Cosmos Mindeleff

“ As already stated, long occupancy of a village, even without increase of population, produces a certain effect on the ground plan. This effect, so strongly marked in all the ruins already described, is conspicuous in this ruin by its almost entire absence. The ground plan is just such as would be produced if a small band of pueblo builders, consisting of ten or twelve related families, should migrate en masse to a site like the one under discussion and, after occupying that site for a few years—less than five—should pass on to some other location. ”

“ Among the ancient pueblo builders there was no military art, or rather the military art was in its infancy; purely defensive structures, such as fortresses, were unknown, and the idea of defense never reached any greater development than the selection of an easily defended site for a village, and seldom extended to the artificial improvement of the site. ”

“ There is no essential difference, other than those due to immediate environment, between the architecture of the lower Verde region and that of the more primitive types found in other regions, Tusayan for example. The Verde architecture is, however, of a more purely aboriginal type than that of any modern pueblo, and the absence of introduced or foreign ideas is its chief characteristic. There are no chimneys, no adobe walls, no constructive expedients other than aboriginal and rather primitive ones. The absence of circular kivas10 or sacred council chambers is noteworthy. ”

“ That the period of occupancy of the lower Verde valley was not a long one is proved by the character of the remains and by what we know of the history of the pueblo-building tribes. There are no very large areas of tillable land on the lower Verde and not a large number of small ones, and aside from these areas the country is arid and forbidding in the extreme. Such a country would be occupied only as a last resort, or temporarily during the course of a migration. ”

“ The ruins of the second subclass, or stone villages located on defensive sites, are found throughout the whole of this region, although the type reaches its best development in the northern portion, in the vicinity of Verde. The separation of this type from the preceding one is to a certain extent arbitrary, as the location of a ruin is sometimes determined solely by convenience, and convenience may dictate the selection of a high and defensible site, when the tillable land on which the village depends is of small area, or when it is divided into a number of small and scattered areas ”

“ This has occurred in many of the pueblos and in the ruins, and in a general way a ruin consisting of large rooms is apt to be more modern than one consisting of small rooms; and where large and small rooms occur together there is a fair presumption that the occupancy of the village extended over a period when hostile pressure was pronounced and when it became less strong. It has already been shown that, owing to the social system of the pueblo-builders, there is almost always growth in a village, although the population may remain stationary in numbers or even decrease ”

“ If the general principles, already laid down, affecting the development and growth of ground plans of villages are applied to this example, the hypothesis suggested above—an incoming of people en masse and a very short occupancy—must be accepted, for no other hypothesis will explain the regularity of wall lines, the uniformity in size of rooms, and the absence of attached rooms which do not follow the general plan of the village. ”

“ Half a mile northwestward, in a saddle similar to that last described, and east of the crown of a hill, are the remains of a single room, nearly square and perhaps 10 feet long. These single rooms and small cluster remains are unusual in this region, and seem to replace the bowlder-marked ruins so common south of the East Verde (to be described more fully later) . Although the walls of this single-room structure were built of river bowlders, they are well marked by débris and are of the same type as those in the ruins at the mouths of the East Verde and Fossil creek. ”

“ There are hundreds of square miles of territory here which are never visited by white men, except by “cow-boys” during the spring and autumn round-ups.
Scattered at irregular intervals along both sides of the river are many benches and terraces of alluvium, varying in width from a few feet to several miles, and comprising all the cultivable land in the valley of the river. Since the Verde is a mountain stream with a great fall, its power of erosion is very great, and its channel changes frequently; in some places several times in a single winter season. ”

“ The inhabitants of the Verde valley were an agricultural people, and even in the darkest days of their history, when they were compelled to abandon the minor settlements, they still relied on horticulture for subsistence, and to a certain extent the defense motive was subordinated to the requirements of this method of life. ”

“ The circular kiva is a survival of an ancient type—a survival supported by all the power of religious feeling and the conservatism in religious matters characteristic of savage and barbarous life; and while most of the modern pueblos have at the present time rectangular kivas, such, for example, as those at Tusayan, at Zuñi, and at Acoma, there is no doubt that the circular form is the more primitive and was formerly used by some tribes which now have only the rectangular form. ”

“ Ruins of villages built of stone, either roughly dressed or merely selected, represent the highest degree of art in architecture attained by the aborigines of Verde valley, and the best example of this class of ruin is found on the eastern side of the river, about a mile above the mouth of Limestone creek. ”

“ The rock employed depended in all cases on the immediate environments of the site of the village, the walls being composed in some cases of slabs of limestone, in other cases of river bowlders only, and in still others of both in combination. The walls of the large ruin near Limestone creek were composed of rude slabs of limestone with an intermixture of bowlders. The bowlders usually occur only in the lower part of the wall, near the ground, and in several cases, where nothing exists of the wall above the surface of the ground, the remains consist entirely of bowlders. ”

“ There can be no doubt that the hostile pressure which produced the larger villages was Indian, probably the Apache and Walapai, who were in undisputed possession at the time of the American advent, and but little doubt that this pressure consisted not of regular invasions and set sieges, but of sudden raids and descents upon the fields, resulting in the carrying off of the produce and the killing of the producers. ”

“ Every mesa had at least one ancient pueblo up off it, evidently far more ancient than the cavate dwellings found in the face of the cliffs. It is, then, very plain that the cavate dwellings are not of great age; that they have been occupied since the advent of the white man, and that on the summit of the cliffs there are ruins of more ancient pueblos.
Major Powell obtained a tradition of the Santa Clara Indians, reciting three successive periods of occupancy of the cavate lodges by them, the last occurring after the Spanish conquest of New Mexico in the seventeenth century. ”

“ Since the American occupancy of the country and the consequent removal of the hostile pressure which has kept the Pueblo tribes in check, development has been rapid and now threatens a speedy extinction of pueblo life. The old Laguna has been abandoned, Acoma is being depopulated, the summer pueblos of Zuñi are now occupied all the year round by half a dozen or more families, and even in Tusayan, the most conservative of all the pueblo groups, the abandonment of the home village and location in more convenient single houses has commenced. ”

“ These remains are quite abundant in the vicinity of Verde, and less so between that point and the mouth of the river. The causes which have induced American settlement in the large area of bottom land about Verde doubtless also induced the aboriginal settlement of the same region, although, owing to the different systems of agriculture pursued by the two peoples, the American settlements are always made on the bottom lands themselves, while the aboriginal settlements are almost always located on high ground overlooking the bottoms. ”

“ These movements are not possible where outside hostile pressure is strong, and if such pressure is long continued it results in a reaggregation of the various scattered settlements into one large village. Such in brief is the process which is termed migration, and which has covered the southwest with thousands of village ruins. Of course larger movements have occurred and whole villages have been abandoned in a day, but as a rule the abandonment of villages was a gradual process often consuming years. ”

“ On the southern side of Clear creek, about a mile above its mouth, there are extensive horticultural works covering a large area of the terrace or river bench. These have already been alluded to in the description of the village ruin overlooking them, but there are several features which are worthy a more detailed description. For a distance of 2 miles east and west along the creek, and perhaps half a mile north and south, there are traces of former works pertaining to horticulture, including irrigating ditches, “reservoirs,” farming outlooks, etc. ”

“ The division into clusters, however, indicates an aggregation of related gentes or subgentes banded together for protection. Given these conditions, (1) bands of related families living near one another; (2) hostile pressure from outside; and (3) a site not in itself easily defended, and a ground plan similar to the one under discussion must result. Single detached rooms would not be built when the village might be attacked at any time, but they might be added during periods of peace and, the conditions being favorable, they might form the nuclei of other clusters. ”

“ Long occupancy, therefore, produces much the same effect on a ground plan of a village as a large population, or a rapidly growing one, except that in the former case irregularity in the arrangement of rooms will be more pronounced.
It will be noticed that the size of rooms is more varied in the southwestern and southern clusters than in the remaining portions of the village. In the southwestern cluster rooms measuring 8 feet by 18 or 20 are not uncommon. ”

“ As the area of tillable land in the pueblo region, especially in its western part, is limited, these requirements have developed a class of temporary structures, occupied only during the farming season. In Tusayan, where the most primitive architecture of the pueblo type is found, these structures are generally of brush; in Canyon de Chelly they are cliff-dwellings; on the Rio Verde they are cavate lodges, bowlder-marked sites and single house remains; but at Zuñi they have reached their highest development in the three summer villages of Ojo Caliente, Nutria, and Pescado. ”

“ We did not come direct to this region (Tusayan) —we had no fixed intention as to where we should go.
We are the Pat-ki-nyû-mû, and we dwelt in the Pa-lát-kwa-bĭ (Red Land) where the kwá-ni (agave) grows high and plentiful; perhaps it was in the region the Americans call Gila valley, but of that I am not certain. It was far south of here, and a large river flowed past our village, which was large, and the houses were high, and a strange thing happened there. ”

“ Be this as it may, the bottom land now presents a fairly continuous surface, from the banks of the river to the foothills that limit the valley on the west and south, and it is certain that this bottom land extended over the place occupied by the ancient ditch; nor is it to be supposed that the ancient ditches ended abruptly at the point where they now enter the bluff. The curves in the line of the ancient ditch might indicate that it was constructed along the slope of a hill, or on an uneven 242 surface, as a deep excavation in fairly even ground would naturally be made in a straight line. ”

“ Prescott is situated on Granite creek, one of the sources of the river, and along other tributaries, as far down as the southern end of the great valley in whose center Verde is located, there are many scattered settlements; but from that point to McDowell there are hardly a dozen houses all told. This region is most rugged and forbidding. There are no roads and few trails, and the latter are feebly marked and little used. The few permanent inhabitants of the region are mostly “cow men,” and the settlements, except at one point, are shanties known as “cow camps.” ”

“ As a further effect of the abundance of cattle and the scarcity of food for them, the young willows, which, even so late as ten years ago, formed one of the characteristic features of the river and its banks, growing thickly in the bed of the stream, and often forming impenetrable jungles on its banks, are now rarely seen. ”

“ It is possible that, commencing at the northern end of the settlement, a ditch extended completely through it, terminating in the storage reservoir at the southern end, and that this ditch was used to collect the surface water and was not connected with the river. A method of irrigation similar to this is practiced today by some of the Pueblo Indians, notably by the Hopi or Tusayan and by the Zuni. In the bottom land immediately south of the mesa, now occupied by several American families, there is a fine example of an aboriginal ditch, described later. ”