In all the region north of the high ridge of eroded Wingate sandstone there are several other groups of ruins with most of the walls very much broken down. It would probably be conservative to state that there were over 200 ruins, large and small, in this region, showing evidence of a considerable population, if they were inhabited simultaneously. Fragments of pottery occur on almost every ridge overlooking the trails, especially along the road from Gallup to Crown Point. The forms of these ruins vary and can be made out only by systematic excavation.
So far as limited exploration about Gallup has gone, the investigations by the author show that the ruins were inhabited by Zuñi clans, as indicated in the structure of the buildings and the symbols on the pottery. It would be important to determine the relative age of these ruins compared with those about Zuñi; as to whether they were peopled by colonies from Zuñi, or whether their inhabitants joined the Zuñi population after deserting these houses. Although there is not sufficient evidence to prove the latter proposition, the author is inclined to accept it.
CROWN POINT RUINS
No more interesting question in southwestern archeology awaits an answer than the query: What became of the former inhabitants of the Chaco ruins, one of the largest clusters of deserted buildings in New Mexico? Like the cliff dwellers of the Mesa Verde, their former inhabitants have disappeared and left no clue as to where they went, the date of their occupation of the ruins, or their kinship with other peoples. Existing legends relating to them among supposed descendants who are thought to live in modern pueblos are fragmentary and knowledge of their archeology is defective. The Hyde Expedition made an extraordinary collection of artifacts from Pueblo Bonito, the largest and formerly the best preserved ruin of the group, but the excavations there have yielded little information on the kinship of its inhabitants. Until we know more about the Chaco Canyon ruins we are justified in the belief that there still remains a most important problem for the archeologist to solve.
In seeking the prehistoric migration trail of the Hopi before they came to Fire House, the author examined ruins near Crown Point identical with those of the Chaco Canyon. There are in fact two ruins within a few miles of the Crown Point Indian school, one of them known among the Navaho Indians as Kin-a-a (the name of the other unknown to the author), which are structurally members of the Chaco series.
The ground plan of the largest, Kin-a-a,[7] is rectangular and was apparently oriented north and south, the walls on the north side being the highest and best preserved and those on the south possibly terraced. On the south side remnants of a court or enclosure surrounded by a low wall can still be detected. The ruin is compact with embedded kivas and measures approximately 150 feet long by 100 feet wide, the north walls rising in places to 50 feet, showing good evidences of five stories, one above the other. The high walls reveal rooms of rectangular shape. Situated midway in the length of the north wall (pl. 4, [a], [b], [c]) is a circular chamber like a kiva on the ground floor, with high walls about it. The recesses between the wall of the circular room and the rectangular wall enclosing it are solidly filled in with masonry, a mode of construction adopted in the great ruins of the Chaco Canyon. The kiva of Kin-a-a (pl. 5, [a], [b]), like those of the great building of the same canyon, are built into the mass of rooms and not separated from them as in the modern pueblos, Walpi, those of the Rio Grande, and the ruin of Sun Temple on the Mesa Verde. This separation of the kiva from the house mesa is regarded by the author as a late evolution, being unknown among the cliff dwellers, and very rare in pueblo ruins possessing ancient characteristics. A union or huddling together of sacred and secular rooms is characteristic of the period when each kiva was limited to the performance of clan rites, the separation of the kiva from secular rooms marking the development of a fraternity of priests composed of different clans. The diameter of the kiva in Kin-a-a is about 15 feet, the average size of these rooms, no doubt determined by the length of logs available for roofs. When the diameter is greater than that it is customary to make the roof in a vaulted form by utilizing shorter roofing, but kivas as small as 10 feet in diameter were sometimes roofed by vaulting. Depressions, in mounds, measuring as much as 50 feet in diameter, in ruins in the Montezuma Valley have been identified as circular ceremonial rooms, but as these have not been excavated, there is always a doubt, for instead of being ceremonial and roofed they may have been uncovered reservoirs for storage of water, for not all circular depressions are kivas. In Far View Pueblo,[8] in the Mummy Lake Group, the author excavated a kiva 32 feet in diameter, which was found to have pilasters for a vaulted roof. No such pilasters occur in Kin-a-a, showing that the roof was flat with a central hatchway, as is customary in all these rooms with two or more stories.
It is difficult to explain the enclosed space above the kiva in this ruin. Was it occupied by rooms one above another, or was the lower open to the sky? The rows of holes interpreted as indicating floors is without significance, unless there were a number of superposed rooms. It must be remembered that the ceremonial room or kiva, in modern mythology, represents the underworld out of which, according to legends, the early races of men emerged through an opening in the roof or hatchway. Among the Hopi it is never covered by another room, and this is carried so far that it is forbidden to walk on a roof of a kiva, especially at a time when rites are being performed.[9] Such an act would be regarded as sacrilegious, and the same taboo is now probably universal: consequently walls constructed 40 feet above the top of the kiva, showing evidence of rooms superposed in stories, are exceptional. The object of rooms above a kiva can only be surmised; possibly there may have been four kivas, one above another, to represent the underworlds in which the ancestors of the human race lived in succession before emerging into that in which we now dwell. The inner walls of this kiva are shown in [plate 5, a]. It was evident to the author when examining the inner wall of the superposed room, above that identified as the kiva, that it belonged to a room with a roof, as appears also from the view here given ([pl. 5, a]). Whatever explanation of this exceptional condition may be suggested, we cannot question the fact that here we have remains of a kiva below one or more other rooms.[10]
A well blazed trail passes the ruin and is lost in the distant hills. This trail was at first mistaken for an irrigation ditch, but an examination of its course shows that it runs up a steep hill, which precludes such a theory. It is a section of an old Indian trail, indications of which occur elsewhere in the State, a pathway over which the rocks used in the construction of the ruins were transported. A similar trail used for a like purpose is recorded near the great ruin at Aztec, New Mexico.
RUIN B NEAR CROWN POINT
Ruin B (pl. 6, [a], [b]), largely made up of a kiva of circular form within a rectangular enclosure, lies near Crown Point on top of a low plateau, back from the edge. Its name is unknown to the author, but from its size and the character of its masonry it must formerly have been of considerable importance. It was not, like Kin-a-a, included in the President’s proclamation making the Chaco Canyon ruins a National Monument. The appearance of the masonry and the structure of the circular room, identified as a kiva, leads the author to place it in the same class as the Chaco ruins, its nearest neighbor being Kin-a-a, east of Crown Point. The excavation of this ruin might shed instructive light on the extension or migration of the inhabitants of the Chaco, after they left their homes in that canyon.