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.