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.