Conclusions Regarding the Verde Valley Ruins
The ruins of the Verde region closely resemble those of Tusayan, and seem to support the claim of the Hopi that some of their ancestors formerly lived in that region. This is true more especially of the villages of the plains and mesa tops, for neither cave-houses nor cavate dwellings are found in the immediate vicinity of the inhabited Tusayan pueblos. The objects taken from the ruins are similar to those found universally over the pueblo area, and from them alone we can not say more than that they probably indicate the same substratum of culture as that from which modern pueblo life with its many modifications has sprung.
The symbolism of the decorations on the fragments of pottery found in the Verde ruins is the same as that of the ancient pueblos of the Colorado Chiquito, and it remains to be shown whether the ancestors of these were Hopi or Zuñi. I believe it will be found that they were both, or that when the villages along the Colorado Chiquito[29] were abandoned part of the inhabitants went to the mesas of Tusayan and others migrated farther up the river to the Zuñi villages.
Two centers of distribution of cliff houses occur in our Southwest: those of the upper tributaries of the Colorado in the north and the cliff houses of the affluents of the Salt and the Gila in the south. The watershed of the Rio Grande is, so far as is known, destitute of this kind of aboriginal dwellings. Between the two centers of distribution lie the pueblos of the Little Colorado and its tributaries, the home of the ancestors of the Hopi and the Zuñi. The many resemblances between the cliff houses of the north and those of the south indicate that the stage of culture of both was uniform, and probably the same conditions of environment led both peoples to build similar dwellings. All those likenesses which can be found between the modern Zuñi and the Hopi to the former cliff peoples of the San Juan region in the north, apply equally to those of the upper Salado and the Gila and their tributaries to the south; and so far as arguments of a northern origin of either, built on architectural or technological resemblances, are concerned, they are not conclusive, since they are also applicable to the cliff peoples of the south. The one important difference between the northern and the southern tier of cliff houses is the occurrence of the circular kiva, which has never been reported south of the divide between the Little Colorado and the Gila-Salado drainage. If a kiva was a feature in southern cliff houses, which I doubt, it appears to have been a rectangular chamber similar to a dwelling room. The circular kiva exists in neither the modern Hopi nor the Zuñi pueblos, and it has not been found in adjacent Tusayan ruins; therefore, if these habitations were profoundly influenced by settlers from the north, it is strange that such a radical change in the form of this room resulted. The arguments advanced that one of the two component stocks of the Zuñi, and that the aboriginal, came from the cliff peoples of the San Juan, are not conclusive, although I have no doubt that the Zuñi may have received increment from that direction.
Cushing has, I believe, furnished good evidence that some of the ancestors of the Zuñi population came from the south and southwest; and that some of these came from pueblos now in ruins on the Little Colorado is indicated by the great similarity in the antiquities of ancient Zuñi and the Colorado Chiquito ruins. Part of the Patki people of the Hopi went to Zuñi and part to Tusayan, from the same abandoned pueblo, and the descendants of this family in Walpi still recognize this ancient kinship; but I do not know, and so far as can be seen there is no way of determining, the relative antiquity of the pueblos in Zuñi valley and those on the lower Colorado.
The approximate date of the immigration of the Patki people to Tusayan is as yet a matter of conjecture. It may have been in prehistoric times, or more likely at a comparatively late period in the history of the people. It seems well substantiated, however, that when this Water-house people joined the other Hopi, the latter inhabited pueblos and were to all intents a pueblo people. If this hypothesis be a correct one, the Snake, Horn, and Bear peoples, whom the southern colonists found in Tusayan, had a culture of their own similar to that of the people from the south. Whence that culture came must be determined by studies of the component clans of the Hopi before the arrival of the Patki people.[30]
The origin of the round shape of the estufa, according to Nordenskiöld (p. 168), is most easily explained on the hypothesis that it is a reminiscence of the cliff-dwellers' nomadic period. "There must be some very cogent reason for the employment of this shape," he says, "for the construction of a cylindrical chamber within a block of rectangular rooms involves no small amount of labor. We know how obstinately primitive nations cling to everything connected with their religious ideas. Then what is more natural than the retention, for the room where religious ceremonies were performed, of the round shape characteristic of the original dwelling place, the nomadic hut? This assumption is further corroborated by the situation of the hearth and the structure of the roof of the estufa, when we find points of analogy to the method employed by certain nomadic Indians in the erection of their huts." This theory of the origin of the round form of dwelling and its retention in the architecture of the kiva, advanced by Nordenskiöld in 1893, has much in its favor, but the rectangular form, which, so far as known, is the only shape of these sacred rooms in the Tusayan region, is still unexplained. From Castañeda's narrative of the Coronado expedition it appears that in the middle of the sixteenth century the eastern pueblos had both square and round estufas or kivas, and that these kivas belonged to the men while the rooms of the pueblo were in the possession of the women. The apparent reason why we find no round rooms or kivas in the southern cliff houses and in Tusayan may be due to several causes. Local conditions, including the character of the building sites on the Hopi mesa, made square rooms more practical, or the nomadic stage was so far removed that the form of the inclosure in which the ancients held their rites had not been preserved. Moreover, some of the most ancient and secret observances at Walpi, as the Flute ceremony, are not performed in special kivas, but take place in ordinary living rooms.
As in all the other ruins of Verde valley, circular kivas are absent in the Red-rock country, and this fact, which has attracted the attention of several observers, is, I believe, very significant. Although as yet our knowledge of the cliff houses of the upper Gila and Salado and their numerous tributaries is very fragmentary, and generalization on that account unsafe, it may be stated provisionally that no circular kivas have yet been found in any ruins of the Gila-Salado watershed. This form of kiva, however, is an essential feature of the cliff dwellings of Rio Colorado, especially of those along its affluents in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Roughly speaking, then, the circular kiva is characteristic of the ruins of this region and of certain others in the valley of the Rio Grande, where they still survive in inhabited pueblos.
Circular ruins likewise are limited in their distribution in the Southwest, and it is an interesting fact that the geographic distribution of ancient pueblos of this form is in a general way the same as that of circular kivas. There are, of course, many exceptions, but so far as I know these can readily be explained. No ruins of circular dwellings occur in the Gila-Salado drainage area, where likewise no circular kivas have been observed. Moreover, the circular form of dwelling and kiva is distinctively characteristic of prehistoric peoples east of Tusayan, and the few instances of their occurrence on its eastern border can readily be explained as extra-Hopi.
The explanation of these circular kivas advanced by Nordenskiöld and the Mindeleffs, that they are survivals of round habitations of nomads, has much to commend it; but whether sufficient or not, the geographic limitation of these structures tells in favor of the absence of any considerable migration of the prehistoric peoples of the upper Colorado and Rio Grande watersheds southward into the drainage area of the Gila-Salado. Had the migration been in that direction it may readily be believed that the round kiva and the circular form of dwelling would have been brought with it.
The round kiva has been regarded as a survival of the form of the original homes of the nomad, when he became a sedentary agriculturist by conquest and marriage.
The presence of rectangular kivas in the same areas in which round kivas occur does not necessarily militate against this theory, nor does it oblige us to offer an explanation of a necessarily radical change in architecture if we would derive it from a circular form. It would indeed be very unusual to find such a change in a structure devoted to religious purposes where conservatism is so strong. The rectangular kiva is the ancient form, or rather the original form; the round kiva is not a development from it, but an introduction from an alien people. It never penetrated southward of the Colorado and upper Rio Grande drainage areas because the element which introduced it in the north was never strong enough to influence the house builders of the Gila-Salado and tributary valleys.