Tusayan

“ At Tusayan the ancient practice of using the ground-floor rooms for storage still prevails. In these are kept the dried fruit, vegetables, and meats that constitute the principal winter food of the Tusayan. Throughout Tusayan the walls of the first terrace rooms are not finished with as much care as those above that face the open courts. A quite smoothly finished coat of adobe is often seen in the upper stories, but is much more rarely applied to the rough masonry of the ground-floor rooms. ”

“ In addition to the deification of the forces of nature, totems of animals, and ancestral personages, Tusayan supernal concepts are almost infinite in variety and number, many of which are simply modified fetishes, the heritage of archaic conditions. ”

“ Although there are many Tusayan ruins which we have every reason to believe are older than the time of Coronado, no archeologist has gathered from them the evidences bearing on prehistoric Tusayan culture which they will undoubtedly yield. Large and beautiful collections of pottery ascribed to Tusayan ruins have shown the excellent artistic taste of the ancient potters of this region, indicating that in the ceramic art they were far in advance of their descendants. ”

“ Fig. 91 illustrates the manner of making small openings in external exposed walls in Zuñi. Stone frames occur only occasionally in what seem to be the older and least modified portions of the village. At Tusayan, however, this method of framing windows is much more noticeable, as the exceptional crowding that has exercised such an influence on Zuñi construction has not occurred there. The Tusayan houses are arranged more in rows, often with a suggestion of large inclosures resembling the courts of the ancient pueblos. ”

“ In Tusayan the necessity of defense has driven the builders to inaccessible sites, so that now all the occupied villages of the province are found on mesa summits. The inhabitants of the valley pueblos of Cibola, although compelled at one time to build their houses upon the almost inaccessible summit of Tâaaiyalana mesa, occupied this site only temporarily, and soon established a large valley pueblo, the size and large population of which afforded that defensive efficiency which the Tusayan obtained only by building on mesa promontories. ”

“ I am sure that in prehistoric and historic times delegations from the Rio Grande country have settled among the Tusayan villagers, and that many families of the latter have migrated back to the Rio Grande again to make permanent homes in that section. The most western and the most eastern peoples of this Pueblo culture-stock have been repeatedly united in marriage, bringing about a consequent commingling of blood, and the legends of both tell of their common character. ”

“ Thus Castañeda says: "Twenty leagues to the north-west, there is another province which contains seven villages. The inhabitants have the same costumes, the same customs, and the same religion as those of Cibola." [35] This district is the one called "Tusayan" by the same author, who places it atp. 13 twenty-five leagues also; and "Tucayan" by Jaramillo, "to the left of Cibola, distant about five days' march." [36] These seven villages of "Tusayan" were visited by Pedro de Tobar. West of them is a broad river, which the Spaniards called "Rio del Tizon." ”

“ Regarding this as proven, Tusayan corresponds with the Hopi villages, of which Awatobi was one of the largest. It lies in the same direction and about the same distance from Zuñi as stated in Castañeda's narrative. The fact that Cardenas passed through Tusayan when he went from Cibola to the Grand Canyon in 1540 is in perfect harmony with the identification of the Hopi villages with Tusayan, and Zuñi with Cibola. ”

“ The conditions under which the houses were built have hardly been such as to stimulate the Tusayan to the invention of such a device. The uniform height of the second-story roofs seen in this village, constituting an almost unbroken level, is a rather exceptional feature in pueblo architecture. Only one depression occurs in the whole length of the main row. ”

“ This village furnishes the most striking example in the whole group of the manner in which a pueblo was gradually enlarged as increasing population demanded more space. Such additions were often carried out on a definite plan, although the results in Tusayan fall far short of the symmetry that characterizes many ruined pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona. ”

“ In connection with the architectural examination of some of these remains many traditions have been obtained from the present tribes, clearly indicating that some of the village ruins, and even cliff dwellings, have been built and occupied by ancestors of the present Pueblo Indians, sometimes at a date well within the historic period.
The migrations of the Tusayan clans, as described in the legends collected by Mr. Stephen, were slow and tedious. While they pursued their wanderings and awaited the favorable omens of the gods they halted many times and planted. ”

“ On the rugged sites of the Tusayan villages corrals are placed wherever favorable nooks happen to be found in the rocks, but at Zuñi, built in the comparatively open plain, they form a nearly continuous belt around the pueblo. Here they are made of stakes and brush held in place by horizontal poles tied on with strips of rawhide. The rudely contrived gateways are supported in natural forks at the top and sides of posts. Often one or two small inclosures used for burros or horses occur near these sheep corrals. The construction is identical with those above described and is very rude. ”

“ The architecture of this district exhibits a close adherence to aboriginal practices, still bears the marked impress of its development under the exacting conditions of an arid environment, and is but slowly yielding to the influence of foreign ideas.
The present study of the architecture of Tusayan and Cibola embraces all of the inhabited pueblos of those provinces, and includes a number of the ruins traditionally connected with them. ”

“ Changes in the character of openings are quite common in all of the pueblos. Usually the evidences of such changes are much clearer in the rougher and more exposed work of Tusayan than in the adobe-finished houses of Zuñi. Pl. CVII illustrates a large, balcony-like opening in Oraibi that has been reduced to the size of an ordinary door by filling in with rough masonry. A small window has been left immediately over the lintel of the newer door. Pl. CVIII illustrates two large openings in this village that have been treated in a somewhat similar manner, but the filling has been carried farther. ”

“ There was a general apprehension that the Spaniards would send a force to punish them, and the Shumopavi also reconstructed their village in a stronger position, on a high mesa overlooking its former site. The other villages were already in secure positions, and all the smaller agricultural settlements were abandoned at this period, and excepting at one or two places on the Moen-kopi, the Tusayan have ever since confined themselves to the close vicinity of their main villages.
The house masses do not appear to bear any relation to division by phratries. ”

“ Stephen has been informed by the Indians that the man is a mason and the woman the plasterer, the house belonging to the woman when finished; but according to my own observation this is not the universal practice in modern Tusayan. In the case of the house in Oraibi, illustrated in Pl. XL from a photograph, much, if not all, of the masonry was laid, as well as finished and plastered, by the woman of the house and her female relatives. ”

“ The builders of large valley pueblos must frequently have been forced to resort hastily to defensive sites on finding that the valley towns were unfitted to withstand attack. This seems to have been the case with the Tusayan; but that the Zuñi have adhered to their valley pueblo through great difficulties is clearly attested by the internal evidence of the architecture itself, even were other testimony altogether wanting. ”

“ This has resulted in some adherence on the part of the Tusayan to the village plans of their ancestors, while at Zuni the great house clusters, forming the largest pueblo occupied in modern times, show a wide departure from the primitive types. In both provinces the architecture is distinguished from that of other portions of the pueblo region by greater irregularity of plan and by less skillfully executed constructional details; each group, however, happens to contain a notable exception to this general carelessness. ”

“ When the Sun people came into Tusayan they halted at that village and a few of them remained there permanently, but the others continued west to the Middle Mesa. At that time also they say Chukubi, Shitaimu, Mashongnavi, and the Squash village on the terrace were all occupied, and they built on the terrace close to the Squash village also. The Sun people were then very numerous and soon spread their dwellings over the summit where the ruin now stands, and many indistinct lines of house walls around this dilapidated village attest its former size. ”

“ The Tusayan Indian thus recognizes the potency of the earth and symbolically deifies it as the mother. Consequently earth goddesses play important roles in his mythology, and here likewise the composition of the tribe shows itself in the many names by which the earth mother is designated. ”

“ Journal of American Ethnology and Archæology, vol. ii, No. 1. All the Tusayan kivas with which I am familiar have this raised spectator's part at one end. The altars are always erected at the opposite end of the room, in which is likewise the hole in the floor called the sipapû, symbolic of the traditional opening through which races emerged to the earth's surface from an underworld. Banquettes exist in some Tusayan kivas; in others, however, they are wanting. ”

“ In plan this village approaches somewhat that of the inhabited Tusayan villages. At the extreme southern extremity of the mesa promontory is a small secondary bench, 20 feet lower than the site of the main village. This bench has also been occupied by a number of houses. On the east side the pueblo was built to the very edge of the bluff, where small fragments of masonry are still standing. The whole village seems so irregular and crowded in its arrangement that it suggests a long period of occupancy and growth, much more than do the other villages of this (Jeditoh) group. ”

“ It is a mistaken idea, and one which has led to many misconceptions, to suppose that what is true of one group of pueblos is true of all. While in a general way the mythology and ritual of all may be said to have general resemblances, there is far from an identity between the ceremonials, for instance, of the Hopi and the Zuñi, or those of the Rio Grande pueblos and Tusayan. It is not a question of knowing all by an intimate knowledge of one ”

“ Such facilities were most abundant near the margins of the mesas, where in many places large blocks of sandstone have fallen out from the edge of the surface stratum, leaving nearly rectangular spaces at the summit of the cliff wall. The construction of their villages on these rocky promontories forced the Tusayan builders to sacrifice, to a large extent, the traditional and customary arrangement of the kivas within the house-inclosed courts of the pueblo, in order to obtain properly depressed sites. ”

“ The inclosures have not been encroached upon, the streets are wider, and altogether the earlier methods seem to have been retained in greater purity than in Zuñi. The unbroken outer wall, of two or three stories in height, like the same feature of the old villages, is pierced at various heights with small openings that do not seriously impair its efficiency for defense. Tusayan examples of these loop-hole-like openings maybe seen in Pls. XXII, XXIII, and XXXIX.
Fig. ”

“ The kivas are also places for general rendezvous, and at night the men and women bring their work and chat and laugh, and in their rude way make the time merry. Many of the tribes of North America have their cult societies, or "medicine orders," as they are sometimes called, but this institution has been nowhere developed more thoroughly than among the pueblo Indians of this region. I am informed that there are a great number in Tusayan, that a part of their ceremonies are secret and another part public, and that the times of ceremony are also times for feasting and athletic sports. ”

“ There is no reason to suppose that the kiva was a necessity in the ancient performance of the Tusayan ritual, and there are still performed many ceremonials as secret and as sacred as any others which occur in rooms used as dwellings or for the storage of corn. Thus, the Flute [Pg 612] ceremony, one of the most complicated in Tusayan, is not, and according to legends never was, performed in a kiva. On the contrary, the secret rites of the Flute society are performed in the ancestral Flute chamber or home of the oldest woman of the Flute clan. ”

“ It is often the practice in the modern pueblos to seal up the windows of a house with masonry, and sometimes the doors also during the temporary absence of the occupant, which absence often takes place at the seasons of planting and harvesting. At such times many Zuñi families occupy outlying farming pueblos, such as Nutria and Pescado, and the 199 Tusayans, in a like manner, live in rude summer shelters close to their fields. Such absence from the home pueblo often lasts for a month or more at a time. ”

“ Small inclosed gardens, like those of Zuñi, occur at several points in Tusayan. The thin walls are made of dry masonry, quite as rude in character as those inclosing the Zuñi gardens. The smaller clusters are usually located in the midst of large areas of broken stone that has fallen from the mesa above. In the foreground of Pl. XXII may be seen a number of examples of such work. Pl. XCI illustrates a group of corrals at Oraibi whose walls are laid up without the use of mud mortar. ”