Upon the completion of the above work one week was spent in making an archeological survey on the Zuñi reservation and in the region west and northwest from that district. As a result of the reconnaissance, a promising site for further investigations was found. Following this, a trip was made to Cortez, Colo., for the purpose of inspecting ruins being excavated by Lee Dawson near the opening into McElmo Canyon, 4 miles southwest from Cortez. It was found that Mr. Dawson had an unusually interesting group of unit-type houses on his property. Of particular interest were the kivas or ceremonial chambers associated with these structures. In many of them the walls had been ornamented with a series of paintings placed in bands encircling the walls. From Cortez the writer went to Denver and from there returned to Washington the middle of October.
During the winter months, galley, page, and final proofs were read on Bulletin 100, a report on work conducted during the summer of 1929, entitled “The Ruins of Kiatuthlanna, Eastern Arizona.” In addition, the specimens brought in from the summer field work were studied. Drawings and photographs were made of them for use in a report on the work. Six hundred pages of manuscript, entitled “The Village of the Great Kivas on the Zuñi Reservation, New Mexico,” was prepared. Thirty text figures were drawn to accompany this manuscript.
Doctor Roberts left Washington May 14, 1931, for Denver, Colo., for the purpose of inspecting and studying the specimens obtained by the Smithsonian Institution-University of Denver Cooperative Expedition in the summer of 1930 and also for the purpose of examining collections in the Colorado State Museum. He left Denver on May 25 for Santa Fe, N. Mex. At the latter place two days were spent in studying the collections at the Laboratory of Anthropology and at the Museum of New Mexico. From Santa Fe he proceeded to Gallup, N. Mex., where supplies were obtained for a field camp. From Gallup this material was taken to a site 3½ miles south of Allantown, Ariz., where a camp was established and excavations started on the remains of a large pithouse village. One refuse mound containing 12 burials with accompanying mortuary offerings and two pit houses had been investigated at the close of the fiscal year.
The pit houses were found to be characteristic of that type and quite comparable to those excavated in the Chaco Canyon in 1927, reported in Bulletin 92 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and to those excavated in eastern Arizona in the summer of 1929, described in Bulletin 100 of the bureau.
From July 1, 1930, to May 10, 1931, J. N. B. Hewitt, ethnologist, was engaged in routine office work, and from the latter date to the end of the fiscal year he was engaged in field service on the Grant of the Six Nations on the Grand River in Ontario, Canada, and, briefly, on the Tuscarora reservation in western New York State.
Mr. Hewitt devoted much time and study to rearranging and retyping some of his native Iroquoian texts which critical revisions and additional data had made necessary to facilitate interlinear translations and to render such texts as legible as possible for the printer.
The texts so treated are the Cayuga version of the founding of the League of the Iroquois as dictated by the late Chief Abram Charles; the version of the Eulogy of the Founders as dictated by Chief Jacob Hess in Cayuga, and also his versions of the addresses introducing the several chants; also, four of the myths of the Wind and Vegetable Gods which are usually represented by wooden faces and husk faces (which are customarily misnamed masks, although their chief purpose is to represent, not to mask). The Onondaga texts of these myths were in great need of careful revision, for their relator was extremely careless in his use of the persons and the tenses of the verbs, frequently changing from the third to the second person and from past to future time by unconsciously employing the language of the rites peculiar to the faces; and also the decipherment of a set of pictographs or mnemonic figures, designed and employed by the late Chief Abram Charles, of the Grand River Reservation in Canada, to recall to his mind the official names and their order of the 49 federal chiefs of the Council of the League of the Iroquois, in chanting the Eulogy of the Founders of the League; and also to recall the 15 sections or burdens of the great Requickening Address of the Council of Condolence and Installation; this paper with illustrations is nearly ready for the printer; and also a critical study of the matter of the Onondaga and the Cayuga texts, giving the several variant versions of the events attending the birth and childhood and work of Deganawida. He was born of a virgin mother, which indicated that underlying them there appeared to be an ideal figure, although of course unexpressed. This discovery showed the need for thorough search in the field for a living tradition in which this ideal is fully expressed. Further search was deferred to field work. It was clear that such an ideal enhanced the beauty of the birth story of Deganawida and made more interesting the historicity of such a person. Mr. Hewitt had the great satisfaction of recovering such a tradition in his subsequent field researches. He found that the inferiority complex had precluded his present informants from expressing themselves during the lifetime of other informants, whose recent deaths opened their mouths without the fear of contradiction. The death of Abram Charles within the year made these shy informants vocal.
In January Matthew W. Stirling, chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, requested Mr. Hewitt to undertake the editing of the Manuscript Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, of Berne, Switzerland, in the manner in which he had prepared the Edwin Thompson Denig Report on the Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri River, published in the Forty-sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. The Kurz manuscript was written in German during the years 1846 to 1852. The typed German text consists of 454 pages of large legal-cap size, while the English translation of it by Myrtis Jarrell occupies 780 pages. The journal is a narrative of Mr. Kurz’s experiences in a trip up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis, thence up the Missouri to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone River, and of his difficulties with the Indians while endeavoring to make drawings or pictures of them. There are 125 pen sketches of Indians and others accompanying the manuscript.
Mr. Hewitt represents the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, on the United States Geographic Board, and is a member of its executive committee. In connection with the forthcoming issue of the sixth report of this board much extra work had to be done by members of the executive committee. Mr. Hewitt prepared a memorandum for a portion of the introduction. Mr. Hewitt also devoted much time and study to the collection and preparation of data for official replies to correspondents of the bureau, some demanding long research. Miss Mae W. Tucker has assisted Mr. Hewitt in the care of the manuscript and phonograph and photograph records of the archives.
On May 10, 1931, Mr. Hewitt left Washington, D. C., on field duty and returned to the bureau July 2, 1931. During this trip he visited the Grand River grant of the Six Nations of Iroquois Indians dwelling near Brantford, Canada, and also the Tuscarora Reservation near Niagara Falls, N. Y.