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.