had joined the dog as an animal domesticate probably as early as Basketmaker III times, and a new food plant, cotton (its oil-rich seeds were eaten), had been established. Weaving of cotton was also presumably early, though a true loom may not have appeared until Pueblo III times. Fibers of yucca and, to some degree, apocynum (alternatively called black hemp or dog-bane) also were woven. The black-on-white painted pottery became technically more advanced and artistically more sophisticated as time went on.

Page 16

Classificatory schemes or the Southwest from Basketmaker to historic times

While still living in pit-houses, the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians seemed to have used their dwellings for certain religious ceremonies. In Pueblo times the pit-house kind of structure was retained, often as a special ceremonial chamber within the pueblo courtyards or room blocks. This ceremonial house, found today in all pueblos, is generally referred to by its Hopi Pueblo term of
kiva.
In the earthen floors of pit-houses were small holes rimmed with clay. These continued to be used in the kivas and, at least in historic and modern times, represented the opening to the underworld from which human beings emerged to populate the earth. The modern kivas are used for a variety of ceremonies central to Pueblo Indian religion. Presumably this was true in prehistoric times; at least the prehistoric kivas have many of the same structural features seen today.

Out of an early Pueblo base a brilliant development of Pueblo III Indian culture began around A.D. 1000 in the high, rather barren Chaco Canyon south of the San Juan River in northwest New Mexico. A century or so later the populous Pueblo II towns of the region north of the San Juan grew into the extensive Pueblo III settlements of which Mesa Verde is perhaps the best example but which stretched along the San Juan and its northern tributariesthe Mancos,

Page 17

McElmo, and Montezuma Riversacross southwest Colorado into southeastern Utah.

The Classic period in Chaco Canyon, called the
Bonito phase
, saw the rise of large pueblos several stories in height and including hundreds of rooms. Though they were built of stone and adobe like earlier pueblos, there was a certain sophistication in the stone structures. Over time there developed banded wall exteriors made with different sized stones. The core and veneer technique, possibly Mesoamerican in nature, allowed the massive lower walls at Chaco to support upper stories also built with stone and mud masonry. A new type of kiva, perhaps developing from a Basketmaker prototype in the Chaco area, was the
Great Kiva.
Such structures were huge, circular excavated areas, six to eight feet deep, the largest being almost eighty feet across. These enormous kivas were roofed by four massive timbers or by columns of alternating stone and wood resting on massive sandstone disks. They may have been used by large groups such as moieties, the two ceremonial units of the pueblo. There are also smaller kivas in the Chaco area, possibly clan or society kivas.

The large Chaco towns were connected in all directions by a series of roadways. Major roads are some thirty feet wide, and the road system stretched to the San Juan River on the north, to the Puerco drainage to the east, to the San José to the south, and to Coyote Wash (north of Gallup) to the west. Chacoan outliers reach well beyond the road system, being found as far north as Colorado and westward to the upper Little Colorado drainage. One important outlier was the Village of the Great Kivas in the Zuni region.

There was considerable trade reaching the Chaco towns. An important trade item was turquoise, some of it from the Cerrillos region south of modern Santa Fe, New Mexico, and some perhaps from other parts of the Southwest. Some trade was from more-distant places. There was shell from the Gulf of California and from the Pacific coast of California, copper bells from western Mexico, and the technique of pseudo-cloisonné (lacquering the surface of pottery or, in the case of Chaco, sandstone). The most dramatic of the imports was the scarlet macaw (
Ara macao
).This brightly feathered bird has been in great demand from at least Chaco times to the present day, the feathers being used in ceremonial dress and in ritual offerings. The macaws seem to have been traded from the jungles of eastern Mexico, and some came as immature birds to be caged and raised to adulthood by the Chaco people. It seems likely that turquoise was traded in return; stockpiles of turquoise representing some hundreds of thousands of pieces have been found at Chaco.

The upper part of the San Juan Basin had large and well-built stone and mud pueblos and a considerable level of technology. In the upper Rio Grande Valley

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