Archeological investigations in New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah

by Jesse Walter Fewkes

This identity in form of tower and round kiva and the relative abundance of both in the San Juan drainage, leads the author to believe that one was derived from the other, in that district, and spread from it southward and westward until, very much modified, it reached the periphery of the pueblo area. It is believed that, in the earliest time, the isolated tower was constructed for ceremonial purposes and that rooms for habitations were dugouts or other structures architecturally different from it. Later, domiciles were constructed around the base of these towers until they encircled them in a compact mass of rooms. The tower then lost its apparent height, but morphologically retained its form. As this circular type of kiva spread into the pueblo area in course of time it was again constructed independently of the domiciles and the relative numbers diminished until, as in some of the pueblos of the Rio Grande, there survive only one or two kivas for each village, but these are no longer embedded in habitations as in the more advanced archaic conditions.

The tower kiva may be regarded as the nucleus of the clan, or the building erected for ceremonies of that clan, the earliest and best constructed stone structures in the region where the pueblo originated. Where there were several clans there were several towers; when one clan, a single tower. In course of time rooms for habitation or possibly for other purposes, clustered about these towers; these units consolidated with rooms and kivas of another type forming a composite pueblo. In this form we find the towers rising above a mass of secular rooms. The archaic form of ceremonial room or tower survived in Cliff Palace and other Mesa Verde ruins.[21]

Several circular kivas and towers seen by the author have one or more incised stones, bearing a coiled figure resembling a serpent. One of the best of these has also peripheral lines like conventional symbols of feathers. An obscure legend of the Hopi recounts that the ancestral kivas of the Snake clan, when it lived at Tokonabi, or along the San Juan were circular in form. While at present only a suggestion, it is not improbable that towers and round kivas may have been associated with Snake ceremonials, especially as this cult is known to have survived among Keresan pueblos like Sia and Acoma. The Snake clan of the Hopi according to traditions came from the north or the region of circular kivas.

From their similarity in external shape and distribution, circular ruins and round towers have been regarded as in some way connected. It by no means follows that rooms inside their external walls were identical in use. For instance, the so-called Great Tower on the cliffs overlooking the San Juan, described and figured by Prof. Holmes, is said by him to measure 140 feet in diameter, and to have double walls connected by partitions, forming a series of encircling rooms. This ruin may be classified not as a tower but a circular ruin, and the same may be said of the so-called Triple-wall Tower, rising on the border of rectangular rooms, situated at the mouth of the McElmo. The dimensions of this so-called tower are reported to be “almost” the same as the Great Tower. The author regards these as examples of an architectural type related to towers, from which it is distinguished not only by size, but also, especially, by the arrangement of rooms on their peripheries. The internal structure of the tower type is little known, but in none of these buildings has the author detected peripheral rooms separated by radial partitions, although one of these radial partitions is found in kiva A of Sun Temple. The original building of the last mentioned ruin, although D-shaped, has a morphological similarity in the arrangement of peripheral rooms to the “Great Tower” of the San Juan, or that on the alluvial flat in the Mancos, and the “Triple-wall Tower” room of the McElmo, save that the so-called innermost of the triple walls is replaced in Sun Temple by two circular walls, side by side, forming kivas B and C.

The tower, with annexed rectangular rooms, like its homologue, the circular kiva with similar adjacent chambers surrounding it, is practically the “unit type,” a stage of pueblo development pointed out by Doctor Prudden,[22] who does not make as much as would the author of the intra-mural condition of the kiva, or its compact union with domiciliary rooms. Far View House on the Mesa Verde is a good example of this union of form, characteristic of the “unit type” or compact pueblo with embedded circular kivas, one of which is central, probably the first constructed, and of large size. Such compact pueblos are numerous on the Mesa Verde, judging from central depressions in mounds, and characteristic of the San Juan, at least of its northern tributaries. The previous stage in pueblo development is that in which the sanctuary or tower (kiva) and habitation are distinct. The extra-mural circular kiva,[23] or circular room separated from the house masses either in courts, as in Rectangular and Round villages, or situated outside the same as in “Line villages,” like Walpi, or pyramidal forms, is like Zuñi or Taos and more modern pueblos. This modification is widely distributed in ruins south of the San Juan, still persisting in several modern pueblos.

The above observations have an important bearing on the author’s differentiation of the village Indians of the Southwest, into two groups, which are culturally distinct and widely distributed geographically. The western group originated in the Gila Valley, and extending across Arizona spread northward making its influence felt as far as the Hopi villages; the eastern culture was born in Colorado and Utah and extended to the south along a parallel zone. The former sprang into being in low, level, cactus plains; while the latter was born in lofty mountains and deep canyons filled with caves. Each reflects in its architecture the characteristic environment of the locality of its origin. As they spread from their homes and at last came together each modified the other by acculturation. The expansion of these two nuclei of culture, and the products of their contact is the prehistoric, unwritten, evolution of primitive people in the Southwest upon which documentary accounts throw no light, and the function of archeology is to read this history through the remains left by this prehistoric people, as interpreted by surviving folklore, ceremonials, legends, and artifacts. Both types of culture reached their highest development before the arrival of the white man; and the advent of the European found both on the decline. The localities where both types originated and reached their highest development were either no longer inhabited or occupied by descendants with modified architectural ideas. Some of the survivors lived in houses of much ruder construction than the cliff dwellings or pueblos of their ancestors. The habitations of others were scattered rude, mud huts. In short the cliff dwellers of the Mesa Verde and the prehistoric inhabitants of the Gila compounds left survivors possessed of inferior skill. Both architecture and ceramic art had declined before the advent of white men.

PL. 1

TEBUNGKI FIRE HOUSE, ARIZONA.