OUTLINE OF PRISTINE ZUÑI HISTORY.
If a historic sketch of Spanish intercourse with the Zuñi people indicates that little change was wrought on their native mood by so many years of alien contact, an outline of their pristine history, or a sketch of their growth and formation as a people, will serve yet further to show not only how, but also why, this was so, as well as to explain much in the following outlines of their myths of creation and migration, the meaning of which would otherwise remain obscure.
Linguistically the Zuñi Indians of today stand alone, unrelated, so far as has heretofore been determined, to any other Indians either sedentary, like themselves, or unsettled, like the less advanced peoples of the plains. Nevertheless, although they as yet thus constitute a single linguistic stock, there are present and persistent among them two distinct types of physique and numerous survivals—inherited, not borrowed—of the arts, customs, myths, and institutions of at least two peoples, unrelated at first, or else separate and very diversely conditioned for so long a period of their preunited history that their development had progressed unequally and along quite different lines, at the time of their final coalition. That thus the Zuñis are actually descendants of two or more peoples, and the heirs of two cultures at least, is well shown in their legends of ruins and olden times, and especially in these myths of creation and migration as interpreted by archeologic and ethnographic research.
According to all these tokens and evidences, one branch of their ancestral people was, as compared with the other, aboriginal in the region comprising the present Zuñi country and extending far toward the north, whence at some remoter time they had descended. The other branch was intrusive, from the west or southwest, the country of the lower Rio Colorado, their earliest habitat not so clearly defined and their remoter derivation enigmatical, for they were much more given to wandering, less advanced in the peaceful arts, and their earliest ruins are those of comparatively rude and simple structures, hence scant and difficult to trace, at least beyond the western borders of Arizona. Considering both of these primary or parental stocks of the Zuñi as having been thus so widely asunder at first, the ancestral relations of the aboriginal or northern branch probably ranged the plains north of the arid mountain region of Utah and Colorado ere they sought refuge in the desert and canyons of these territories. Yet others of their descendants, if still surviving, may not unlikely be traced among not only other Pueblos, but also and more distinctly among wilder and remoter branches, probably of the Shoshonean stock. The ancestral relations of the intrusive or western branch, however, were a people resembling the semisettled Yumans and Pimans in mode of life, their ruins combining types of structure characteristic of both these stocks; and if their descendants, other than Zuñis themselves, be yet identified among Yuman tribes, or some like people of the lower Colorado region, they will be found (such of them as survive) not greatly changed, probably, from the condition they were all in when, at a very distant time, their eastward faring kinsfolk, who ultimately became Zuñis, left them there.
It is quite certain that relatives, in a way—not ancestral—of the Zuñis still exist. Not many years before Fray Marcos de Niza discovered Cibola, the Zuñians conquered some small towns of the Keres to the south-southeastward of the Zuñi-Cibola country, and adopted some of the survivors and also some of their ritual-dramas—still performed, and distinctively Keresan in kind—into their own tribe. Previously to that—previously, indeed, to their last and greatest union with the settled people mentioned as the aboriginal Zuñi—a large body of the western branch and their earlier fellows (called in the myths of creation "Our lost others") separated from them in the country south and west of the Rio Puerco and the Colorado Chiquito, and went, not wholly as related in the myths, yet quite, undoubtedly, far away to the southward. I have identified and traced their remains in Arizona toward and into Mexico as far as the coast, and if, as the Zuñis still believe, any of them survive to this day, they are to be looked for lower down in Mexico or in the still farther south, whither, it is said, they disappeared so long ago. But, as before intimated, these relatives (by adoption in the one case, by derivation in the other) were not, strictly speaking, ancestral, and thus are barely alluded to in the myths, and therefore concern us less than do the two main or parental branches.
Of these, the one which contributed more largely in numbers, certain culture characteristics, and the more peaceful arts of life to make the Zuñis what they were at the time of the Spanish conquest, was the aboriginal branch. The intrusive or western branch is, strange to say, although least numerous, the one most told of in the myths, the one which speaks throughout them in the first person; that is, which claims to be the original Shíwi or Zuñi. Of this branch it is unnecessary to say much more here than the myths themselves declare, save to add that it was, if not the conquering, at least, and for a long time, the dominant one; that to it the Zuñis owe their vigor and many, if not most, of their distinguishing traits; and that, coming as they did from the west, they located there, and not in the north, as did all these other Pueblo Indians (including even those whom they found and prevailed over, or were joined by, in the present land of Zuñi), the place where the human family originated, where the ancestral gods chiefly dwell, and whither after death souls of men are supposed to return anon.
According to their own showing in the myths they were, while a masterful people, neither so numerous at the time of their coming, nor so advanced, nor so settled, as were the peoples whom they "overtook" from time to time as they neared the land of Zuñi or the "Middle of the world." They did not cultivate the soil, or, at least, apparently did not cultivate corn to any considerable extent before they met the first of these peoples, for, to use their own words, they were "ever seeking seeds of the grasses like birds on the mesas."
There is abundant reason for supposing that the "elder nations"—these peoples whom they "overtook," the "People of the Dew," the "Black people," and the "Corn people" of the "towns builded round"—were direct and comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. The evidences of this are numerous and detailed, but only the principal of them need here be examined.
The ruins of these rounded towns of the Corn tribes which Hernando de Alvarado and Fray Juan de Padilla saw in 1540 while going southeastward from Zuñi, are especially characteristic of the Zuñi region, and extend quite generally both southward toward the Rito Quemado and the Salinas in western central New Mexico, and, by way of the Chaco, northward nearly to the Colorado boundary. They are as often half round as they are wholly oblong or circular, and even when completely rounded or oval in outline are usually divided into two semicircular parts by an irregular court or series of courts extending lengthwise through the middle, and thus making them really double villages of the half-round type.
A comparison of the ground plans of these round or semicircular ruins with those of the typical cliff ruins reveals the fact that they were simply cliff towns transferred, as it were, to the level of the open plains or mesa tops. Their outer or encircling walls were, save at the extremities of the courts, generally unbroken and perpendicular, as uninterrupted and sheer, almost, as were the natural canyon walls surrounding to the rearward the older cliff towns to which they thus corresponded and which they apparently were built to replace; and the houses descended like steps from these outer walls in terraced stories, facing, like the seats of an amphitheater, the open courts, precisely as descended the terraced stories of the cliff dwellings from the encircling rock walls of the sheltered ledges or shelves on which they were reared, necessarily facing in the same manner the open canyons below. Thus the courts may be supposed to have replaced the canyons, as the outer walls replaced the cliffs or the back walls built nearest them in the rear of at least the deeper village caves or shelters.
Other structural and kindred features of the cliff towns are found to be equally characteristic of the round ruins, features which, originating in the conditions of building and dwelling in the cliffs, came to be perpetuated in the round towns afterward built on the plains.
So limited was the foothold afforded by the scant ledges or in the sheltered but shallow hollows of the cliffs where the ancient cliff dwellers were at first forced as a measure of safety to take refuge and finally to build, that they had to economize space to the utmost. Hence in part only the women and children, being smaller and more in need of protection than the men, were accommodated with dwelling places as such, the rooms of which were so diminutive that, to account for them, theories of the dwarfish size of the cliff dwellers as a race have been common. As a further measure of economy these rooms were built atop of one another, sometimes to the height of several stories—up, in fact, to the very roof at the rear of the cavern in most cases—and thence they were terraced toward the front in order that light and air might be admitted as directly as possible to each story.
For the double purpose of accommodating the men and of serving as assembly rooms for councils and ceremonial functions, large circular chambers were constructed almost always out in front of the terraced dwelling cells of the women and children, and thus in the more exposed mouths of the caverns or shelters the villages nestled in. These round assembly rooms or kivas were often, indeed, built up from sloping portions of the sheer outer edge of the village cave shelf, in order to be as much as possible on a level with or even below the limited ground space between them and the houses farther back, so that the front along the lower and outermost row of these house cells might remain open and unobstructed to passage.
The dwelling rooms or house cells themselves were made as nearly rectangular as was practicable, for only partitions divided them; but of necessity such as were placed far back toward or against the encircling and naturally curved rock walls, or the rear masonry walls, built in conformity to their curvature in all the deeper caves, had small triangular or keystone-shape spaces between their partitions. These, being too small for occupancy even by children, were used as storerooms for grain and other household supplies. When the cave in which a village was built happened to be very deep, the living rooms could not be carried too far back, as neither light nor sufficient air could reach them there; hence here, chiefly against the rear wall or the cave back itself, were built other storerooms more or less trapezoidal in shape, according to the degree of curvature in the rock face against which they were built, or, as said before, of the rear wall itself, which in the deeper caves often reached from floor to roof and ran parallel to the natural semicircular back of the cavern.
Against the rearward face of such back walls when present (that is, between them and the rear of the cave itself), behind the village proper, if space further permitted, small rooms, ordinarily of one story, or pens, sometimes roofless, were built for the housing of the flocks of turkeys which the cliff dwellers kept. Beyond these poultry houses was still kept, in the deeper village caves, a space, dark and filled with loose soil and rubbish, in which certain of the dead, mostly men, were buried; while other dead were interred beneath the floors of the lowermost rooms, when the soil or sand filled in to level up the sloping rock bottom of the shelter was sufficiently deep to receive them.
A noteworthy peculiarity of the doorways in the upper stories leading toward the rearward storerooms already described was that they were often made T-shape; that is, very narrow at the bottom and abruptly widened at the top. This was done in order to avoid the necessity of making these openings for entrance and egress too large proportionally to the small size of the rooms. Thus, neither were the walls weakened nor were the inmates needlessly exposed to cold; for fuel, even of the lightest kind, was gathered with risk and transported thither with great difficulty, and the use of it was therefore limited to cookery, and yet a person bearing a back load of corn, or other provender might, by stepping first one foot, then the other, through the narrow lower portion of such a doorway, then stooping with his blanket or basket load, pass through without inconvenience or the necessity of unloading.
Nearly all of these features—so suited to, and some of them evidently so unavoidable with, a people building eyrie-like abodes high up on limited sloping ledges in pockets of the cliffs—were, although they were totally unnecessary to the dwellers in the half-round or double half-round towns of the plains, where space was practically unlimited and topographic and other conditions wholly different, nevertheless characteristic of these also.
Not only were the external walls of these old villages of the plains semicircular, as though built in conformity with the curved rock walls of the hollows in the cliffs, but they were continuous. That is, in all the rounded town ruins, except those which seem to have been reconstructed in more recent times, the outer walls were built first as great semicircular inclosures, hollow artificial cliffs, so to say, and afterward the house walls were built up against them inside, not into them, as they would have been had these outer and the inner walls been built up together. Moreover, not only were the ground plans of these towns of the plains semicircular, as though built in conformity with the curved rock walls of hollows in the cliffs in ancestral fashion, but the storerooms were also still tucked away in the little flaring spaces next to these now outer and surrounding walls, instead of being placed near the more convenient entrances fronting the courts. The huts or sheds for the turkeys, too, were placed not in the inclosures of the courts, but against and outside of these external walls of the villages; and while many of the dead were buried, as in the cliff houses, under the floors of the lowermost rooms, others of them, almost always men, and notably victims of war or accident, were still buried out beyond even the turkey huts. So both the turkey huts and some of the graves of these round villages retained the same positions relative to one another and to the "rearward" of the dwellings that had very naturally been given them in the cliff villages; for in these, being behind the houses and in the rear of the caves, they occupied the most protected areas; while in the round villages, being behind the houses, they were thrown quite outside of the villages, hence occupied the most exposed positions, which latter fact would appear inexplicable save by considering it as a survival of cliff-town usage.
The kivas, or assembly rooms of the round villages, were placed generally in front of the houses facing the courts, as of old they had been built in the mouths of the caverns, also in front of the houses facing the canyons. Moreover, they were, although no longer in the way, wholly or in part subterranean, that is, sunk to the level of the court or plaza, as in the cliff towns they had been built (except where crowding rendered it necessary to make them two-storied, as in some cases) up the front slopes only to the height of the general cave floor or of the lowermost house foundations.
Finally, there were no doorways in the lower stories of the rounded villages, the roofs of which were reached by ladders; but in the upper stories there were passages, some of which, although here no longer so needfully small, were still economically fashioned as of old—wide at the top, narrow at the base, like the T-shape granary avenues of the cliff ruins.
The closeness of correspondence of all these features in the round ruins to those in the cliff ruins (features which in the round ruins appear less in place than in at least the older cliff ruins) would seem to justify my conclusion, earlier stated, that the round towns were simply outgrowths of the cliff villages, transplanted, as it were, into the plains; for all of these features, as they occur in the old cliff ruins, can, with but a single exception (that of the circular form of the kivas or assembly chambers, which, as will presently be shown, were survivals of a yet older phase of building), be accounted for as having originated from necessity, whereas in the round ruins they could not have originated even as possible expedients, since they were unsuitable save by having become customary through long usage.
I have reasserted this fact because the theory that all cliff dwellings were but outlying places of refuge or the hunting and farming stations of larger pueblos in their neighborhood, strongly fortified by position in order that the small parties occupying them now and then for longer or shorter seasons might find safe retreat in them, has been advanced quite successfully. As this theory is not unlikely to gain a considerable hearing, it is necessary to demonstrate even more fully the fact that at least the round towns did not give their structural characteristics to such of the northern cliff ruins as resembled them in plan, and that therefore the latter are to be regarded as actual cliff-dweller remains. In the southern portions of New Mexico and Arizona, as on the upper Salado and in canyons of the Sierra Madre, still farther south, all the cliff dwellings and villages were built without reference to the curved forms of the caverns in which they occurred.[2] That is, they rigidly retained the rectangular pueblo form of arrangement characteristic of the larger ruins in the valleys and plains around them. Hence for this and for other reasons they may be regarded as pueblos transferred to the cliffs, such outposts of the larger pueblos of the plains as it is claimed all cliff dwellings were. So, also, as hitherto intimated, many of the later cliff dwellings, even of the north, have rectangular pueblo additions below them in the canyons or above them on the mesas, and some of the village ruins in the cave shelters themselves are almost faithful miniature reproductions in general plan of the large pueblos of the plains near at hand; but in the one case the pueblo additions above and below were comparatively modern, and indicate either that the cliff dwellings they are adjacent to continued to be occupied down to the time of later true pueblo building, or that they were reoccupied from comparatively modern pueblos and that all additions made were constructed according to customary later forms of building. In the other case, that of the rectangular structures in semicircular cave shelters, either a return to cliff dwelling from pueblo dwelling is indicated, or, as with the southern cliff villages, these also were outposts of comparatively modern kinds of pueblos occurring in the neighborhood. Such, for example, was the case with many of the cliff dwellings of the Tsegi or Canyon de Chelly, some of which continued to be occupied long after the more easterly towns of the San Juan were abandoned, and others of which were reoccupied, probably by Tusayan Indians, in comparatively recent time.
The occurrence of sepulchers in or near almost all the San Juan cliff ruins would alone indicate that they were central and permanent homes of the people who built and occupied them. The surviving Pueblo Indians, so far as I am aware, never bury in or near their outlying towns. Invariably the dead are taken to the central pueblo home of the tribe for sepulture, as there only may they become tribal fetiches in the manner I have heretofore indicated, and be properly renounced by the clans of kin at their place of birth and rearing. If, then, all the cliff towns were merely outlying strongholds, no interments of the original inhabitants would be found in them save those of children perchance born and reared in them. In fact, this is precisely the case with some of the towns in question, those above described as manifestly settlements from later true pueblos.
Another feature of the older cliff dwellings is still more significant in this connection—the presence of the kiva; for the kiva or sacred assembly room was never, for mythic and sociologic reasons, built in temporary or outlying settlements. The mere council chamber was sometimes present in these, but the true kiva never, so long as they remained resorts of more central pueblo towns, for each kiva of such a town located a division of the tribe as pertaining to one or another of the quarters or mythic divisions. Hence, as might be expected, in the more southerly cliff dwellings belonging to more recent pueblos no kiva is ever found.
The evidence furnished by the kivas is significant in other ways, for in connection with the above theory the claim has also been advanced that the cliff villages were occupied for only brief periods at best; that they do not, as assumed by me, represent a phase—so much as an incident—in the development of a people. Aside from the linguistic, sociologic, and other evidence I have to offer later on that of not only these kivas, but also of certain other features of the ruins themselves, is decidedly indicative of both long and continuous occupancy; and an examination of this evidence helps to an understanding of the culture growth of the early cliff dwellers as being not that of Pueblos at first, but that of Pueblo ancestry, Pueblos developing.
Occurring in the midst of the greater groups of northern cliff dwellings, no less than somewhat more scatteringly and widely distributed to at least as far south as the middle of Arizona, are remains of cave dwellings of an older type. They are usually lower down in the cliffs, although they once occurred also in the larger and more accessible of the caverns now occupied by later cliff-house remains, underneath or amid which remains they may still in places be traced. These rude and very ancient cave dwellings mark the beginnings of the cliff occupancy. In all essentials they correspond to the modern cave dwellings of the Sierra Madre in Sonora, Mexico, so admirably described by my friend, Dr. Carl Lumholtz, as built and still lived in by the Tarahumári and Tepehuani Indians, who survive either in the state of these first cliff dwellers of the north, or, as is more probable, have naturally and independently resorted to a similar mode of life through stress of similar circumstances.
Like the Tarahumári, these ancient people of the north at first resorted to the caves during only portions of the year—during the inclement season after each harvest, as well as in times of great danger. At other times, and during the hunting, planting, and seed-gathering seasons particularly, they dwelt, as do the Tarahumári, in rancherias, the distinctive remains of which lie scattered near and far on the plateaus and plains or in the wide valleys. But the caves were their central abodes, and the rancherias, frequently shifted, were simply outlying stations such as are the farming hamlets of the modern pueblos.
The earliest of these dwellings in the caves were at first simple huts disposed separately along the rear walls of these recesses in the cliffs. They usually had foundation walls, approximately circular in plan, of dry-laid stones, upon which rested upper converging courses of cross-laid logs and sticks, hexagonal and pen-like covers surmounted, as were the rancherias of the open plains, by more or less high-pitched roofs of thatch—here in the shelters added rather for protection from cold than from storms of rain and snow.
But in course of time, as the people dwelling, when needful, in these secure retreats increased in numbers, and available caves became filled, the huts, especially in the more suitable shelters, were crowded together in each, until no longer built separately, but in irregularly continuous rows or groups at the rear, each divided from others by simple, generally straight, partitions, as are the dwelling divisions of the Tarahumári today. But unlike the latter, these hut-like rooms of the northern cave-dwellers were still rounded outwardly, that is, each hut (where not contiguous to or set in the midst of others, as was the case with those along the front), retained its circular form. The partitions and foundation walls were still built low, and still surmounted by converging cross-laid upper courses of logs or saplings and roofs of thatch. As with the Tarahumári, so with these earliest cliff dwellers of the north; their granaries were far more perfectly constructed than their own abiding places. To adequately protect their store or provision from seed-devouring animals, no less than from the elements, it became necessary to place it in dry crannies or pockets of the cliffs near at hand, preferably in recesses as far back in their caves as possible, and also to seal it up in these natural receptacles. At first (as may be seen in connection with the caves of Las Tusas, Arizona, containing some of the oldest and rudest separate hut remains I have yet examined) the mouths of these receptacles were walled up with dry-laid stones, carefully chinked, and plastered inside with mud, precisely as were the granary pockets of the Havasupai Indians seen by me in 1881. Later, while still the houses continued to be mere low-walled and partitioned sheds or huts of dry masonry, these granaries came to be quite well constructed, of mud-laid walls, and were enlarged, as stores increased with increase of settlement and tillage, until they had to be built outward from the niches like good sized, slightly tapering bins, protruding somewhat from the cave walls, and finally forming, as do the granaries of the Tarahumári today, miniature prototypes of the perfected single cliff house of a far later day.
In times of great danger small children were not infrequently bestowed for safe-keeping in the larger of these little granary rooms in the deepest recesses at the rear of the earliest cave villages, as the finding of their remains without burial token in such situation has attested; and thus the folk tales which modern Pueblos tell of children left in the granary rooms and surviving the destruction or flight of their elders by subsisting on the scant store remaining therein (later to emerge—so the stories run—as great warrior-magicians and deliver their captive elders), are not wholly without foundation in the actual past of their ancestry. It was thus that these first cliff dwellers learned to build walls of stone with mud mortar, and thus, as their numbers increased (through immunity from destruction which, ever better, these cliff holds afforded), the women, who from the beginning had built and owned the granaries, learned also to build contiguously to them, in the depths of the caverns, other granary-like cells somewhat larger, not as places of abode, at first, but as retreats for themselves and their children.
It is not needful to trace farther the development of the cliff village proper into a home for the women and children, which first led to the tucking of storerooms far back in the midst of the houses; nor is it necessary to seek outside of such simple beginnings the causes which first led to the construction of the kivas, always by the men for themselves, and nearly always out in front of the house cells, which led to the retention for ages of the circular form in these kivas and to the survival in them for a long time (as chambers of council and mystery, where the souls of the ancients of men communed in these houses of old with the souls of their children's grandchildren) of the cross-laid upper courses of logs and even the roofings of thatch. Indeed, it is only in some way like this, as survival through slow evolution of archaic structures for worship, that the persistence of all these strange features—the retention for use of the men, the position in front of the houses, the converging hexagonal log wall caps, the unplastered roofing of thatch—until long after the building of houses for everyday use by the women, with walls continuous from floor to ceiling, with flat and mud-plastered roofs and smooth finishing inside and out, manifest themselves.
Of equal significance with this persistency of survival in the kiva, as to both structural type and function, of the earliest cave-dwelling hut-rooms through successively higher stages in the development of cliff architecture, is the trace of its growth ever outward; for in nearly or quite all of the largest cliff ruins, while as a rule the kivas occur, as stated, along the fronts of the houses—that is, farthest out toward the mouths of the caverns—some are found quite far back in the midst of the houses. But in every instance of this kind which I have examined these kivas farthest back within the cell cluster proper are not only the oldest, but in other ways plainly mark the line of the original boundary or frontage of the entire village. And in some of the largest of these ruins this frontage line has thus been extended; that is, the houses have grown outward around and past the kivas first built in front of them, and then, to accommodate increased assemblies, successively built in front of them and in greater numbers, not once or twice, but in some cases as many as three, four, and in one instance five times.
All this makes it plain, I think, that the cave and cliff dweller mode of life was a phase, not an incident merely, in the development of a people, and that this same people in general occupied these same caves continuously or successively for generations—how long it is needless here to ask, but long enough to work up adaptively, and hence by very slow degrees, each one of the little natural hints they received from the circumstances and necessities of their situation in the caves and cliffs into structural and other contrivances, so ingenious and suitable and so far-fetched, apparently, so long used, too, as to give rise to permanent usages, customs, and sociologic institutions, that it has been well-nigh impossible to trace them to such original simple beginnings as have been pointed out in the case of a few of them.
The art remains of both the earliest cave dwellers and of the cliff dwellers exhibit a like continuity of adaptive development; for even where uses of implements, etc., changed with changing conditions, they still show survivals of their original, diverse uses, thus revealing the antecedent condition to which they were adapted.
Moreover, this line of development was, as with the structural features already reviewed, unbroken from first to last—from cave to cliff, and from cliff to round-town conditions of life; for the art remains of the round ruins, of which I recovered large numbers when conducting the excavations of the Hemenway expedition in ruins east of Zuñi, are with scarcely an exception identical, in type at least, with those of the cliff ruins, although they are more highly developed, especially the potteries, as naturally they came to be under the less restricted, more favorable conditions of life in the open plains. Everything, in fact, to be learned of the round-ruin people points quite unmistakably to their descent in a twofold sense from the cliff-dwelling people; and it remains necessary, therefore, only to account for their change of habitat and to set forth their supposed relationship finally to the modern Zuñi pueblos.
In earlier writings, especially in a "Study of Pueblo Pottery,"[3] where the linguistic evidence of the derivation of the Zuñis from cliff-dwelling peoples is to some extent discussed, I have suggested that the prime cause of the abandonment of the cliffs by their ancestry was most probably increase of population to beyond the limits of available building area, and consequent overcrowding in the cliffs; but later researches have convinced me that, although this was no doubt a potent factor in the case and ultimately, in connection with the obvious advantages of life in more accessible dwelling places, led by slow degrees, as the numbers and strength of the cliff villages made it possible, to the building of contiguous pueblos both above their cliffs on the mesas and below them in the valleys, still it was by no means the only or the first cause of removal from these secure strongholds. Nor is it to be inferred from the evidence at hand that the cliff dwellers were ever driven forth from their almost inaccessible towns, either by stress of warfare or by lack of the means of subsistence, as has been so often supposed. On the contrary, it is certain that long after the earliest descents into the plains had been ventured, the cliffs continued to be occupied, at first and for a very long period as the permanent homes of remnant tribes, and later as winter resorts and places of refuge in times of danger for these latter tribes, as well as, perhaps, for their kinsfolk of the plains.
It is by this supposition only that the comparatively modern form of the square and terraced pueblos built contiguously to the latest abandoned of the cliff towns may be explained. For when the cliff dwellers had become numerous enough to be able to maintain themselves to some extent out on the open plains, it has been seen that they did not consider their villages safe and convenient or quite right unless builded strictly, in both general form and the relative arrangement of parts, as had been for many generations their towns in the cliffs—did not, it is reasonable to suppose, know at once how to build villages of any other form. Thus we may confidently regard these round towns as the earliest built by the cliff dwellers after they first left the cliffs.
The direction in which these cavoid or cliff-form or rounded village ruins may be farthest and most abundantly traced, is, as has been said before, to the southward into and through the land of Zuñi as far as the cliffless valleys bordering the Rito Quemado region in southerly central New Mexico, wherein lies the inexhaustible Lake of Salt, which the early Spanish chronicles mention as the possession and source of supply of the "salt in kernels" of the Zuñi-Cibolans.
Not only did a trail (used for such long ages that I have found it brokenly traceable for hundreds of miles) lead down from the cliff-town country to this broad valley of the Lake of Salt, but also there have been found in nearly all the cliff dwellings of the Mancos and San Juan section, whence this trail descends, salt in the characteristic kernels and colors found in this same source of the Zuñi supply.
This salt, as occurring in the cliff ruins, is commonly discovered wrapped in receptacles of corn husk, neatly tied into a trough-like form or pouch by bands of corn-leaf or yucca fiber. These pouches are precisely like the "wraps of the ancients," or packs of corn husk in which the sacred salt is ceremoniously brought home in advance of the cargoes of common salt by the Zuñi priests on each occasion of their annual, and especially of their greater quadrennial, pilgrimages (in June, after the planting) to the Lake of Salt. And it is not difficult to believe that both the packs and the pilgrimages—which latter offer many suggestive features not to be considered here—are survivals of the time when the remoter cliff-dwelling ancestry of the Zuñi Corn tribes ventured once in a period of years to go forth, in parties large enough for mutual protection, to the far-off source of their supply of salt.
Except this view be taken it is difficult to conceive why the "time after planting" should have become so established by the Zuñis (who are but two days' foot-journey from the lake, and visit its neighborhood at other periods of the year on hunting and other excursions) as the only period for the taking of the salt—to take which, indeed, by them or others at any other season, is held to be dire sacrilege.
But to the cliff dwellers and their first descendants of the farther north this period "after the planting" was the only available one of the year; for the journey along their trail of salt must have consumed many days, and been so fraught with danger as to have drawn away a goodly portion of the warrior population who could ill be spared at a later time in the season when the ripening and garnering of the harvest drew back upon the cliff-towns people the bands of predatory savages who annually pillaged their outlying fields, and in terror of whom they for so long a time clung to their refuge in the cliffs.
Additional considerations lead further to the inference not only that the Zuñis inherit their pilgrimages for the salt and the commemorative and other ceremonials which have developed around them directly from the cliff-dweller branch of their ancestry, but also that these latter were led down from the cliffs to build and dwell in their round towns along the trail of salt chiefly, if not wholly, by the desire to at once shorten and render less dangerous their communal expeditions to the Lake of Salt and to secure more exclusive possession thereof.
These two objects were rendered equally and the more desirable by the circumstance, strongly indicated by both the salt remains themselves and by usages surviving among the present Zuñis, that in course of time an extensive trade in salt of this particular variety grew up between the cliff dwellers and more northern and western tribes. When found by the Spaniards the Zuñi-Cibolans were still carrying on an extensive trade in this salt, which for practical as well as assumed mythic reasons they permitted no others to gather, and which they guarded so jealously that their wars with the Keresan and other tribes to the south-southeastward of their country were caused—as many of their later wars with the Navajo have been caused—by slight encroachments on the exclusive right to the products of the lake to which the Zuñis laid claim.
The salt of this lake is superior to any other found in the southwest, not excepting that of the Manzano salinas, east of the Rio Grande, which nevertheless was as strenuously fought for and guarded by the Tanoan tribes settled around these salinas, and had in like manner, indeed, drawn their ancestry down from earlier cavate homes in the northern mountains. Hence it was preferred (as it still is by both Indian and white population of New Mexico and Arizona) to all other kinds, and commanded such price that in the earlier cliff-packs I have found it adulterated with other kinds from the nearer salt marshes which occur in southern Utah and southwestern Colorado. That the adulteration of the lake salt with the slightly alkaline and bitter salt of the neighboring marshes was thus practiced with a view to eking out the trade supply is conclusively shown, I think, by the presence in the same cliff homes from which the adulterated specimens were obtained, of abundant specimens of the unadulterated salt, and this as conclusively shows not only that the cliff dwellers traded in this salt, as do their modern Zuñi representatives, but also that it was then, as now, more highly valued than other kinds of salt in the southwest.
The influence on the movements of whole tribes of people which it is here assumed such a source of favorite salt supply as this exerted over the early cliff dwellers, does not stand alone in the history of American tribes. It already has been intimated that the Tanoans so far prized their comparatively inferior source of salt supply in the salinas of the Manzano as to have been induced to settle there and surround them with a veritable cordon of their pueblos.
Another and far more significant instance, that of the Cerro de Sal in Peru may be mentioned, for in that country not only was salt of various kinds to be found in many valleys and throughout nearly all the deserts of the Medano region extending from northern Ecuador to southern Chili, but the sea also lay near at hand along the entire western border of this vast stretch of country; yet from remote parts of South America trails lead, some from the Amazon and from Argentina, more than a thousand miles away, some from nearer points and from all local directions to this famous "Cerro de Sal." The salt from this locality was, like that of the Lake of Salt, so highly prized that it drew aboriginal populations about it in even pre-Incan days, and was a source of supply, as well as, it is affirmed, of abundant tribute to those dominant Pueblos of South America, the Incas of later days.[4]
That the Lake of Salt, as a coveted source, actually did influence the earlier descents of the cliff dwellers, and did lead to the building and occupancy by them of the long line of ruins I have described, rests, finally, on linguistic no less than on such comparative evidence as has already been indicated. In turn, this leads to consideration of the larger and at present more pertinent evidence that these dwellers in the round towns were in part ancestors of the Zuñis, and that thus, as assumed at the outset, the Zuñis are of composite, at least dual, origin, and that their last, still existing, phase of culture is of dual derivation.
The archaic and sacred name for the south in Zuñi is Álahoïnkwin táhna, but the name more commonly employed—always in familiar or descriptive discourse—is Mák‘yaiakwin táhna (that is, the "direction of the salt-containing water or lake," from ma, salt; k‘yaía, water, or lake-containing or bearing; kwin, place of, and táhna, point or direction of). That this name should have displaced the older form in familiar usage is significant of the great importance attached to their source of salt by the early Zuñis; yet but natural, for the older form, Álahoïnkwin táhna, signifies "in the direction of the home (or source) of the coral shells," from álaho, glowing red shell-stuff; ïnkwïn, abiding place of, or containing place of, and táhna. This source of the álahowe or coral red shells (which are derived from several species of subtropical mollusks, and were so highly prized by the southwestern tribes that the Indians of the lower Colorado traded in them as assiduously as did those of the cliffs and round towns in salt) has been for generations the Gulf of California and the lower coast to beyond Guaymas.
It is not improbable, then, that this archaic and now exclusively ritualistic expression for the southward or the south is a surviving paraphrase of the name for south (or of the source in the south of the red shells), formerly known to the western branch of the Zuñi ancestry, and once familiarly used by them to designate also, perhaps, the direction of the source of their chief treasure (these coral red shells of aboriginal commerce), as in the Gulf of California, which was then south of them, but is now due west-southwestward from them.
What renders this supposition still more probable, and also strengthens the theory of the dual origin of many parallelisms in Zuñi culture, observances, and phraseology, is not so much the fact that this name for red shells and the archaic Zuñi name for red paint, áhona, resemble in sound and meaning the Yuman ahowata, ahauti, etc., for red paint, nor yet the fact that such resemblance extends to many archaic and other terms, for example of relationship in the Zuñi as compared especially with corresponding terms in the Yavapai Tulkepaiya and other dialects of the Yuman. In fact, all the terms in Zuñi for the four quarters are twofold and different, according as used familiarly or ritualistically. That for west, for instance, is in the archaic and ritualistic form, K’yálishiïnkwïn táhna, and signifies "direction of the home, or source of mists and waters, or the sea;" which, when the Zuñi abode in the farther southwest near the Pacific, was the appropriate name for west. But the familiar name for west in modern Zuñi is Súnhakwïn táhna, the "direction of the place of evening," which is today equally appropriate for their plateau-encircled home of the far inland.
"North," in the archaic form, is now nearly lost; yet in some of the more mystic rituals it occurs as both Wímaiyawan táhna (Wíkutaiya is "north" in the Yuma), "direction of the oak mountains," and Yä´lawaunankwin táhna, literally "direction of the place of the mountain ranges," which from the lower Colorado and southern Arizona are toward the north, but from northern Zuñi are not so conspicuous as in the other direction, as, for instance, toward the southwest. On the other hand, if we consider the familiar phrase for north, Pïsh´lankwïn táhna, "direction of the wind-swept plains," or of the "plains of the mightiest winds," to have been inherited from the aboriginal round-town Zuñis, then it was natural enough for them to have named the north as they did; for to the north of their earlier homes in the cliffs and beyond lay the measureless plains where roamed the strong Bison God of Winds, whence came his fierce northern breath and bellowings in the roar of storms in winter.
The east, in common language, signifies "direction of the coming of day;" but in the ritual speech signifies "direction of the plains of daylight"—a literal description of the great Yuma desert as seen at day-break from the Colorado region, but scarcely applicable to the country eastward from Zuñi, which is rugged and broken until the Llanos Estacados of Texas are reached.
The diverse meaning of terms in Zuñi architecture is no less significant of the diverse conditions and opposite directions of derivation of the Zuñi ancestry. If the aboriginal branch of the Zuñi were derived from the dwellers in the northern cliff towns, as has been assumed, then we would expect to find surviving in the names of such structural features of their pueblos as resulted from life in the cliffs linguistic evidence, as in the structures themselves material evidence, of the fact. Of this, as will presently be shown, there is an abundance.
If the intrusive branch of the Zuñi ancestry were, as has also been assumed, of extreme southwestern origin, then we should expect to find linguistic evidence of a similar nature, say, as to the structural modifications of the cliff-dweller and round-town architecture which their arrival at and ultimate position in these towns might lead us to expect to find, and which in fact is to be abundantly traced in later Zuñi ruins, like those of the historic Seven Cities of Cibola.
The conditions of life and peculiarities of building, etc., in the caves and cliffs, then in the round towns, have been commented on at some length in previous pages, and sufficiently described to render intelligible a presentation of this linguistic and additional evidence in regard to derivation from that direction; but it remains for me to sketch, as well as I can in brief, the more significant of such characteristics of the primitive Yuman house and village life as seem to bear on the additional linguistic and other evidence of derivation also from the opposite or Rio Colorado direction, for both clews should be presented side by side, if only for the sake of contrast.
These ancient people of the Colorado region, Yuman or other, had, as their remains show (not in their earliest period, nor yet in a later stage of their development, when a diverging branch of them—"Our lost others"[5]—had attained to a high state of culture in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, but at the time of their migration in part Zuñiward), houses of quite a different type from those of the north. They were mainly rancherias, that is, more or less scattered over the mesas and plains. They were but rarely round, commonly parallelogrammic, and either single or connected in straight L-shape or double L-shape rows. The foundations were of rough stones, designed probably to hold more firmly in place the cane-wattled, mud-plastered stockades which formed the sides and ends as well as (in the house rows) the partitions. They owed their rectangular shapes not to crowding, but to development from an original log-built house type—in the open (like the rancheria house type of the Tarahumári), to which may also be traced their generally greater length than width. They were single storied, with rather flat or slightly sloping roofs, although the high pitched roof of thatch was not wholly unknown, for it was still employed on elevated granaries; but sometimes (this was especially the case with single houses) the stockade posts were carried up above this roof on three sides, and overlaid with saplings on which, in turn, a bower of brush or cane or grass was constructed to protect from the sun rather than from rain. Thus a sort of rude and partial second story was formed, which was reached from below by means of a notched step-log made of a forked or branching tree-trunk, the forks being placed against the edge of the roof proper to keep the log (the butt of which rested on the ground) from turning when being ascended.[6]
Of these single houses the "bowers" described in the following myth of the creation of corn (see [page 391]), and typically surviving still to a great extent in the cornfield or farm huts of modern Zuñi, may be taken as fair examples; and of the villages or hut-row structures of these ancient plains and valley people, an excellent example may be found in the long-houses of the Mohave and other Yumans of the valley of Colorado river. Both these hut-row houses and the single-room houses were generally surrounded by low walls of loose stone, stone and mud, stockade and mud, or of mud alone; and as often as not one side or the front of a hut within such a wall inclosure was left entirely open.
Thus the outer wall was intended in part as a slight protection from the wind, and probably also to guard from flooding during the sudden showers which sometimes descend in torrents over Arizona plains. They may also have been designed to some extent for protection from the enemy; for these people were far more valiant fighters than their ultimate brethren of the north, and depended for protection less on security of position than on their own prowess. Only during times of unusual danger did they retire to fortified lava buttes (or, when near them, to deep but more or less open crevices in some of the more extensive lava fields), where their hut foundations may be found huddled together within huge inclosures of natural lava blocks, dry laid and irregular, but some of them skillfully planned and astonishingly vast; but in these strongholds they never tarried long enough to be influenced in their building habits sufficiently to change the styles of their hamlets in the plains, for until we reach the point in eastern Arizona where they joined the "elder nations" no change in ground plan of these houses is to be traced in their remains.
It is necessary to add a few details as to costume, usages, and the institutions of these semisettled yet ever shifting people.
They wore but scant clothing besides their robes and blankets—breech-clouts and kilts, short for the men, long for the women, and made of shredded bark and rushes or fiber; sandals, also of fiber; necklaces of shell beads, and pendent carved shell gorgets. The hair was bobbed to the level of the eyebrows in front, but left long and hanging at the back, gathered into a bunch or switch with a colored cord by the men, into which cord, or into a fillet of plaited fiber, gorgeous long tail feathers of the macaw, roadrunner, or eagle were thrust and worn upright. To the crown of the head of the warriors was fastened a huge bunch of stripped or slitted feathers of the owl or eagle, called, no doubt, then as now by its Yuman name, musema; for it is still known, though used in different fashion, as the múmtsemak‘ya or múmpalok‘ye by the Zuñi Priests of the Bow. The warriors also carried targets or shields of yucca or cotton cord, closely netted across a strong, round hoop-frame and covered with a coarser and larger net, which was only a modification of the carrying net (like those still in use by the Papago, Pima, and other Indians of southern Arizona), and was turned to account as such, indeed, on hunting and war expeditions.
Their hand weapons were huge stone knives and war clubs shaped like potato-mashers, which were called, it would seem, iítekati (their Yuman name) for, although changed in the Zuñi of today, still strikingly survives in familiar speech as the expression ítehk‘ya or ítehk‘yäti, to knock down finally or fatally, and in ceremonial allusion (rather than name) to the old-fashioned and sacred war clubs (which are of identical form) as ítehk‘yatáwe, or knocking-down billets, otherwise called face-smashers or pulpers.
They sometimes buried the dead—chiefly their medicine men and women, or shamans; but all others were burned (with them personal effects and gifts of kin) and their ashes deposited in pots, etc., at the heads of arroyas, or thrown into streams. They held as fetiches of regenerative as well as protective power certain concretionary stones, some of the larger of which were family heirlooms and kept as household gods, others as tribal relics and amulets, like the canopas and huacas of ancient Peru. These nodules were so knobbed, corrugated, and contorted that they were described when seen elsewhere by the early Spanish writers as bezoars, but they were really derived from the sources of arroyas, or mountain torrents, in the beds of which they are sometimes found, and being thus always water-worn were regarded as the seed of the waters, the source of life itself. Hence they were ceremoniously worshiped and associated with all or nearly all the native dances or dramaturgies, of which dances they were doubtless called by their old time possessors "the ancients," or "stone ancients," a name and in some measure a connection still surviving and extended to other meanings with reference to similar fetich stones among the Zuñis of today.
From a study of the remains of these primitive Arizonian ancestors of the Zuñis in the light of present-day Zuñi archaisms, and especially of the creation myths themselves, it would be possible to present a much fuller sketch of them. But that which has already been outlined is sufficiently full, I trust, to prove evidential that the following Zuñi expressions and characteristics were as often derived from this southwestern branch as from the cliff dweller or aboriginal branch of the Zuñi ancestry:
The Zuñi name of an outer village wall is hék‘yapane, which signifies, it would seem, "cliff-face wall;" for it is derived, apparently, from héăne, an extended wall; and ák‘yapane, the face of a wide cliff. Thus it is probably developed from the name which at first was descriptive of the encircling rear wall of a cave village, afterward naturally continued to be applied to the rear but encircling or outside wall of a round town, and hence now designates even a straight outer wall of a village, whether of the front or the rear of the houses.
The name for the outer wall of a house, however, is héine, or héline, which signifies a mud or adobe inclosure; from héliwe, mud (or mud-and-ash) mortar, and úline, an inclosure. Since in usage this refers to the outer wall of a house or other simple structure, but not to that of a town or assemblage of houses, its origin may with equal propriety be attributed to the mud-plastered corral or adobe sides or inclosures of such rancherias as I have already described.[7]
Again, the names in Zuñi, first, for a room of a single-story structure, and, second, for an inner room on the ground floor of such or of a terraced structure, are (1) télitona, "room or space equally inclosed," that is, by four equal or nearly equal walls; and (2) téluline, "room or space within (other rooms or) an inclosure." Both of these terms, although descriptive, may, from their specific use, be attributed to single-story rancheria origin, I think, for in the cliff villages there was no ground-floor room. The name for a lowermost room in the cliff villages still seemingly survives in the Zuñi name for a cellar, which is ápaline, from a, rock, and páloiye, buried in or excavated within; while the cliff name for an upper room or top-story room, óshtenu‘hlane, from óshten, a cave-shelter or cave roof, and ú‘hlane, inclosed by, or built within the hollow or embrace of, also still survives. Yet other examples of diversely derived house-names in this composite phraseology might be added, but one more must suffice. The Zuñi name for a ladder is ‘hlétsilone, apparently from ‘hléwe, slats (‘hléma, slat), and tsilulona, hair, fiber, or osier, entwined or twisted in. This primary meaning of the name would indicate that before the ladder of poles and slats was used, rope ladders were commonly in vogue, and if so, would point unmistakably to the cliffs as the place of its origin; for many of the cliff dwellings can not now be reached save by means of ropes or rope ladders. Yet, although the name for a stairway (or steps even of stone or adobe) might naturally, one would suppose, have been derived from that of a ladder (if ladders were used before stairs, or vice versa if the reverse was the case), nevertheless it has a totally independent etymology, for it is íyechiwe, from íkŏiyächi, forked log or crotch-log, and yéhchiwe, walking or footing-notched; that is, notched step-log or crotch. And this it would seem points as unmistakably to such use of forked and notched step logs or crotch-logs as I have attributed to the rancheria builders, as does the "rope-and-slat" ladder-name to the use of the very different climbing device I have attributed to the cliff dwellers.
It is probable that when the round-town builders had peopled the trail of salt as far from the northward as to the region of Zuñi and beyond, the absence of very deep canyons, containing rock-sheltered nooks sufficiently large and numerous to enable them to find adequate accommodation for cliff villages, gradually led them to abandon all resort to the cliffs for protection—made them at last no longer cliff dwellers, even temporarily, but true Pueblos, or town dwellers of the valleys and plains.
But other influences than those of merely natural or physical environment were required to change their mode of building, and correspondingly, to some extent, their institutions and modes of life from those of round-town builders to those of square-town builders, such as in greater part they were at the time of the Spanish discoveries. In the myths themselves may be found a clew as to what these influences were in that which is told of the coming together of the "People of the Midmost" and these "Dwellers-in-the-towns-builded-round." For there is evidence in abundance also of other kind, and not a little of it of striking force and interest, that this coming together was itself the chief cause of the changes referred to. It has been seen that the western branch of the Zuñi ancestry (who were these "People of the Midmost") were almost from the beginning dwellers in square structures; that their village clusters, even when several of their dwelling places happened to be built together, were, as shown by their remains wherever found, built precisely on the plans of single-house structures—that is, they were simple extensions, mostly rectilinear, of these single houses themselves.
Now peoples like those of the round towns, no less than primitive peoples generally, conceive of everything made, whether structure, utensil, or weapon, as animistic, as living. They conceive of this life of things as they do of the lives of plants, of hibernating animals, or of sleeping men, as a still sort of life generally, but as potent and aware, nevertheless, and as capable of functioning, not only obdurately and resistingly but also actively and powerfully in occult ways, either for good or for evil. As every living thing they observe, every animal, has form, and acts or functions according to its form—the feathered and winged bird flying, because of its feathered form; the furry and four-footed animal running and leaping, because of its four-footed form, and the scaly and finny fish swimming, because also of its fins and scales and form appropriate thereto—so these things made or born into special forms of the hands of man also have life and function variously, according to their various forms.
As this idea of animals, and of things as in other sort animals, is carried out to the minutest particular, so that even the differences in the claws of beasts, for example, are supposed to make the difference between their powers of foot (as between the hugging of the bear and the clutching of the panther), it follows that form in all its details is considered of the utmost importance to special kinds of articles made and used, even of structures of any much used or permanent type. Another phase of this curious but perfectly natural attributive of life and form-personality to material things, is the belief that the forms of these things not only give them power, but also restrict their power, so that if properly made, that is, made and shaped strictly as other things of their kind have been made and shaped, they will perform only such safe uses as their prototypes have been found to serve in performing before them. As the fish, with scales and fins only, can not fly as the duck does, and as the duck can not swim under the water except so far as his feathers, somewhat resembling scales, and his scaly, webbed feet, somewhat resembling fins enable him to do so, thus also is it with things. In this way may be explained better than in any other way, I think, the excessive persistency of form-survival, including the survival of details in conventional ornamentation in the art products of primitive peoples—the repetitions, for instance, in pottery, of the forms and even the ornaments of the vessels, basketry, or what not, which preceded it in development and use and on which it was first modeled. This tendency to persist in the making of well-tried forms, whether of utensil or domicile, is so great that some other than the reason usually assigned, namely, that of mere accustomedness, is necessary to account for it, and the reason I have given is fully warranted by what I know of the mood in which the Zuñis still regard the things they make and use, and which is so clearly manifest in their names of such things. It is a tendency so great, indeed, that neither change of environment and other conditions, nor yet substitution of unused materials for those in customary use for the making of things, will effect change in their forms at once, even though in preserving older forms in this newer sort of material the greatest amount of inconvenience be encountered. There is, indeed, but one influence potent enough to effect change from one established form to another, and that is acculturation; and even this works but slowly and only after long and familiar intercourse or after actual commingling of one people with a diversely developed people has taught them the safety and efficiency of unfamiliar forms in uses familiarly associated with their own accustomed but different forms. Sooner or later such acculturation invariably effects radical change in the forms of things used by one or the other of the peoples thus commingling, or by both; though in the latter case the change is usually unequal. In the case here under consideration there is to be found throughout the nearer Zuñi country ruins of the actual transitional type of pueblo thus formed by the union of the two ancestral branches of the Zuñis, the round town with its cliff-like outer wall merging into the square, terraced town with its broken and angular or straight outer walls; and in these composite towns earliest appears, too, the house wall built into (not merely against) the outer walls of the curved portions no less than into the outer walls of the squared or straight portions.
The composite round and square pueblo ruin is not, however, confined to this transitional type or to its comparatively restricted area wherever occurring, but is found here and there as far northward, for instance, as the neighborhood of older cliff ruins. But in such cases it seems to have been developed, as heretofore hinted, in the comparatively recent rebuilding of old rounded towns by square-house builders. Quite in correspondence with all this is the history of the development, from the round form into the square, of the kivas of the later Zuñi towns; that is, like the towns themselves, the round kivas of the earlier round towns became, first in part and then nearly squared in the composite round and square towns, and finally altogether squared in the square towns. This was brought about by a twofold cause. When the cliff dwellers became inhabitants of the plains, not only their towns, but also the kivas were enlarged. To such an extent, indeed, were the latter enlarged that it became difficult to roof them over in the old fashion of completing the upper courses of the walls with cross-laid logs, and of roofing the narrowed apex of this coping with combined rafter and stick structures; hence in many cases, although the round kiva was rigidly adhered to, it was not unfrequently inclosed within a square wall in order that, as had come to be the case in the ordinary living rooms, rafters parallel to one another and of equal length might be thrown across the top, thus making a flat roof essentially like the flat terrace roofs of the ordinary house structure.
It is not improbable that the first suggestion of inclosing the round kiva in a square-walled structure and of covering the latter with a flat roof arose quite naturally long before the cliff dwellers descended into the plains. It has been seen that frequently, in the larger and longest occupied cliff-towns, the straight-walled houses grew outward wholly around the kivas; and when this occurred the round kiva was thus not only surrounded by a square inclosure—formed by the walls of the nearest houses,—but also it became necessary to cover this inclosing space with a flat roof, in order to render continuous the house terrace in which it was constructed. Still, the practice never became general or intentional in the earlier cliff-towns; probably, indeed, it became so in the now ruined round towns only by slow degrees. Yet it needed after this (in a measure) makeshift beginning only such influence of continued intercourse between the square-house building people and these round-town building people to lead finally to the practical abandonment by the latter of the inner round structure surviving from their old-fashioned kivas, and to make them, like the modern Zuñi kiva, square rather than round.
An evidence that this was virtually the history of the change from the round kiva building to the square kiva building, and that this change was wrought thus gradually as though by long-continued intercourse, is found in the fact that to this day all the ceremonials performed in the great square kivas of Zuñi would be more appropriate in round structures. For example, processions of the performers in the midwinter night ceremonials in these kivas, on descending the ladders, proceed to their places around the sides of the kivas in circles, as though following a circular wall. The ceremonials of concerted invocation in the cult societies when they meet in these kivas are also performed in circles, and the singers for dances or other dramaturgic performances, although arranged in one end or in the corner of the kiva, continue to form themselves in perfect circles; the drum in the middle, the singers sitting around and facing it as though gathered within a smaller circular room inclosed in the square room. Thus it may be inferred, first, from the fact that in the structural details of the scuttles or hatchways by which these modern kivas are entered the cross-logged structure of the inner roof of the earliest cliff kivas survive, and from the additional fact above stated that the ceremonials of these kivas are circular in form, that the square kiva is a lineal descendant of the round one; and second, that even after the round kiva was inclosed in the square room, so to say, in order that its roof might be made as were the roofs of the women's houses, or continuous therewith, it long retained the round kiva within, and hence the ceremonials necessarily performed circularly within this round inner structure became so associated with the outer structure as well, that after the abandonment entirely, through the influences I have above suggested, of these round inner structures, they continued thus to be performed.
As further evidence of the continuity of this development from the earliest to the latest forms, certain painted marks on the walls of the cliff kivas tell not only of their derivation in turn from a yet earlier form, but also and again of the derivation from them of the latest forms. In the ancient ruins of the scattered round houses, which, it is presumed, mark the sites of buildings belonging to the earlier cliff ancestry folk on the northern desert borders, there are discovered the remains of certain unusually large huts, the walls of which appear to have been strengthened at four equidistant points by firmly planted upright logs. It is probable that, alike in this distribution and in the number of these logs, they corresponded almost strictly to the poles of, first, the medicine tent, and, second, the medicine earth lodge. When, in a later period of their development, these builders of the round huts in the north came to be, as has heretofore been described, dwellers in the kivas of the caves, their larger, presumably ceremonial structures, while reared without the strengthening posts referred to, nevertheless contained, as appropriate parts, the marks of them on the walls corresponding thereto. At any rate, in the still later kivas of the cliffs three parallel marks, extending from the tops of the walls to the floors, are found painted on the four sides of the kivas. Finally, in the modern square kiva of Zuñi there are still placed, ceremonially, once every fourth year, on the four sides of the lintels or hatchways, three parallel marks, and these marks are called by the Zuñi in their rituals the holders-up of the doorways and roofs. Many additional points in connection not only with the structural details of, but also in the ceremonials performed within, these modern kivas, may be found, survivals all pointing, as do those above mentioned, to the unbroken development of the kiva, from the earth medicine lodge to the finished square structure of the modern Zuñi and Tusayan Indians.
It likewise has been seen that through very natural causes a strict division between the dwellings of the women and children and of the adult male population of the cliff villages grew up. From the relatively great numbers of the kivas found in the courts of the round towns, it may be inferred that this division was still kept up after the cliff dwellers became inhabitants of the plains and builders of such round towns; for when first the Spaniards encountered the Zuñi dwellers in the Seven Cities of Cibola they found that, at least ceremonially, this division of the men's quarters from those of the women was still persisted in, but there is evidence that even thus early it was not so strictly held to on other occasions. Then, as now, the men became permanent guests, at least, in the houses of their wives, and it is probable that the cause which broke down this previous strict division of the sexes was the union of the western or rancheria building branch of the Zuñi ancestry with the cliff and round-town building branch.
In nothing is the dual origin of the Zuñis so strongly suggested as in the twofold nature of their burial customs at the time when first they were encountered by the Spaniards; for according to some of the early writers they cremated the dead with all of their belongings, yet according to others they buried them in the courts, houses, or near the walls of their villages. It has already been stated that the cliff dwellers buried their dead in the houses and to the rear of their cavern villages, and that, following them in this, the dwellers in the round towns buried their dead also in the houses and to the rear—that is, just outside of their villages. It remains to be stated that nearly all of the Yuman tribes, and some even of the Piman tribes, of the lower Colorado region disposed of their dead chiefly by cremation. Investigation of the square-house remains which lie scattered over the southwestern and central portions of Arizona would seem to indicate that the western branch of the Zuñi ancestry continued this practice of cremating the greater number of their dead. If this be true, the custom on the one hand of cremating the dead, which was observed by Castañeda at Mátsaki, one of the principal of the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the practice of burying the dead observed by others of the earliest Spanish explorers, are easily accounted for as being survivals of the differing customs of the two peoples composing the Zuñi tribe at that time. As has been mentioned in the first part of this introductory, both of these very different customs continued ceremonially to be performed, even after disposal of the dead solely by burial under the influence of the Franciscan fathers came to be an established custom.
In the Kâ´kâ, or the mythic drama dance organization of the Zuñis, there is equal evidence of dual origin, for while in the main the kâ´kâ of the Zuñis corresponds to the katzina of the Rio Grande Pueblo tribes and to the kachina of the Tusayan Indians, yet it possesses certain distinct and apparently extraneous features. The most notable of these is found in that curious organization of priest-clowns, the Kâ´yimäshi, the myth of the origin of which is so fully given in the following outlines (see [page 401]). It will be seen that in this myth these Kâ´yimäshi are described as having heads covered with welts or knobs, that they are referred to not only as "husbands of the sacred dance" or the "kâ´kâ" (from kâ´kâ and yémäshi, as in óyemäshi, husband or married to) and as the Old Ones or Á‘hläshiwe.
Throughout the Rio Colorado region, and associated with all the remaining ruins of the rancheria builders in central and even eastern Arizona as well, are found certain concretions or other nodular and usually very rough stones, which today, among some of the Yuman tribes, are used as fetiches connected both with water worship and household worship. Among the sacred objects said to have been brought by the Zuñi ancestry from the places of creation are a number of such fetich-stones, and in all the ruins of the later Zuñi towns such fetich-stones are also found, especially before rude altars in the plazas and around ancient, lonely shrines on the mesas and in the mountains. These fetich-stones are today referred to as á‘hläshiwe, or stone ancients, from a, a stone, ‘hlä´shi, aged one, and we, a plural suffix. The resemblance of this name to the Á‘hläshiwe as a name of the Kâ´yemäshi strongly suggests that the nodular shape and knobbed mask-heads of these priest-clowns are but dramatic personifications of these "stone ancients," and if one examine such stones, especially when used in connection with the worship and invocation of torrents, freshets, and swift-running streams (when, like the masks in question, they are covered with clay), the resemblance between the fetich-stones and the masks is so striking that one is inclined to believe that both the characters and their names were derived from this single source. From the fact that this peculiar institution of the clown-priest organization, associated with or, as the Zuñis say, literally married to the Cachina, or Kâ´kâ proper, was at one time peculiarly Zuñi, as is averred by themselves and avowed by all the other Pueblos, it would seem that it was distinctively an institution of the western branch of their ancestry, since also, as the myths declare, these Old Ones were born on the sacred mountains of the Kâ´kâ, on the banks of the Colorado Chiquito in Arizona. Finally, this is typical of many, if not all, features which distinguish the Zuñi Kâ´kâ from the corresponding organizations of other Pueblo tribes.