Frijoles: A Hidden Valley in the New World

by J. W. Hendron

In 1540 the Spanish explorers passed the [Keres] province and moved northward, it would appear, near the present site of [San Juan] [Pueblo]. The entire Indian population fled to the mountains, as you will recall, where they said they had four very strong villages. It is entirely possible that some of these people from the north pushed deep into the mountain country and on to the Valley of the Frijoles where the Spanish could not go on horseback. It was a Hidden Valley. If this had been true, if these northern people had moved into [Tyuonyi] with their kith and kin and had told about how the Spanish stormed pueblos and shot cannon at other Indians and readily conquered the inhabitants, “the little strong people” might have had incentive to fortify their [Puwige] against the undesirable attentions of the conquerors. Or it might have been some visitor from the Valley of the [Rio Grande] who told about depredations at [Tiguex]. But would a Keres warn a [Tewa]? We must not overlook the fact that it would have been possible for friendly relations to have existed between the rival groups of people at the time of the Spanish Conquest. They could have lived close together and traded pottery and other articles back and forth. One might go so far as to say that they could have lived at Tyuonyi together a few years prior to its abandonment. But taking all these things into consideration it was likely the Keres whom the Tewas fortified themselves against, and from whom they had probably experienced hostile visits. So they fortified their Puwige and drew up their ladders to the roof-tops in defiance. And the people in the cliffs also drew up their ladders.

Within the inner court of this big community house were three [kivas]. These deep underground ceremonial chambers lined with rock walls were built adjacent to the rooms on the north side. [Puwige] was large. It was more than two hundred seventy-five feet across and the tiers of rooms formed a wide band around the outside of the circular court. Why the Indians erected three kivas so close together is uncertain unless it was to have more room in the [plaza]. It is possible that the kivas were erected first, outside of the village, and as the [pueblo] grew the three little ceremonial chambers were entirely enclosed within it. But why three kivas inside Puwige? Indians had their reasons. These three ceremonial chambers were small. They were not more than twelve or fifteen feet in diameter. The hard plaster floors were seven or eight feet below the surface of the ground. Their roofs were of poles laid across the stone walls with brush and grass and mud for a covering. Small combination hatchways and smoke vents were cut in the roofs and ladders were put down to the floors as a means of getting in and out. These chambers were likely society kivas of which there were several in every Indian village. Or we might compare them with club rooms in our own society. They were places where the elders met in council, or where they came to spend an hour or so, perhaps a week, visiting with their spiritual fathers. Kivas were places where policy was discussed and decided upon—or a kiva might have been a place where a group of hunters gathered before going on a hunt to pray that their hunt would be successful. We will never know what went on in the secret chambers at [Tyuonyi], or as a matter of fact, in any other [prehistoric] kiva.

And speaking of [kivas] or ceremonial chambers, some groups preferred to have theirs in the cliffs, hewn out like the smoky cave rooms but generally larger. And the kivas, like the cave rooms, were plastered half-way up the walls whenever they became smoked. This happened quite often if fires were kept burning.

The greatest period of occupation of Hidden Valley must have begun sometime during the fifteenth century. It was to last about a hundred years. With the beginning of this Great Period, the period in which [Puwige] and all of the [talus] houses were most likely built and occupied, there certainly must have been some social or ceremonial organization similar to that in the modern [pueblos]. There were likely two moieties. The dual system where every person in the village belonged to one of two [kivas]—either Turquoise or Squash, or, Winter or Summer respectively. Presumably a baby born in the winter belonged to the Turquoise kiva. If it was a patrilineal society then the individual might have belonged to the same kiva as his father. Who knows but that it was a matter of personal choice? Each kiva, Turquoise or Squash, had a ruler or [cacique] whose word was absolute. He was the father of the village to whom villagers looked for guidance and his appointment was for life. The moieties were under the spiritual guidance of the two town chiefs who were responsible for the welfare of the people. An important office was that of cacique. He had been chosen because of his thorough knowledge of chants, sacred rituals, ceremonial procedure and prayers. No one doubted the word of the cacique. And all Indians owed duties to their respective kivas. Although the groups, Turquoise and Squash, were in opposition they also depended upon one another for the common good of the pueblo.

If the dual system was in vogue at [Tyuonyi], there must have been two [kivas] to support it. A peculiar thing, it seems, took place here. At least one tribal kiva was built and was in use before the Great Period of occupation came along. It was a large structure forty-two feet in diameter. Sixty Indians could have crouched down around the inside against the wall. Indian men, years before, excavated a large concave depression in the side of a hill a hundred yards or so down the [Canyon] from [Puwige]. Days and days were required to bring in thousands of cobble stones. They labored untiringly. They brought them from the river and they brought chunks from the cliff. Around this deep concave depression which they had laboriously scooped out of the earth with broken pieces of pottery, sticks, flat stones and whatever else they had to work with, Indian men laid stone after stone of this volcanic tuff in crude mortar. They laid a wall ten feet thick. It required thousands of the unworked stones to line this deep pit. It was a circular affair and was their way of creating a semi-subterranean chamber when they did not know how to lay single thickness masonry walls with fashioned blocks.

No [prehistoric] [Rio Grande] [kiva], that I know of, has an entrance through its wall such as this which was found at Frijoles. They all were entered through the roof. Such things as wall entrances are customary in kivas in the [San Juan] area but not in the Rio Grande Valley. And these early people dug five pits in the floor of their kiva and lined them with cobble stones. They must have had some use for them of which we know nothing. Pits of this type are something else not seen in prehistoric Rio Grande kivas. They are found in the kivas at [Chaco] [Canyon] though, and it is possible that they could have been vestiges of that early culture.

This particular ceremonial chamber had apparently fallen into disuse for a time. But during the Great Period of occupation, when “the little strong people” presumably occupied the [Tyuonyi], it was rebuilt. There was little use in going to work and building an entirely new [kiva] when one was already here and could be rebuilt. The old roofing had fallen to the inside and there were hundreds of pounds of debris in the kiva chamber. All this was cleaned out. Building a kiva was a community enterprise. Men again began cutting and fashioning rectangular blocks from large chunks fallen from the cliff. As each block was fashioned it was laid into a single thickness coursed masonry wall around the inside of the thick wall of cobble stone which belonged to the earlier occupation. The Indian was smart. He laid this circular wall sloping outward toward the top so that the pressure from the heavy roof would be diverted downward when it was laid over the walls. When the wall was finished it was nine feet high from the floor of the kiva to the ceiling. And then to keep it from falling down, the Indians dug underneath the footing stones, and objects modeled of clay which looked like doughnuts were laid in the holes. When we discovered these doughnut-shaped affairs I was mystified until an old Indian from [San Ildefonso] told me they were put there purposely to hold the wall up, in a spiritual way of course.

What a large structure this was! It was almost as large as the [kivas] at [Chaco] [Canyon] where the ancestors of these Indians probably lived several hundred years before. There was no kiva this large in the entire [Rio Grande] Valley. Huge timbers forty-five feet long were required to span its diameter and timbers that large were difficult to carry. But with crude stone axes and obsidian knives these kiva builders penetrated the forest to cut girders for their ceremonial chamber. In the year 1513 A.D. or thereabout, they cut three trees with trunks fifteen inches or more in diameter. It took hours, days perhaps. They hacked and they pounded with their [Neolithic] implements of toil until all three trees had been felled. I would hate to estimate the time required to fell these timbers but time meant nothing to the Indian. Then there was the job of removing all the branches, needles and bark.